Last week the government issued its first official guidance on ethnicity pay gap reporting. Somewhat unusually among gov.uk workplace guidance, it is prospectively a very useful read. To its immediate credit, for example, it accepts right up front that there can be many legitimate reasons for disparities in average pay between ethnic minority groups. “It … Continue Reading
Just a quick update for any employer currently preparing its gender pay gap report for 2020/21. As you may have seen, the Equality and Human Rights Commission has confirmed that “due to the continued effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, enforcement action against employers failing to report their gender pay gap will start on 5 October … Continue Reading
Businesses in Great Britain with 250 employees or more are required to publish information annually showing the difference in average pay between their male and female employees – the “gender pay gap”. This year the reporting obligation was suspended, but what is likely to happen for the reporting year 2020/21?… Continue Reading
At present there is no legal obligation to do anything more with your pay gap than publish it on your website, not necessarily accompanied by any form of explanation or other comment at all. Most employers caught by the current gender pay gap regulations (about 10,000 of them) have added some form of narrative, but … Continue Reading
So now you have published your gender pay gap statement and added the traditional narrative treading the thin line between acknowledgement of the gap and denial that it represents evidence of any unlawful discrimination. Well done so far, but if the UK Government has its way, that is only the beginning.… Continue Reading
Inevitably in diversity discussions, the topic of women on Boards or in other senior leadership positions will come up. Quite right too. Despite some progress in this area (the proportion of women on the Boards of the largest listed companies across the EU more than doubled from 10% in 2005 to 22% in 2015), it … Continue Reading
Courtesy of Acas, here are the top ten myths to be “busted” by the Government’s promised campaign to make the Gender Pay Gap Regulations look less over-engineered than they really are together with some italicised comments of our own. MYTH: We did an equal pay audit a while ago so we’re fine FACT: Equal Pay deals … Continue Reading
As we have mentioned in previous blog posts, having a gender pay gap does not mean in any way that an employer has necessarily failed to comply with its equal pay obligations under the Equality Act 2010. But this new obligation to publish pay information is likely to bring the issue of equal pay to … Continue Reading
We recently ran a webinar on the new gender pay gap reporting obligations coming into force in the UK in April. During and since the webinar we have been asked a number of questions about how the new reporting obligations will work. Here are some of these questions and our outline answers. Will group reporting … Continue Reading
It would be wrong (in fact, outright churlish) to end the year without another poke at the new draft Gender Pay Gap Regulations, or rather the Government Equalities Office’s Response to the public consultation on them. This is broadly a rehearsal of the different views expressed during that consultation process, mostly concerning the mechanics of … Continue Reading
This week the UK government has published the revised version of the Equality Act 2010 (Gender Pay Gap Information) Regulations 2017 in the form in which they are likely to come into force on 6 April 2017. Join us at our webinar on Thursday 15 December 2016 from 12 – 1pm GMT when we will … Continue Reading
So here they are, out yesterday, a strange parallel universe where months last 30.44 days and years 365.25, and where you don’t include pay for periods of leave except when you do. In past blogs here we have criticised Government Regulations and statutory Guidance as too vague, leaving employers unclear whether they are caught by … Continue Reading
Today (10 November) is “Equal Pay Day” in the UK. It marks the day in the year when the average full-time working woman in the UK effectively stops earning compared to the average full-time working man because of the gender pay gap. The gender pay gap is the difference between men and women’s average earnings. … Continue Reading
According to data published today (26 October) by the Office for National Statistics in its Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, the overall gender pay gap (taking into account both full-time and part-time employees) has fallen from 19.3% in 2015 to 18.1% in 2016. This is apparently the largest year-on-year drop since 2010. The gender … Continue Reading
