Gender pay gap calculations don't make sense?

Key part!

And unlike outsourced workers they wouldn’t be picked up as employees of any other company.

Yes eurochick I understand why technically they could justify not including them, but in this context it’s clearly disingenuous. Partners aren’t ‘just’ the owners of the business, they are a key plant of the workforce. It would be the equivalent of another business excluding the top few toers of management.

mother it was all them. Article here refers to it although the numbers don’t match the final numbers reported, so maybe they made other subsequent changes: www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2018/mar/14/gender-pay-gap-what-we-learned-in-week-three

It really saddens me that girls don't consider STEM and senior roles, getting stuck at the bottom.

I want a more senior role on my STEM job. My management seem totally clueless about how to support me in preparing for that, and apparently "we can’t change the way things are done." I can easily see how people get stuck, or at least delayed, even if they don't want to.

But the point about Phase Eight is they shouldn't have to change

They got pilloried in the media and some prominent politicians were talking about how bad it was and people were tweeting about boycotting it.

But they also need men to apply for the lower paid jobs

I can’t see many men wanting to sell mother of the bride type outfits that phase 8 sell.

And frankly, when I am buying a smart frock, I am more likely to be influenced by the opinion of a female sales assistant.

and even if a woman is a mother and the primary carer she can still be brilliant

From my anecdata of women/mothers I know, I think there’s a bit of an acknowledgement from some women that something has to give, so they either don’t pursue or actively avoid promotion that either ups their working hours away from PT, or the responsibility/stress if their partner is already the higher earner.

But the point about Phase Eight is they shouldn't have to change. Their board of directors is an even split. They are a major employer of women. They would have to promote over 1000 women to head office to even out the mean, and evening out the median is just token. Yes they could encourage more men to work in retail. But when a company that has half of its board as women, employs huge numbers of women, gives good bonuses to women, has to change its structure to meet a goal someone has set, something isn't right.

I must add I have no invested interest in them. I'd never even heard of them prior to them being mentioned in all this reporting.

It's unlikely that Ryanair or Phase 8 will be firing female staff to even things up - but if it makes them consider prioritising men who apply for predominately female staffed roles and prioritising woman for currently predominately male staffed roles, this will help overall. (It's not just about getting woman in high paid roles, but making it more acceptable to hire men in lower paid roles to stop "low paid/low status" jobs being seen as woman's work).

Companies like Ryanair and chain clothes shops do have relatively high turn over of staff so this should be achievable without putting anyone out of work. If they can't find woman who'll do the male dominated jobs, perhaps it'll make them look at why their job structure stops woman applying or from gaining promotion.

All good questions! I have been responsible for calculating my employers equal pay gap and they are all questions we have asked. Most of your questions are answered in that this is about the difference in pay between men and women and not equal pay for equal work between men and women.

For the organisation I work for (education) there is a massive gap because our lowest paid jobs all tend to be part time (cleaners, lunch time staff, catering staff) and on the whole they predominantly females in these roles. In my experience most men don't work part time (this is changing) and those that do tend to be older and cling some sort of former works pension or maybe are caters for a partner. I know this isn't the case for all men, you do get exceptions.

In our organisation we are predominantly female (about 3/4) but those men we do have with the exception of caretakers and the odd cover supervisor are all qualified teachers and head teachers so when comparing them to the large range of women's jobs there is a large gender pay gap!

We are about to start calculating this years and hoping that the additional men we have taken on I'm lower paid roles might affect the figures.... personally I don't think they will but we can hope.

The things is there isn't much we can do about this. If more men don't apply for the lower paid jobs what can we do? We already employ a lot of women in the higher paid jobs and to be honest, we try to get more men in texting anyway so that won't help our gender pay gap 🤔

I would say it's a good time for women applying for well paid jobs and also for men applying for lower paid jobs.

But if companies are named and shamed, there is a real danger of the law of unintended consequences.

It should be over 250 employees but I'm not 100% sure. The gap will be reported separately though. Company A gap and company B gap (higher grades) so there is no requirement to monitor movement between then 2. As I said, I don't think the pay gap is the driving factor for it but I also don't think they've given any thought to the real impact it will have to the female employees being employed on worse conditions under an outsourced company.

