City’s dismal gender pay gap is an opportunity for smarter firms

The business case for diversity is stronger than ever, writes James Moore

The gender pay gap is still high... and is a chasm in the City (PA)

The results of the latest exercise in gender pay gap reporting are predictably dismal. Various surveys of the data show roughly eight in 10 firms pay women less. The median gap hovers around the 10 per cent level; the Financial Times puts it as 12 per cent, the BBC at 9.4 per cent, depending on how you crunch the numbers.

What is not in dispute is that those numbers are too high, and that little has changed since 2017-18 when gender pay gap reporting was made compulsory. Some estimate it will take more than a century to eliminate the gender pay gap at current rates; even that is starting to look optimistic because slow progress is starting to look like no progress.

It should be stated at this point that what we are talking about here is not that men and women are paid for the same work; any gap there is already illegal. The gender pay gap is calculated as the difference between average hourly earnings (excluding overtime) of men and women as a proportion of men’s average hourly earnings (excluding overtime) across an organisation.