I’m no great organiser, but I always fancied having a go at running New Labour’s celebrated election ‘Grid’, designed to transform campaign chaos into order by giving each day some strategic single-issue focus. At the very least, I’d not, after a seven-year wait to pick virtually any day I wanted for a Gender Pay Gap Day, select one within a week of an already well established Equal Pay Day and make no attempt whatever to link the two.

I’ll start with the seven-year wait, because this blog’s main proposition is that Wednesday 4th April, the deadline chosen for the required publication by nearly 10,000 companies and public sector organisations of broadly comparable gender pay gap data, bears a certain resemblance to Churchill’s characterisation of the war-turning battle of El Alamein in November 1942: “not the end; not even the beginning of the end, but perhaps the end of the beginning.”

Indeed, an even lengthier beginning than World War II.  And there is a figure of Churchillian admirability in the equal pay battle too – a remarkable woman politician, and pleasingly recognised as such by this Association.  Which rules out Theresa May, despite her audacious media bid to claim a leading role in the Equal Pay campaign.

Yes, technically it was Prime Minister May who did eventually introduce Statutory Instrument No.172 (2017) – the Equality Act (2010) (Gender Pay Gap Information) Regulations – with its key ‘duty to publish’ stipulations: gender pay gaps, proportions of men and women by salary quartile, bonus payments, and, arguably most important of all, to do so annually.

But it was also Home Secretary May, the new Conservative-led Coalition and its business supporters who were chiefly responsible for delaying this beginning by the seven years between those two bracketed legislative dates, by doing their utmost in 2010 to dilute the implementation of the genuinely radical Equality Act inherited from the Labour Government and its author and driver, Equalities Minister Harriet Harman – only the second woman, after Baroness Shirley Williams, to receive the PSA’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

Positive Action just survived – enabling an employer, faced with two candidates of equal merit, to recruit or promote one from an age, racial or gender group under-represented in the workforce in order to increase its diversity. But not the pivotal gender pay audit – “Theresa May axes Harman’s Law”, as the Telegraph exulted. Instead of employers having to reveal their gender pay gaps, a voluntary approach, we were assured, would be preferable.  And true, some big companies did respond: five, to be precise.

So, by 2015, with the UK’s overall gender pay gap – that is, between the total pay averages of all, not just full-time, workers – still close to 20%, it was clear even to ministers that voluntary wasn’t working. Compulsory annual reporting, gender pay gap league tables, and annual gap-closing targets are no magic wand. But they furnish authoritative and hard-to-deny data, and highlight details, patterns and trends – the near-absence, for instance, of a gender pay gap for full-time men and women between 22 and 39. They also indicate where further data are needed and enable properly informed debate. 

Hence, the end of the beginning. Harman had been right, although her Equality Act would have constituted a much bigger, as well as earlier, beginning. For, despite its interminable gestation, this month’s exercise has major limitations.  First, it is confined to organisations with 250 or more employees – a count which, contrary to some reports, should include part-time workers and job-sharers (as whole employees), but, significantly for the local authorities in which I am primarily interested, not agency workers or service companies. 

Secondly, there is no definitive database of companies with 250-plus employees. No way of knowing, therefore, who’s not reported, never mind penalising them for non-compliance. The most the Government Equalities Office (GEO) threatens is that non-compliance runs a “reputational risk”. Scary!  Thirdly, there’s no way, with only 14 items of information requested, of checking patently implausible returns – not even overall employee totals by gender.

The concluding section of the blog takes the form of a small tabulated comparison of West Midlands metropolitan councils’ pay gap returns that I compiled for my own illustrative purposes – very basic, very limited, but fractionally more than a straight lift from the GEO website.

The 14 items of information required of employers comprised:

1 – 2: Mean gender pay gap – difference between women’s and men’s average hourly wage rates across the whole organisation, a -10% gap meaning women’s hourly wage is 10% lower than men’s and that they earn 90p for every £1 that men earn.

3 – 4: Median pay gap – a -10% gap here meaning the middle-paid woman’s hourly wage is 10% lower than the middle-paid man’s. Despite the media’s strong preferences to the contrary, median pay is widely considered the better measure of ‘typical pay’, less influenced by workers with either very low or very high pay, and is the measure used here.  Currently it is 18.4% for all UK workers, 1% higher than the mean pay gap.

The GEO helpfully translated the percentages into more readily graspable cash terms, but, having been in the US when it was launched over 20 years ago, I’ve always liked the American concept of Equal Pay Day, marking how far into the next calendar year the average American woman must work to earn what the average man earned the previous year. For 2017/18 it happened to be Tuesday 10th April, just days after Gender Pay Gap Day, and was widely celebrated – but not here, though I like to think that, were Harriet still Equalities Minister, or better still PM, it would have received at least a serious mention.

Part of the reason, it has to be said, is that the Fawcett Society, custodian of the UK’s Equal Pay Day, defines it slightly differently, as the day – November 10th last year – after which women in effect begin to work for free, due to the pay gap. In the table, therefore, that column’s calculations are mine.

5 – 9: Proportions of women in each pay quartile, calculated by dividing all employees into four even groups according to their pay, and indicating women’s representation at different levels of the organisation.

10 – 14: Proportion of men and women receiving bonuses; mean and median gender bonus gaps. Important statistics, but excluded here, since Solihull and Walsall were the only councils paying bonuses.

Hopefully, after that much explanation and certainly for a PSA readership, the figures speak largely for themselves. The sector headline results were widely reported, particularly by the Local Government Chronicle, though usually using mean, rather than median, figures.  Two-thirds of councils – 193 of 293, and all but Coventry in the WM metro sample – reported mean pay differences of over 5%, the threshold deemed “significant” by the Equality & Human Rights Commission. In just 18 of the 193 cases was the gap in favour of women, which brings us back to the title.

Chris Game is Honorary Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Local Government Studies.

Image: Mike Licht CC BY-NC-ND