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

[IwantToRetire]

Well, according to the Sun!

Bosses will be forced to use their staff’s biological sex when declaring their gender pay gap in a “common sense” victory.

Existing rules let firms interpret “male and female” as whatever the employee themselves identifies as.

The Sun can reveal that new guidance will soon be published that obeys last year’s landmark Supreme Court judgement that enshrines the rights of biology.

Around 10,000 large employers will be required by law to calculate the average gulf in pay between men and women.

The upcoming guidance states: “It is important for you to be sensitive to how an employee identifies their gender.

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

Full article https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/37936392/bosses-use-biological-sex-gender-pay-gap/

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Is it actually called gender pay gap regulations? If so, very misleading.

I think that is just an example of how over the years there has been this creeping transing of lanuage.

As it relates to the Equal Pay Act and the Sex Discrimination Act the word gender would never have come into it.

But of course they needed to make it sound like it was about "gender" because then employers could be made to think they could record someone who identifies as a woman being part of the statistics on women's pay.

Good. My employer ONLY recognises gender and does not have a tick box for sex with the consequence that I refuse to fill out the forms. I have specifically requested that I am excluded from the gender pay gap reporting as well.
Unfortunately I think it has caused some issues with my tax code as they also claim that HMRC only wants gender details.

I think the phrase dates from the time when gender and sex were used interchangeably.

There was never a time when these 2 words were used interchangeably.

That is another trans myth.

You only need to look at old newpapers and the fact that the Sex Discrimination Law isn't the Gender Discrimination Law.

Gender was used by academics but for different reasons.

Honestly, they were. Gender was used as a polite (and slightly posher) way of saying sex in the 80s. Nobody was thinking about trans rights when they said 'gender'. Apart from anything else there wasn't a concept of 'transgender' - just transexual.

I agree, I've been hearing the Gender Pay Gap mentioned for years, it's always been a big thing for women's rights group's because women have traditional been paid less than men for doing the same job. I can't say I've ever hear of the Sex Pay Gap.

Maybe it is just bad writing by the Sun, but the text it suggests will be in the new guidance is actually the current guidance. That instructs employers to record gender (not sex), and to discount anyone who doesn't want to self identify as a man or woman. Hopefully there will be be new guidance and it will make it clear that the pay gap must be based on sex.

agree, it has never been called the "sex" pay gap, but it does relate to the pay-gap caused by sex.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

That's just rubbish.

The Sex Discrimination Act had not long been passed.

All you are talking about is the environment you grew up.

And as i said if you bothered to check old newspaper you will see that the word gender didn't really start to be use early 2000, which is when the graduates who were the first to be in university and Queer Studies got Women's Studies closed down, had graduated and moved into places of influence such as newspapers.

It was deliberate.

You may have moved in circles who used the word gender on a personal level.

And again the bact that they now talk about "gender" pay gap is because they want it NOT to be about sex but about gender identity.

Seriously, how is it possible to fight back against what they are doing it, if you dont even see it.

Sadly this side lining comes up on threads every year or so.

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

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!

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.

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.

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 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.