PM vows to tackle 'burning injustice' of gender pay gap
Wednesday 4 April 2018 16:10, UK
Adele Robinson, Sky Correspondent
The Prime Minister has described the gender pay gap as a "burning injustice" as the deadline looms for the UK's largest companies to publish their figures.
Theresa May said the wage disparity between men and women "mars our society" and needs to be closed "within a generation".
Writing in The Daily Telegraph, she said: "It seems extraordinary to us that women 100 years ago were not only denied the right to vote but had to fight so hard for it.
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"It is our job to make sure that it doesn't take another 100 years for the gender pay gap to become a thing of the past."
More than 9,000 firms, with 250 or more employees, have until midnight to submit their median and mean gender pay gap figures to the Government Equalities Office (GEO).
Businesses will be given a month's grace period if they fail to submit the information but will subsequently face unlimited fines and legal action.
By late Wednesday afternoon just over 9,400 had filed, with 78% of those revealing that they pay men more than women.
The rest of the employers either had no median gender pay gap (8%) or one in favour of women (14%).
Nationwide across all sectors, British men earn 18.4% more per hour on average than women, according to data from the Office for National Statistics.
One of the biggest gender pay gaps so far was reported by Ryanair, which pays women 71.8% less than men on average.
This means that, for every £1 earned by men per hour, women earn just 28p.
The airline said this was because most of its pilots are men - 546 compared with just eight women.
Employers have until the deadline to update their data.
The company that had, until Tuesday, topped the list for the largest median gender pay gap between men and women was among those to change its submission.
Rainham Industrial Services said it had made an "error" in its original filing and that the figure should have read 48.8% rather than 90%.
It apologised - but is unlikely to be alone in complaining that it had misinterpreted the reporting methodology.
It also emerged on Wednesday that the GEO had contacted at least one company, spoken to by Sky News, to point out an error in its filing.
The GEO said it would not be giving information on the reporting process at this stage but insisted employers had all the guidance they needed.
Of all the councils in England, North Hertfordshire District Council has the worst median gender pay gap, paying women 34% less than men on average.
Geeta Sidhu-Robb, founder of food delivery service Nosh Detox, used to "routinely" be paid less than her male counterparts when she worked as a corporate lawyer.
"I remember always thinking you could never catch up," she told Sky News.
"You just couldn't, no matter what you did, or how good you were, you just never ever caught up because you weren't a man.
"How do you fight that? And why would you want to? And I just thought, after a while, why am I doing this? I've got to do it my way."
A number of the firms had their pay gaps revealed in January, with one of the worst sectors proving to be the country's finance industry, including retail banks such as Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds Banking Group.
Both banks were rescued with vast amounts of taxpayer cash in the financial crisis and they have pay gaps of 37.2% and 33%, respectively.
However, Katie Andrews, from the institute of economic affairs, describes the new system as "very problematic".
"The data that's being produced by these new pay gap reporting measures is essentially useless," she said.
"That's because it looks across organisations and doesn't break down comparable roles, age, experience, time taken off work.
"It tells us very little about equality between men and women in the workplace."