Gender pay gap not closing despite reporting regulations
The number of employers reporting their gender pay gap has declined despite requirements under the Gender Pay Gap Regulations, the CIPD has found.
The Gender Pay Gap Regulations require employers with 250 or more members of staff to publish statutory calculations every year showing how large the pay gap is between their male and female employees. These results must be published on the company's own website and a government site, which means that the gender pay gap will be publicly available, including to customers, employees and potential future recruits. The intention is to spur employers to action to address their gender pay gap.
The CIPD has carried out initial analysis on employers’ gender pay gap figures for 2020 and found that the number of employers reporting their pay data has declined: 10,833 organisations published their numbers for 2018, but just 6,150 did so for 2019 and 2,440 for 2020.
The decline for 2019 and 2020 is probably attributable to enforcement action being suspended and delayed respectively.
Due to the continued effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, enforcement action against employers failing to report their gender pay gap will start on 5 October 2021, the Equality and Human rights Commission (EHRC) announced.
Enforcement for the reporting year 2019/20 was suspended in March 2020 at the start of pandemic. The changes for the 2020/21 reporting year give those required to meet the regulations an additional six months to report their data before legal action begins.
Of those who have reported, the CIPD research finds there is little, if any, change to the median gender pay gap. In 2020 the gap was 12.8% or, alternatively, for every £1 the median male worker earned the median female worker earned 87 pence.
By contrast, in 2019 women received 86 pence while in 2018 they got 87 pence for every £1 a man earned.
In response to the figures, Charles Cotton, Senior Reward and Performance Adviser at the CIPD, said:
"We are now into our fifth year of gender pay gap reporting and there has been markedly little change in the figures. This is to be expected, however, given improvements can’t be made overnight and some of the measures employers have taken to close their gender pay gap may well initially result in it widening. However, we are more concerned by the sharp drop in employers who have so far chosen not to report their figures this year.
"While this is not that surprising given enforcement action has been delayed by six months, it does raise questions about the commitment of some employers to tackling their gender pay gap. Reporting is an integral part of an organisation’s fairness strategy and without it employers lack a valuable tool to assess the fairness of how they recruit, manage, develop and reward their people. We would therefore urge those that have not yet filed their figures for 2020 to do so now, rather than waiting until October. With the pandemic disproportionately affecting women financially, it’s even more of an imperative for employers to ensure gender pay reporting returns to the top of their agenda."
The Equality and Human Rights Commission will begin its enforcement after the six-month period, contacting employers that have not submitted their data. The EHRC has the power to investigate employers that fail to report their gender pay gap data which could lead to unlimited fines after court action.
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