May pledges to fight ‘burning injustice’ of pay
Firms face deadline on wage gender gap
PRIME MINISTER Theresa May has vowed to tackle the “burning injustice” of the gender pay gap as the deadline arrived for the UK’s largest companies to report their figures. Mrs May used an article in The
Telegraph to compare the pay gap to the women’s suffrage campaign a century ago, saying “major injustices still hold too many women back”.
Her intervention comes as time runs out for firms to publish the average pay gap between male and female workers.
All employers with more than 250 staff have been told to publish their gender pay gap by April 4, although it is understood firms will still be able to submit their figures beyond the midnight deadline. As of 8am yesterday, nearly all of the 9,000 organisations expected to report their gender pay gap had done so.
Of the 8,874 firms to submit data so far, 78 per cent had a gender pay gap in favour of men, while 14 per cent reported a gap in favour of women. The remaining eight per cent said they had no gender gap at all.
“A hundred years ago, some women first won the right to vote,” the Prime Minister said. “But for all the welcome progress in the decades since, major injustices still hold too many women back.
“When I became Prime Minister, I committed myself to tackling the burning injustices which mar our society. One such is the gender pay gap.”
While the difference in median hourly wages earned by men and women is at an historic low, Mrs May says progress is still too slow and action was needed to close the gap for good within a generation. “It is essential that we do so. Most importantly, because equality for women is a right, and our whole society is the poorer as long as it remains unrealised,” she said.
“There is also a clear economic imperative. It is estimated that if women and men enjoyed parity in their hours, pay and seniority at work then we could see up to £150 billion added to our GDP.”
Mrs May said making the figures public “will make for uncomfortable reading”, adding: “By making this information public, organisations will no longer have anywhere to hide.
“We will have established a baseline from which to hold them to account in the future.
“Shareholders and customers will expect to see improvements, and will be able to hold organisations to account if they fail to achieve them.”
She also called on workplaces to rid themselves of “outdated stereotypes” and recognise that everyone brings their own experience into their role.
The Equality and Human Rights Commission says it will initially contact employers informally at first if they have not published by the deadline, but businesses could ultimately face “unlimited fines and convictions”.
Some groups have attacked the mandatory reporting and said the gender pay gap is a crude measure of equality between men and women.
The Shadow Women and Equalities Minister, Dawn Butler, said: “There is no excuse for companies which fail to meet today’s deadline.
“The Equality and Human Rights Commission must use the full force of its powers to ensure employers publish their data or face sanctions.”
Companies who do not provide their figures will face legal action including court orders and fines, but only after they have been given a month’s grace to report the figures.
The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) said they will write to employers who have not complied on April 9, giving them 28 days to publish the figures “before an investigation takes place and an unlawful act notice is issued”.
Courts can impose an unlimited fine on those who do not comply. Chief executive of the EHRC Rebecca Hilsenrath said: “This is not optional – it is the law and we will be fully enforcing against all companies that do not report.”
Major injustices still hold too many women back. Prime Minister Theresa May.
IT IS, in fact, a measure of Britain’s progress as a society – and world-leading economy – that there’s so much focus on the gender pay gap, one of the ‘burning injustices’ that Theresa May has resolved to reconcile.
In previous generations, women may have been expected to put career ambitions on hold, and accepted this, while they brought up their family. Now women should be accepted as equals of men and deserving of pay parity.
This is why companies employing more than 250 people were required, a century after the women’s suffrage campaign, to publish their gender pay gap by last night in one of the biggest – and most important – exercises in transparency ever undertaken.
Just like Labour’s decision to introduce allwomen shortlists in the 1990s for the selection of Parliamentary candidates, this controversial approach is succeeding in forcing companies to think again about their employment practices and ensure there’s no discrimination.
And, while there will be anomalies, like those engineering firms who perhaps employ a disproportionate number of men or have a preponderance of males at director level who have been rewarded for decades of service, these are reasonable explanations that are understandable for the time being.
As such, the only organisations who should have everything to fear from this exercise are those whose business and recruitment practices are still derogatory towards women. And they’re the firms who should expect Government intervention as Britain’s business culture becomes more enlightened.