With 1 month to go in relation to the 2018/19 gender pay gap reporting deadline, less than 1/8th of the approximately 10,500 employers who are required to publish their data have done so as at the date of writing, with just 1251 organisations having published their data so far. This amounts to just 11.88% when compared to the 10,538 organisations who published their data for the year 2017/18. Moreover, the latest data shows that the pay gap has widened in around 40% of private sector companies, compared to last year.
Gender Pay Gap Reporting Deadline
The gender pay gap reporting deadline is now just over 1 month away. The deadline for public sector employers is the 30th March 2019, whilst the deadline for private sector employers and voluntary organisations is the 4th April 2019.
A Repeat Of Last Year
With the gender pay gap reporting deadline just 1 month away, and with less than 1/8th of employers having published their data so far, the process appears to be following the same pattern as last year. As at the 28th February 2018, just 1308 employers of the 10,538 who ultimately reported, had published their data. That represents just 12.41% of the total. Just 50% had reported by the end of March 2018, more than 1100 organisations left it to the last day, and 1557 employers completely missed the deadline. Moreover, paygaps.com report that in relation to the data that has been published so far for 2018/19, whilst there has been a 31% increase in employers providing accompanying reports to explain their pay gap, at the same time 31.3% of the organisations have made mistakes when submitting their data, such as failing to provide a link to their written report, and the wrong person signing the report.
Gender Pay Gap Has Widened In 4 In 10 Private Sector Companies
Research by the BBC has found that compared to last year, the gender pay gap has widened in around 4 in 10 private sector companies. These include:-
- Kwik Fit - have gone from a median pay gap in favour of women of 15.2% to a median pay gap in favour men of 14%. A company spokesperson stated: "Last year most of our female employees were in our upper quartile of salary bands, however over the course of the last 12 months a number of these senior employees have left the company, a shift which has skewed our figures. We are keen to both promote from within the company as well as recruit more women to help redress this balance."
- NPower - the median pay gap has grown from 13% to 18%. A spokesperson said: "Npower Limited implemented a cost reduction programme in 2017, which, along with the trend of more women than men taking advantage of salary sacrifice employee benefits designed to promote flexible working, had an impact on the pay gap."
- Virgin Atlantic - the median pay gap has increased from 28.4% to 31%. They attribute this to the fact that a number of senior female employees have left, whilst pilots (who are mostly male) have been working a lot of extra hours
The BBC analysis found that 74% of those employers who had reported so far had a pay gap in favour of men (a fall of 4% compared with 2017/18), 14% have a pay gap in favour of women (unchanged since 2017/18), and 12% have no pay gap at all (an increase of 4% compared to 2017/18). The overall hourly median gender pay gap across all of the organisations that have reported so far is 8.4% in favour of men, compared with 9.7% last year (a fall of 1.3%).
With the gender pay gap reporting deadline fast approaching, Rebecca Hilsenrath, the Chief Executive of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, stated: "Transparency is brilliant and the first year of gender pay gap reporting has had an immense impact in raising awareness of workplace equality. But the truth is that transparency is not enough. Just reporting figures is not going to eliminate anyone’s pay gap. Now that employers have met their legal duty to report their pay gaps, they should have worked out what has caused them and what they need to do to narrow them. We believe that it should be mandatory for employers to publish, alongside their pay gap data, action plans with specific targets and deadlines.”
