Gender Pay Gap

A new conversation has begun and is at the forefront of the mind for employees and employers – differences in pay across genders.

Whilst the Equal Pay Act has been resolving some of these issues since its introduction in 1970, there are still significant pieces of the puzzle to be considered.

In accordance with the Act, men and women should be paid the same for doing the same job. However, this does not legislate for the fact that men may be operating in higher paid roles than women. The Gender Pay Gap legislation is looking to tackle this by considering the gap across pay within organisations as a whole. The government have decided the best way to make inroads into the pay gap in the UK is to make information transparent to the public to allow stakeholders to drive change.

Key Facts

Employers with over 250 employees need to report

Deadline of 5 April 2018 for the 5 April 2017 metrics

Multiple calculations to be undertaken to show the Gender Pay Gap for ‘Ordinary’ and ‘Bonus’ pay

Gender Pay Gap metrics will be made public on the Government website and published to the organisation’s website

The Gender Pay Gap calculations take no account of the different roles undertaken by men or women. Instead, these are general calculations of the average hourly rate paid to men and women. For businesses that have a male dominated management team, pay gap percentages are going to make for hard reading. This has resulted in organisations having to take a long, hard look at the split of roles across genders and, hopefully, look at the reasons why imbalances exist.

Beyond the compliance requirements, the Gender Pay Gap metrics are important for a number of reasons – employee engagement, recruitment, staff retention, public relations and marketing. The requirements dictate that the pay gap figures have to be submitted to a Government website where they will be available to the public and made available on the organisation’s own website. Given these statistics will be readily available to anyone, organisations need to be prepared to answer some difficult questions that are likely to arise from their reporting, and in some cases, even see their results reviewed in the media.

To be able to provide satisfactory answers, organisations will need to understand the data behind the calculations and the specific drivers in any resulting pay gap. This can prove challenging with the sheer quantity and complexity of the data involved in the calculations.

To assist organisations in what will likely be a difficult journey, AAB have developed a Dashboard reporting tool plugged into live payroll data to provide a real time view of the key metrics. These dashboards do all of the ‘data crunching’ behind the scenes to allow you 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.

Please see below a live and interactive demo of this tool. Please click through the pages and years and hover over the information to see how the relevant data is displayed and summarised in a user-friendly, easy to understand way:

For more information, please contact Culum Graham (culum.graham@aab.uk) or your usual AAB contact.