The annual deadline has passed for U.K. businesses to report their gender pay gap and results show little progress so far. More than 10,000 companies submitted their data, with some big names saying that the imbalance between what their female workers earn on average and what male staff do has actually got bigger.
It’s the second year that organizations with at least 250 employees in Britain have been required to provide details of any difference between the salary and bonus of all male employees and all female employees on a mean and median hourly basis, the proportion of each gender receiving a bonus and the proportion of men and women in each pay quartile.
The new reporting system unleashed a wave of embarrassing information, highlighting that women are often under-represented in higher-paying roles and prompting pledges from many leading firms to improve the situation. Even so, they point out that meaningful change takes time and that little can be concluded from just two years of data.
*Gap comparison only available where firms have filed under the same name both years.
Note: Companies with a pay gap greater than 95 percent are not represented on the chart.Companies with a pay gap greater than 70 percent are not represented on the chart. Companies are represented in the industry breakdown if they have provided an industry in their filings. FTSE100 company analysis is based on as-reported names and incomplete where companies have filed more than once or under a different name.
Of firms to report so far, men dominate the highest pay quartile in 16 of 21 industries.
The numbers are a blunt uniform assessment across the whole workforce and don’t measure the pay of men and women in the same job or adjust for other factors such as experience or location.