The Equal Pay Act was enacted in 1970 but with an unusually long delay until 1975 before full implementation. The idea was to allow employers to get their houses in order and bring about parity of pay between the sexes. It seems remarkable that 40 years on there is a UK gender pay gap of just under 20%.
The UK Regulations
The latest attempt to address this is mandatory reporting for larger employers with 250 or more staff. The draft regulations were published on 12th February 2016. There is now a short period of consultation and they are expected to come into force in 1 October 2016. The key points are:
- Employers in both the private and public sectors with more than 250 employees will have to disclose how much they are paying their male and female employees.
- The date by which companies will have to publish their gender pay data has been delayed until April 2018, with the aim of giving employers time to introduce new systems or processes to analyse their gender pay gaps. Employers will have to publish their data annually thereafter. Employers are expected to provide a shorter data snapshot in April 2017.
- A number of metrics will be reported on, including mean and median gender pay gaps for salaries and bonuses, the number of men and women in each salary quartile and the proportion of male and female employees who received a bonus that year.
- The Westminster Government has indicated that it will use the data to produce league tables that rank whole sectors against each other according to their average pay gaps (it is as yet undecided whether league tables of individual companies will also be published).
- A database of complying employers will be built up as employers publish their information, with examples of compliance and non-compliance identified. The regulations do not provide for any penalties. The real consequence is negative publicity and risk to employment relations resulting from non-compliance.
The Scottish dimension
Under the specific equality duties, listed public authorities in Scotland with more than 150 employees are already required to publish their gender pay gap. The Scottish Government is currently consulting on lowering this threshold even further to cover listed public authorities with more than 20 employees. The aim is that the Scottish Regulations are approved by March 2016.
Please click here to review the draft UK regulations. If you are interested in finding out more about preparing for publication please Contact us to obtain our guide on the gender pay gap.
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