We are now a little over half way through the first year of the new gender pay gap reporting regime. By the end of October, with just five months of the reporting window remaining, only around 200 of the estimated 9,000 in scope companies had filed their reports.
However, there are some lessons that we can learn from the companies that have reported so far. In terms of the hard data:
- The sector with the highest rate of reporting is human, health and social work activities which makes up approximately 11% of the total responses to date.
- Perhaps unsurprisingly, the financial and insurance services sector makes up just 3.6% of responses to date.
- The average hourly pay gap reported so far is 11.1%, which suggests that companies with better gender pay gaps are disproportionately represented in the first wave of reports. The Office for National Statistics reported in October 2017 that the national gender pay gap was 18.4%.
- Of those who have reported so far, the largest hourly gender pay gap is 54.2%.
- Less than 0.1% of responses to date have shown either no gender pay gap, or a gender pay gap in favour of women.
Interestingly, three out of the Big 4 accountancy practices have reported. This process may have been driven by the fact that PwC has been reporting its gender pay gap for many years. PwC's pay gap is below the national average at 13.1% (all figures are median), however it did demonstrate a bonus gender pay gap of 32.3%. Deloitte LLP reported a pay gap of 12.1% and a bonus pay gap of 41.2%. Ernst & Young reported a pay gap of 14.8% with a bonus gender pay gap of 35.2%. KPMG is yet to report.
In terms of the style of reporting, it is too early to draw any concrete conclusions. It is noteworthy, however, that the Government website is deliberately stark and not designed to help employers put their numbers in context. In particular, there is no place for the (optional) narrative, so it does rely upon people viewing the data to click through to the respondent's own website to find out any additional information that explains the figures. We may therefore see independent reports produced by companies wishing to retain more control over the context of their statistics, as illustrated by the long form report produced by the BBC, which is yet to formally file its data.