Government guidelines will follow Supreme Courty ruling when it comes to pay gap

Yes, exactly this. GIs did nor invent the word gender and instigate its use in place of sex. They appropriated the word gender, that was always used to mean sex, and gave it a new meaning. Which means we now have to stop using it to mean sex.

Yes the two terms used to be used as synonyms. Gender Studies in academic departments in the 1980s and 1990s were simply Women’s Studies (generally the same textbooks, topics etc) and gender was taken to be the roles men and women are expected to play in society. Nothing to do with trans of any kind. These days of course would be very different and anything on gender would be almost certain to centre on trans stuff, because women can’t have anything for themselves.

Employers doing it 'deliberately' to what ends though? If TIM showed a pattern of high earnings then I could see the value of including them with women to make employers appears to pay more equally. As it is, TIM are statistically likely to be lower earners so including them with women would drag down the earnings level and make the employer look worse. Far more beneficial to an employer trying to show a closing gap to include them with the men.
I completely agree that data needs to be collected on the basis on sex not gender, but think this is an odd example to put forward as a deliverate attempt to obscure that data.

I agree. Just as the term used to be transsexual not transgender. There's been a subversion of language, but the baseline was sex and gender being synonymous, generally on forms.

Are they not going to conduct an impact assessment first of following the ruling when it comes to pay - for the sake of consistency?

Of course not.....because this permits them to continue with the cognitive dissonance of holding two contradictory positions together at the same time. We all know what 'sex' is; we all know the difference between male and female - but they have to pretend they don't when it comes to female only facilities in which women are preocupied with their physical or biological function or else undressed. In these instances they have to pretend that males are actually female.

Shame on them.

If an employee does not self-identify as either gender, you can exclude them from your calculations.

Under what section is that allowed?

Off to reread🤪

It really isn't rubbish as all. There has never been a term 'sex pay gap'. It was simply '(un)equal pay' then GPG from the early 2000s.
Its entirely possible to fight back about how the term gender is being separated from sex now, without the need to reinvent history and tell other women they are incorrect about things within their own memory.

Someone in that department will tell the employer guidance is not legally binding🤣

Because if the unprofessional idiot who wrote/approved that blurb had read the Act they would have realised that

The gender pay gap regulations do not define the terms ‘men’ and ‘women’.

is 100% bullllshite as the words used are "male" and "female'

^ that is activisim and/or hire of idiots who dont understand the basics of how the law works.

One of the reasons the previous government used for using section 35 to veto the Scottish Parliament's Gender Recognition Bill was the impact on reporting of the pay gap. Not the main reason I am sure, perhaps used so they could not be accused of transphobia.

Though of course if Boris Johnson and others were decent politicians and not just playing politics, they would have acted to make it clear long before the Scottish Parliament voted, and the Supreme Court judgment would not have been needed. So the guidance would have been issued perhaps seven or more years ago.

I actually think it's the opposite. Gender used to be synonymous with sex and was perhaps seen as a more polite way to say sex. It has been co-opted by transgenderism.

I agree @AnSolas that whatever its name, this should always have been based on sex. However, this is the current guidance at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/gender-pay-gap-reporting-guidance-for-employers/preparing-your-data

At least they have added a note that it is under review following FWS - but how can it have taken nearly a year!

I think the main driver of the use of 'gender' was the wish to avoid 'phnarr phnarr' double entendre jokes about sex.

If you look at the comments under a Times article, many people will be outraged at the idea that gender is used to mean anything other than sex. From their point of view, the word has been appropriated and should just mean sex.

Look at the Act posted by @RogueFemale it used the words female and male not women and men.
And the Act is is written under the powers of the Equality Act

RogueFemale · Yesterday 23:33
I discover there is https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukdsi/2017/9780111152010
The Equality Act 2010 (Gender Pay Gap Information) Regulations 2017

So the employer should have sorted the employees by sex

Activists may have include the term gender pay gap but that is not the substance of the Act.

If the employer has been including male persons in the female data and female persons in the male data their calculations are not correct.
They are on notice as the SC ruled that sex means biology not a social grouping classification

Simple reading in English has always been that female is the grow the babies sex class which is the class which is being assessed against the male "benchmark" class.

The GRA makes it clear that females dont get male rights so employers cant rely on that as a reason to missex an employee in the calculation.

