Gender pay reports - what is the overall picture saying?

We've been examining gender pay gap reports over recent weeks - it has kept us out of mischief and we thought you might be interested to read about some of our findings!

Employers with 250 employees or more were required to publish their gender pay gap data by 4 April. Most (but not all) met the deadline and since then the information has been published on a Government website. ​Over 10,000 organisations are logged, providing a wealth of information that enables you to compare gender pay gap figures with similar organisations.

The data is tricky to analyse, so we have developed a database which enables us to drill down and produce reports which provide powerful comparative data for you. The results make interesting reading, whether or not your organisation had to make a report. ​

Key highlights that we've picked out include:

• Taking the median of the published data, men were paid 13.4% when looking at supplied arithmetic mean figures and 9.3% when using the median submissions. (As a rule of thumb, the median tends to be a more accurate indicator of the core of the data, as the mean can be skewed by the presence of very high and low figures.)
• The top paid quartile of organisations tends to be just over 60% male, while the lowest quartile is typically 65% female.
• Overall, the likelihood of receiving a bonus did not differ by much - the median proportion of men receiving a bonus was 19.8%, compared with 17.6% of women.
• However, the bonus amounts favoured men. By taking the median point of each set of data, the median bonus gap measure was 5.2% in favour of men, while the mean bonus gap was higher at  22.1%. The bonus gap submissions contain far more varying data, with some huge differentials in some organisations.
• There are differences between sectors and regions and by organisation size. For example, the median pay gap for organisations of 250 to 499 employees is almost 1% higher then the overall sample.

Of course, these figures are a snapshot, so it will be interesting to see how the picture differs when the next annual reports are available next year.

Want to find out more?
You can download an example report from the Gender pay audits page of our website. This includes analysis of the actual overall sample of results that had been submitted at the end of April 2018, which you can use. It also shows the type of additional analysis that we can undertake for you. 

Order a customised report
To save you the bother of creating and analysing a huge spreadsheet, we can present results that compare your organisation's data for each measure with:

• the whole sample
• organisations in your size range.
• a requested sample of named organisations.
• organisations in your employer's Standard industrial classification of economic activities (SIC) code.
• organisations in a specified region.

As there is a time lag between data submission and its inclusion on the website, we can also search specific organisation's websites for their gender pay gap reports and incorporate this data for you.

The cost for this service depends on the level of analysis you need. Pricing starts from £150 plus VAT, for a report that compares your data with the whole sample and your size range. Just think about what your team could do with that time it will save...! 

Contact us to find out more.