Some of Britain’s top employers pay women less than half of men’s wages
Women are paid less than half than men at some of Britain’s major companies, new gender pay gap figures have revealed.
At Easyjet, women’s hourly pay rates are 52 percent lower than men’s, while at fashion business Phase Eight, mean hourly pay for women is 65 percent lower, telegraph.co.uk reported.
Explaining the difference, airline Easyjet said women made up the majority of cabin crew, who are paid lower wages, whereas only six percent of higher-paid pilots are women. It has a target for a fifth of new entrant pilots to be women by 2020. They said women are paid the same as men for the same work. In its gender pay gap report the company said: “Easyjet’s gender pay gap is strongly influenced by the salaries and gender make-up of its pilot community, which make up over a quarter of its UK employees. Pilots are predominantly male and their higher salaries, relative to other employees, significantly increases the average male pay at easyjet.”
The average salary for a pilot is £92,400. For cabin crew it is £24,800.
Phase Eight has the biggest gender pay gap of companies to publish their rates so far. The clothing chain’s male employees mainly work in head office rather than in shops.
Phase Eight’s report said: “Whilst on first glance, our published gender pay gap figures suggest the average man has a higher hourly rate of pay, than the average female, this is misleading and does not reflect the true story and culture within the Phase Eight business.
“The figures result from the fact that, as a women’s fashion retailer, the staff in our stores are overwhelmingly female, whilst our corporate head office staff (whose pay rates are typically higher) are more evenly split between men and women.
“This will cause significant disparity across our results where this imbalance is not taken into consideration. Similar issues will apply to other organizations in the women’s fashion retail sector.”
But at some organizations have higher hourly pay for women than men, including Cambridgeshire Police, where women earn 13 per cent more.
At Unilever UK, women earn nine percent more than men, while at Evans Cycles women earn 6.5 percent more.
So far 527 companies have published their gender pay gap statistics. All organizations with 250 or more workers must do so by April.