Closing the gap

Politics at the dinner table; public nudity; talking about your salary – traditional British taboos, but perhaps not for much longer.

New legal rules announced in March mean that companies with 250 or more employees will have to announce their gender pay gaps by April 2018, in a move to fight workplace discrimination.

It’s “a key step to closing the gap,” said Women and Equalities minister Justine Greening, announcing the measure. “Helping women to reach their full potential isn’t only the right thing to do, it makes economic sense.”

The World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Report ranks Britain in a dismal 53rd place for equality of economic participation and opportunity, with figures currently putting the national gap at 17 per cent.  In Bristol, it’s an above-average 21 per cent.

Analysis by Fair Play South West found variations even within the city. Full-time workers in Bristol West are much more likely to experience a pay disparity than those in the South or East, paid an average of 15 per cent less per hour than men.

Though industries like nursing and midwifery have achieved near parity, and some sectors – like hairdressing and secretarial work – are weighted towards women, it’s an economy-wide problem. Finance has one of the highest gaps at 35 per cent and the construction industry averages 28 per cent.

Academia isn’t immune. In 2015, a report by the Sunday Times found that female science professors at Bristol University were paid on average £8,000 less than their male counterparts for similar roles. A spokesperson said the organisation has since resolved to proactively tackle the problem: “As part of our recently published strategy we have pledged to eliminate the gender pay gap within the professoriate by 2021.”

Most of Bristol’s big companies are blandly accepting the new legislation: “We have committed to carrying out an Equal Pay Audit every three years,” said a NatWest spokesperson. “We are supportive of the Gender Pay Gap requirements.”

“Airbus takes seriously the advantages of promoting diversity in our business and we work hard to ensure that we operate fair remuneration policies,” said spokesperson Victoria Runcie. “We are fully supportive of the requirement for businesses to publish their gender pay gap data.”

Others are more emphatic about the value of the legislation. “Closing the gap in pay between men and women is incredibly important, and I hope that pay gap reporting will encourage more companies to take a critical look at their pay policies,” commented Judy Rose, head of operations at Triodos Bank, adding that the bank has rooted its remuneration policy in the principles of fair pay and social coherence.

“Socially, companies in the UK must work harder to make sure that the contribution of women is valued equally in the workplace—both in pay and recognition. We want all our co-workers, regardless of gender, to earn a decent living and to contribute to the organisation and society at large.”

But will simply reporting the numbers help?

Women’s rights expert Zara Nanu, whose company Gapsquare provides tools to enable gender analysis and narrow the gap, points out that the issue is a lot more complex than just salaries: “If men and women are doing the same job and they are getting paid different amounts this is an equal pay issue and employers can be taken to a tribunal. The gender pay gap legislation is more about looking at the organisation as a whole and identifying the maternity penalty, lack of women in senior roles or higher paid roles.”

Some argue that the legislation discounts the fact that women’s careers are most often disrupted by having children – not discrimination – dubbing it instead the motherhood pay gap. The Citizens Advice Bureau has reported a 25 per cent increase in maternity discrimination.

“There are still a lot of cultural barriers which we need to overcome,” says Zara, “for instance in the uptake of shared parental leave which has been almost zero in the UK. If we look at Sweden it is fifty-fifty, and that has had a significant levelling effect on the gender pay gap because men are taking an equal amount of time out of their careers.”

“A large problem comes when women return to work after having children: they often find it difficult to come back to the same level of job, particularly if the employer is unwilling to discuss more flexible working hours,” agrees Sian Webb of Bristol Women’s Voice.

So if it’s more than a numbers issue, how much of a difference will reporting make?

Gareth Edwards, partner at Veal Wasbrough Vizards and expert in employment law, believes it will bring at the very least bring some transparency to a murky subject and help to identify the scope of the problem. “Lots of the larger companies will have gathered the gender pay data and will now be analysing it to determine whether they have a gender pay gap.”

That analysis has the potential to trigger concurrent conversations about pay policies. “I anticipate that companies will also be examining how decisions that can affect pay are made in the workplace,” he argues. “They will want to ensure that they are free of any gender or discrimination bias and tackle any unconscious bias in the decision making process.”

But it shouldn’t stop at the big companies. “Although the new legislation only requires companies with 250 or more employees to report their gender pay gap, the hope is that smaller companies will also pick it up as a marketing tool and mechanism for recruitment,” says architect and chairman of Women in Property South-West Rachel Bell; “and when the cost of replacing a member of staff can be upwards of £30,000, it suddenly makes sense to consider what tools like this can do for the benefit of your existing staff.

“Statistics show that broad diversity within both ethnicity and gender enhances creativity and market reach in that business, and I firmly believe there is a wealth of talent out there in women which some businesses currently fail to recognise. The Federation of Small Businesses has even published a report on ‘Women in Enterprise: The Untapped Potential‘. If businesses can establish mechanisms of encouraging talented women into senior positions – provision of flexible working, allowing career breaks – then they should be able to be more efficient and profitable in the long run, which surely is good news for everybody.”

It’s progress, but it’s only the beginning. “[We] welcome addressing the gender pay gap, yet this is only one element,” says Sian. “What will be paramount is for companies to start analysing what is causing the gap and then actively put in place measures that will address and ultimately eliminate gender inequality in the workplace.”

Read more: Nipping gender discrimination in the bud