So the senior staff who signed the data as accurate had best check if they are exposed to personal liability.

And the employers would have to check back 6 years since they published in 2025.

You're right @MyAmpleSheep that it was originally a grammatical term, I left that one out deliberately to keep it simple and as it doesn't relate to people specifically!

But it has certainly been used to mean "sex" on forms, in "gender pay gap" etc for a long time before there was any suggestion (in general life) that it could mean something different to one's sex. (I think in the US it has been used in that way even more than in the UK?). That idea of "gender identity" really only started to creep into public life from around 2010-2015 - it doesn't appear in either the GRA or Equality Act, and the GRA in particular is a total muddle because it still uses "gender" in places to clearly mean sex (eg its impact on sport) but then at the same time has to discuss it as something that can be "changed", whereas of course you can't change sex! But it doesn't yet adopt the claims that TRAs later started making, that they "were always a woman/man inside" due to their innate "gender identity", and that it was not about "changing gender" but recognising what they "always were inside". If it had been written in the last decade I'm sure it would have been very differently worded!

Sorry IwantToRetire, you are wrong if you are suggesting this wasn’t commonplace. I remember many forms and other fairly formal things asking for gender when they meant sex. At the time, the miniscule number of trans people were referred to as transsexuals not transgender. This was true of my school, my doctors and my university (at the other end of the country) so not just a tiny social group that nicepotoftea grew up in. That is why everyone understood what the ‘gender pay gap’ meant

My recollection is different. What I recall is that gender was a word applied to nouns in foreign languages. Never to people. Nouns had a gender, and were either masculine or feminine, or sometimes neuter.

Then it became common to refer to people's gender as a polite way of avoiding the word sex.

As a point of reference, the Supreme Court in FWS said the following about the meaning of the words in law:

at 97: In our judgment, the words in parenthesis are more likely to be intended to forestall any argument that might have arisen if the rule referred only to gender and not to sex (or only to sex and not to gender) and to reflect the fact that the words "gender" and "sex" were used interchangeably in legislation at the time the GRA 2004 was introduced. As Lord Reed PSC said in R (Elan-Cane) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2021] UKSC 56, [2023] AC 559, legislation across the statute book assumes that all individuals can be categorised as belonging to one of two sexes or genders and those terms have been used interchangeably: para 52.

Yes. "Gender" originally meant "sex", no distinction. Then some feminist academics started using "gender" in a second way, to talk specifically about the different ways men and women were viewed/treated by society based on their sex, e.g. expecting women to be the carers - but it was still entirely linked to people's actual sex, and was not individual, just about the different social roles/expectations/stereotypes placed (unfairly/wrongly) on each sex class.

Then a few male academics (some quite dodgy, eg John Money) dreamt up the idea of "gender identity", supposedly an innate feeling of being male/female/ other that was NOT tied to one's sex and apparently VERY IMPORTANT, even though nobody had ever reported having such a thing up till then. This third meaning was a very useful concept to men who wanted to pretend to be women, who therefore invented "transgender", and here we are...

Unfortunately, these men also like to switch between the different uses of "gender" to confuse matters and help them get what they want, e.g. by talking about "gendered" sports, changing rooms etc when these were actually always separated by sex (meaning 1!), so that they can then claim they should be allowed into female spaces/sports based on their "female gender identity" (meaning 3!), and so on. It's quite interesting when you read statements, laws, policies etc to pay attention to the different ways they often use "gender" in different places, often even within the same document!

What I don’t understand is how they are getting this data- hmrc (who provide the data for the GPG reporting) does not hold sex category data, only gender.

Looking at AI (for what it’s worth) it relates to the prevalence of socially constructed roles eg women’s work being care, retail etc compared to typical men’s work. I can sort of understand the thinking behind it because I don’t think they ever imagined that a male could suggest they had the gender of a woman.

Using gender in place of sex was to be polite in some cases and to try to head off silly jokes like writing "yes please" on forms.

There was never a time when these 2 words were used interchangeably.
That is another trans myth.

Honestly, @IwantToRetire , I'm sure I am a lot older than you, but that certainly was the case, in some situations.

Even though only a decade ago, it seems to be from a time when people wrongly used the word gender to mean sex.

I discover there is https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukdsi/2017/9780111152010
The Equality Act 2010 (Gender Pay Gap Information) Regulations 2017