Mums who cut hours ‘major pay gap cause’

WOMEN who ease off their jobs to bring up children are a major cause of the gender pay gap, the UK’s most prominent economic think-tank said yesterday.

A high proportion of mothers give up fulltime work to go part-time, which results in future pay rises being far less likely, the Institute for Fiscal Studies said.

It came as the last of 8,000 larger companies published details of the difference in pay for men and women, to meet the Government’s deadline at midnight tonight.

As well as the motherhood effect, the pay gap results are also affected by how the different companies work, the IFS said. It warned that the figures on pay gaps ‘are limited and need to be interpreted with care’.

It pointed to employers who pay a small number of male workers very large salaries, which can distort calculations of average salaries.

Its report cited five English Premier League football clubs where this distortion bumped up the average pay when it was calculated using the mean instead of the median. The IFS also questioned whether some firms are reporting pay gaps accurately, citing 45 which say they have no gap.

The overall gender pay gap, according to the Office for National Statistics, was 9.1 per cent for full-time workers in 2017, a figure that has fallen from 17.4 per cent 20 years ago.

For all employees, including part-time workers, the gap was 18.4 per cent. But among part-time workers alone, the gender pay gap was 5.1 per cent in favour of women.

The ONS assessment said the pay gap is small for full-time workers until they reach their late 30s, when women slip behind.

The IFS report said: ‘Some, but not all, of the gender wage gap is explained by the fact that after having children women are much more likely than men to work part-time, and part-time work is associated with little or no subsequent progression in hourly wages. This is particularly important for graduates for whom full-time experience typically delivers considerable wage growth.’

It added by the start of this week, 79 per cent of firms with more than 250 workers that had reported said they paid men more than women, while 13 per cent paid women more than men.

‘Women much more likely to work part-time’