Gender Pay Gap Reporting – Easing the fear!

With Gender Pay Gap Reporting, introduced in April 2017, now into the third year it’s still a topic that seems to strike fear into many companies.

With the data that is required to be collated, scrutinised, verified and reported it’s a task that starts gathering momentum by the end of the calendar year. It then takes precedent at the start of the year to ensure that it is submitted, prior to the reporting deadline, which is by 30th March for public companies and 4th April for private companies.

Although introduced only for companies that have over 250 staff, this should not stop all companies having the data and ability to be able to report this by the required deadlines. Last year’s Gender Pay Gap results, the Office of National Statistics have released their findings for 2018. It showed that for full-time employees it fell from 9.1% to 8.6%. However, the reporting hasn’t been an unqualified success, with it being reported via the Guardian that some companies have yet to file accurate data for 2017.

EHRC (Equality & Human Rights Commission) were still advising that some companies were still filing mathematically impossible results, with gender pay gaps of more than 100%, some companies entering zeros in all fields, reporting impossible bonus gaps and removing key workers from their figures.

But where there are bad points, there is some good points as well. EHRC advised that 10,738 organisations have reported their pay gap.

The one remaining question is that if smaller companies aren’t required to report the Gender Pay Gap, how will the UK get to pay parity?

The future

Gender Pay Gap reporting is here to stay and if anything, it will require a bigger reach, which may mean introducing ethnicity pay gap reporting. This is something that was initially highlighted back in 2017 by Baroness MacGregor-Smith’s ‘Race in the Workplace’ report that recommended the Government should legislate to introduce mandatory reporting of ethnicity of data.

Alongside this, crucially, the report recommended that companies with 50+ employees should report as well.

Staying / Getting Ahead

Where companies are currently reporting and even if your company does not have 250+ staff, AAB can support companies with a fully interactive Gender Pay Gap Dashboard reporting tool which is fed directly from the payroll data supplied by AAB. This allows a real-time view of key metrics, with the dashboards do all the ‘data crunching’ meaning companies just need to focus on the output. The power of this becomes clear as you are able to analyse this data on a real-time basis at the click of a button to see your Gender Pay Gap broken down by Department, Job Grade or any other reportable basis across a full history of your payroll.

If you require any assistance with Gender Pay Gap Reporting or outsourcing your payroll, please get in contact with Brian Robb , Payroll and Employment Taxes Senior Manager or your usual AAB contact.