International Women’s Day isn’t the time to be pushing faulty pay gap statistics

International Women’s Day is a time to celebrate the vast achievements of women worldwide, while acknowledging the real struggles and oppression millions of women and girls continue to face, including violence, inequality under the law and limited access to education. It is not a time to push faulty pay gap statistics. Yet that is exactly what happened yesterday. Ahead of International Women’s Day, Robert Half – a specialised recruitment agency – calculated that women in the UK will earn roughly £300,000 less than their male counterparts throughout their career, putting their estimated pay gap figure between men and women at 24%. Robert Half’s estimation is wildly inflated compared to the Office of National Statistic’s calculations, which estimate the pay gap to be 9.4% (the lowest on record since these comparisons began). This huge differential boils down to the latter’s decision to control for as many mitigating factors as possible in an effort to come up with the most accurate figure.