Comment The end of the beginning on closing our gender pay gap?
trends – the virtual absence, for instance, of a gender pay gap for full-time men and women between 22 and 39, and the consequently much higher gap among over-40s. They also signal where further data are needed and enable genuinely informed debate. Hence, the end of the beginning. Harman had been right, although her Equality Act would have constituted a much bigger, as well as earlier, beginning. For, despite its interminable gestation, this month’s exercise has major limitations. First, it is confined to organisations with 250 or more full- and part-time employees – despite, secondly, there being no definitive database of companies with 250-plus employees. No way, therefore, of identifying non-respondents, never mind penalising non-compliance. The most the Government Equalities Office threatens is that non-compliance runs a “reputational risk”. Scary! And thirdly, no way either, with only 14 pieces of information requested, of checking patently implausible returns. Those 14 items start with the mean and median gender pay gaps. ‘Mean’ is simply the average, a minus 10 per cent gap meaning women’s average hourly wage is 10 per cent lower than men’s and that they earn 90p for every £1 men earn.
It’s the commonest measure, but generally considered less valid than the median or typical pay gap, which is potentially less distorted by workers on either very low or very high pay.
It is calculated by ranking all employees from highest paid to lowest paid and taking the hourly wage of the person in the middle, a minus 10 per cent gap here meaning the middle-paid woman’s hourly wage is 10 per cent lower than the middle-paid man’s.
According to the Office for National Statistics, it is currently 18.4 per cent for all workers, one per cent higher than the mean pay gap. The Equalities Office interprets it as women earning 82p for every man’s £1, and the TUC as women effectively working for free for the first 67 days of the year until they begin to get paid on ‘Women’s Pay Day’, or this year March 8.
Two other types of information were required. For pay quartiles, all employees are divided into four even groups according to their pay, the proportions of women in each quartile broadly indicating their representation at different levels of the organisation.
With most big councils employing roughly one-third men and twothirds women (almost exactly in Birmingham), there could be higher proportions of women in every quartile. But in Birmingham, for instance, the top quartile 78 per cent and bottom quartile 63 per cent represent a minus 15 per cent gender gap – compared to Coventry’s minus 4 per cent, Dudley’s minus 25 per cent, and the albeit very much smaller Worcester City Council’s plus 28 per cent.
The differing proportions of men and women receiving bonuses are obviously revealing too, but among the seven West Midlands metropolitan boroughs only Solihull and Walsall appear to pay bonuses.
The table (left) summarises the pay gap figures. Across the whole local government sector, two-thirds of councils – 193 of 293, and all but Coventry of the West Midlands seven – reported mean pay differences of over 5 per cent, the threshold deemed “significant” by the Equality & Human Rights Commission.
Not good, though considerably better than the private sector or the overall public sector.
In just 18 of the 193 cases was the gap in favour of women, but these did include both Worcester City and Wyre Forest councils.
The former happens to be fractionally over the 250-employee threshold, but obviously many smaller districts are below. In future years they will surely be included, and the required data extended – because, as Harriet Harman would be entitled to note, this is barely the end of the beginning. Chris Game is a lecturer at the Institute of Local Government Studies, at the University of
Birmingham