What's the gender pay gap like where you work - and is it an issue for you?

[kalapattar]

Gender pay gap reporting is going on at the moment.

An overview here
www.theguardian.com/society/ng-interactive/2018/mar/28/gender-pay-gap-what-we-learned-in-week-five

And the data here

gender-pay-gap.service.gov.uk/Viewing/search-results

Where I work is overwhelmingly female and is too small to be reported.

But there are some companies that stick out with large pay gaps.

What's your company doing about it ?

With all the potential problems with the potential for self ID it's a shame that this is being called gender paygap rather than sex paygap.

Wonder how much of a difference asking for wages by sec rather than by gender is? And how they deal with someone like Phillip/Pip Bunce in the City who sometimes goes on as a man and sometimes as a woman. Wonder if his pay goes down by a percentage on the dsays he presents as a woman despite doing the same job...

I work in STEM academia and the sex pay gap is around 7%. It’s a little more nuanced than outright sexism though.

Females and males get paid exactly the same for the same job. Pay scales are public and anyone can look up someone’s salary.

We are banded into categories containing several salary points, and you move up a point each year. So you can have Lecturer 1 paid more than Lecturer 2, if Lecturer 1 has been employed longer with no employment gap.

We have a very generous maternity package so females are more likely to take longer leave.

This means females are more likely to occupy the lower salary points within a given category - they are more likely to be Lecturer 2. Thus, it could seem that female lecturers are paid less than male lecturers.

Of course, academia is also overwhelmingly male at the top, where the max salaries are, which is probably a bigger skew.

I work for myself so I’m not impacted as much as others. I’m one of very few people who do my job now, so it would be hard to quantify if there was a gap across the area I work in.

However in my former career, I believe when I was in the depths of it (working batshit hours, getting physically abused, being undervalued) the gap between the sexes was reported as 39%. I believe it has gone down by a few per cent in the last 3-4 years but the gap is still around a third.

We haven't reported yet although apparently our gap is smaller than average.

We are also on HE pay scales so theoretically things should be even. However there is always room for discretionary points and I do think men are more likely to be recognised/ask for this.

I also went to a training session where they said that women are routinely started on the bottom of the pay scale and men negotiate increments and therefore start higher. Since then I have always asked for and got increments so maybe that is true.

My workplace has just published their report and it's 16%. They say it's due to more men in management roles and they want to increase the number of women in higher management by 5% by a certain time.
However this is not looking at equal pay, they have that - same role, same pay regardless of sex.
So with regards to the comment above about a trans person being paid less on the day they identify as a woman... They won't be paid less (they are doing the same job = equal pay act), but their salary could count towards the 'women' statistics. Is that right?
So at my workplace, all they need to do to 'fix' this gender pay gap is to get some of the men to self ID as women, bump up the statistics and voila, no gender pay gap

My workplace Is 18% according to the official figures although they have tried to fudge the figures by getting rid of a whole department. They are telling staff that it is now 11% . Ironically they seem quite pleased with this!

MaidOfStars A few years ago, I used to be a UCU officer in a Russell group university. I can't remember the pay gap then, but the number you quote sounds about right for the lecturer payscales. Management always flatly refused to provide figuers for professors though, because they are not included in the payscales, and of course, that's where the disparities are, since there is more discretion about how pay is awarded and hence more scope for discrimination. But we didn't manage to get the data from them, despite many attempts - I wonder why they were so cagey I don't

I am self employed now. I wouldn't know where to begin, or have the time, to get data on gender disparities in my field, although there is only me in my 'company'.

Apparently it's 33% at my workplace despite supposed pay banding and relatively even split of men to women except at the very highest levels. I'm actually pretty shocked by that so thanks for the link.

About 20% and I'm furious. I'm not in a traditionally masculine or male dominated industry so they can't even use that excuse.

can't earn because I used to work as a supply teacher, took a career break to have the kids, and supply agencies won't let me return to being active on their books now because I cannot provide a reference for the 5 years

That's really hard. Your teaching qualifications and experience are still valid. Returning to a career after a long break to raise a family is something that needs to be addressed - I know that STEM subjects have some initiatives about returning to science after a long break. This country needs scientists and teachers - and it's ridiculous that experienced people face barriers when they want to return to the workplace. It's not like you forget what to do - although some things may have changed, most things stay the same.

Some of those pay gaps are massive - you can see why some of them exist but things do need addressing.

Women’s mean hourly rate is 14% lower than men’s
In other words when comparing mean hourly rates, women earn 86p for every £1 that men earn.
Women’s median hourly rate is 12.4% lower than men’s
In other words when comparing median hourly rates, women earn 88p for every £1 that men earn.

so could be worse...

Still waiting for our results.

I've been very bored today, and it's amused me that every time I refreshed the gender pay gap page, the total number of employers has risen by a few hundred.

I work in for a large company in a hugely male-dominated industry. Our gap is 30% for hourly pay, 40% for bonuses.

I'm on maternity leave currently and, having been grinding my axe over my salary for yonks now, it was agreed I'd get a pay rise before returning. But not as much as I wanted.

Then came the call for publishing our figures.

And suddenly I'm getting an awful lot more.

I'm sure I won't be the only one of the few women working for us to feel the benefit, but I do wonder what our gap would have been had we not.

That's very interesting Rat - I'm not aware of similar happening in my company (certainly haven't been approached myself if so unfortunately) but I wouldn't be surprised if it had.

MiaowTheCat I had similar issues for a highly regulated industry. I was so surprised that they didn't have a process for it - clearly not enough women going back to the industry after a break! I ended up using the child benefit statement (think had to get one from Gov dept) to prove that I had a child (yes, I had to prove I had one - I did say was happy to take said child in to the office to show him....on a serious note, they said it could be anyone's child...!!) and that ended up being good enough to prove that I was legitimately busy during that time.

I would suggest trying a different agency so see if they have the same criteria too.

Good luck.

My company is too small to report on this. It has more female employees than male, but the men are more senior so I guess that might skew the statistics. The numbers are too small for the statistics to be meaningful anyway.

Either way, it's a great work environment and they are happy to be flexible for any employee that asks. This is in the T of STEM.

Where I used to work was over 10% - it emerged in our company's internal pay audit, and this was across the board, not because of more men at senior levels. They claimed not to be able to fix it, so we had to threaten them with court (with the help of our union) to get them to fix it. It made a real difference to me - as a single mum, that 10% was the difference between dipping into savings to cover the bills every other month and watching my "emergency rainy day fund" slowly dwindle, and actually being able to live on my pay and start putting a bit back into my savings account.

17% at my place, which they tried to fudge away by saying a lot of words about how it looks quite high but isn't really... It's definitely a problem to me. My company is absolutely riddled with unconscious bias, but we see ourselves as a very ethical firm, so any suggestion that perhaps we don't treat men and women the same is met with howls of incredulity.

Ours is more than 20%.

It’s a STEM field.

But according to one of our vey loud colleagues it is in fact a myth and women should just plan better when they want babies.

It's terrible where I work. I'm paid much more than our female cleaner and it's only because I studied for years to be able to do my job. I used to have a female boss who was paid even more than me, just because she'd studied hard and worked for years to get where she was.

I wonder what the gender wage gap is at the Guardian?