The gender pay gap reporting deadline was midnight 4 April 2019. I stayed up late and crunched the numbers and this is what I found.

• 10,463 organisations submitted by the deadline which is approximately 99% of organisations[1]. This is an improvement on last year when only 93% of organisation’s made the deadline.
• The absence of gender pay gaps over 100% (which is statistically impossible and was seen in last year’s data) couple with the increase in the number of organisations meeting the deadline suggests organisations are getting better at reporting their gender pay gaps.
• The headline median gender pay gap has got slightly worse - Table 1[2].

Table 1: Headline median gender pay gap

• The proportion of organisations paying women less than men has got slightly worse - Table 2.

Table 2: Proportion of organisations paying women less than men over time

• There are marked differences by region with the suggestion of a North/South divide where gender pay gaps are lower in the North. The median is lowest in Scotland at 5.7% which is around half of the gender pay gap in London where it stands at 10.4 - Table 3[3].
• This result likely represents the distribution of industries within regions. In the North certain industries with low pay gaps such as health, are overrepresented, and industries with large pay gaps, such as finance, are underrepresented.

Table 3: Gender pay gaps by region over time

• 352 organisations have less than 250+ staff and therefore voluntarily submitted their gender pay gap data.
• The very largest organisations (20,000 or more) had the lowest median gender pay gap at 7.6.

Table 4: Median hourly gender pay gap by organisation size

• Median gender pay gaps have not changed much by industry. The highest median gender pay gaps s exist in Construction (24.35) followed by Finance (23.9).
• Some industries such as Hospitality (Accommodation and Food Services) have very low gender pay gaps (median of 0.6) and this may be because of the high proportion of both men and women on the minimum wage.

Table 5: Gender pay gaps by industry over time[4]

• The median proportion of women receiving a bonus was 17.4% whereas the median proportion of men receiving a bonus was 19.3%.
• There has been a slight increase in the average proportion of women in each wage quartile including the upper quartile - Figure 1.

Figure 1: Average proportion of women in each wage quartile

• A URL to information on the gender pay gap is available for 2/3 of organisations (66%), although the absence of a URL does not mean that information is not available somewhere.
• There are some good examples of narratives which is especially important when a gender pay gap has seemingly got worse. For example easy jet had a gender pay gap of 47.9% up from 45.5% in 2017. The narrative outlines how the company has increased in the proportion of entrant female pilots from 13% to 15% (and 18% in 2019).
• Hilton Hotels – median GPG has more than doubled from 3.1% to 7.8%.
  • The narrative explains that although they are building a strong female entry-level talent pipeline, they haven’t done enough at the mid-senior management levels. Supporting this explanation is the statistic that 73% of Hilton’s graduate Management Development Programme intake and alumni are women who have not yet progressed into more senior roles.  Hilton also have a corporate mentoring scheme, flexible working arrangements, gender-balanced nominations for development, diversity training, 50% women independent board members, and a ‘Coaching on Call’ scheme.

Endnotes

[1] This is based on the fact that 10,563 submitted last year. 10463/10564=99%

[2] Here we have used the median (middle company) for both the median hourly pay gap and mean hourly pay gap. The figures were reported slightly differently by the BBC and others because they did not update their analysis after the deadline last year. However, at this point 7% of companies were yet to submit.

[3] Regions were not provided and were matched using addresses. Sample sizes are small for Northern Ireland.

[4] In most cases we used the SIC code provided to assign each company to an industry Section. Although some companies have multiple codes each was assigned the first code. In many cases there was no SIC code provided and a judgement call was made. For example, an NHS trust would belong in health and a School would belong in education.