But the Gap will be easier to explain - in the same way that the Phase 8 Gap is easy to explain

By the way - I chose to stall my career for my family. It made sense for us. But it is also what I wanted to do. I had children late in life and I had burnt out from work. So I welcomed spending time with my kids - it’s been fun and I have never regretted it for a minute.

So you have to also account for the many individual decsions that are behind these figures.

And maybe, just maybe these figures reflect the preferences and life decision of women. And we should be allowed to make these decisions without it being seen to be a bad thing.

That's happening irrespective of the pay gap unfortunately. A local employer to me is outsourcing all staff that earn under 30k (first 6 grades) to cut costs. These employees are mostly women but no mention has been made of that.

but not all women are mothers, or want to be, and not all mothers are the primary caregiver for their children, and even if a woman is a mother and the primary carer she can still be brilliant

I would be interested to see, if we took all of this into account, if we just took that this was the case at face value, without going into the whys, whether that explains the pay gap - ie whether the ratios then match up. Because if we knew that, then we'd be able to know where to focus effort - if it matches up, then the effort needs to go on supporting women to be able to make free choices, but if, after doing this analysis, it turns out that there is still a gap, then the effort needs to be on making working places examine their biases and pay fairly.

Many companies may choose to further outsource the lower paid support jobs to reduce the %

I looked at the public services near me and it was notable that one of the local authorities had a very small gap compared to all the others, so it would be interesting to know why as they are all providing similar services.

I think the argument about women "choosing" lower paid jobs or shorter hours is disingenuous, as you see many threads on mumsnet about women not being comfortable with their "choice" either because of partner's wishes or because of the cost of childcare. I personally would choose to split childcare and work equally with a partner but since DD's dad is a nob and does practically nothing (he's also an XP because of this!) that choice isn't available I choose what's best out of the remaining options, which was to give up a senior management job for self employment (and before that to work slightly less than full time). It's not what I'd choose in an ideal world.

The same goes for Ryanair. Does anyone really think they're going to take on a load of extra male cabin crew on top ofthe female cabin crew to try and even out the lower paid numbers? This is a company that charges a pound to use the toilets! They aren't going to add salaries to their costs just to close gaps. More likely they'll look at firing women cabin crew, hiring men cabin crew, closing the gap and keeping their overheads the same.

I think it also has a bearing on where the company is based, doesn't it? For example, Ryanair will have head offices outside of scope of this data collection and thus a good number of employees would not be counted and in turn skew the findings. How can you therefore compare Ryanair with easyJet (who's offices are presumably inside the geographical catchment area)?

But if Phase Eight were to take on an extra 46 men in low paid jobs, while it would reduce their median gap, it would still be 46 extra salaries they've taken on to do so. More likely they would fire 46 women and replace them with 46 men. Same overall payroll, median gap closed. But that wouldn't be good for women at all. So trying to achieve closing of these gaps in companies that massively employ women is potentially worse for women. Which is why the stats don't mean anything on their own.

"One of the answers to Phase 8's problems to reducing the median gap would be to employ 46 men in low paid jobs on the shop floor"

Yy to this - I work for a large org and we are reporting on 5 entities. The 2 with the lowest gender pay gaps have large numbers of lower paid men working on shop floor in factory/warehouse.

"Mother best thing about the big four numbers is they all initially left Partners out of the equation!"

Doesn't surprise me. I don't know what the end result was but there was a lot of discussion about whether inbound ex-pats (with massive compensation packages and predominantly men would be included)

For me the statistics are relatively meaningless in isolation & completely pointless unless companies are actively engaged in taking actions to change the situation, which cynically I'm not convinced many truly are, but the fact it is being talked about in the press & elsewhere is a start. It will be interesting to see the development - probably not in 2019 reporting as it is based on today's info and given how late most published I doubt they've been actively seeking out measures in advance to bridge the gap, but in 2020 onwards.

Partners are not employees so they are not required to be included. Law firms have the same issue. Some have chosen to include figures for partners but they don't have to.