Changing the gender pay gap system won’t help – let’s scrap it instead

My heart skipped a beat when I discovered the Royal Statistical Society was publishing a report, out today, which calls for the rules around gender pay gap reporting (companies with 250+ employees are mandated to calculate and publish this data by law) to be refined.

As I wrote on Coffee House last week, the calculations are so crude and void of context, they render the results almost meaningless. They don’t take any like-for-like comparison on job, age, or education into account and don’t even control for full and part-time workers. As a result, the final figures are comparing the CEO of the FTSE 100 company to the junior researcher who just graduated from university.

The flaws in the legislation are so egregious and so obvious, it was simply a matter of time before there were calls to improve the reporting system, or scrap it all together. 

Or so I thought.

Unfortunately today’s report from the RSS only serves to double down on the deeply entrenched problems with the pay gap reporting.