Gender pay gap

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

Would we condone teaching a child that 1+1 = 3, for the sake of increasing her interest in maths? No. Would we praise flat earth theorists for getting people talking about the health of the planet? No. So why are we giving credence to meaningless and often deceptive gender pay gap statistics, which have us focusing on women’s issues in a way that is damaging to women? With Brexit-mania dominating our national debate, you may have missed that today is the deadline for large organisations to report their gender pay gap data. Now into the second year of reporting, it has become increasingly clear that the influx of data from the gender pay

Shocking news emerges that Sandi Toksvig is paid 40pc of what Stephen Fry was on to present the lamentable programme QI. Really? It had never occurred to me that Toksvig was paid anything at all. She is boring, smug and bereft of wit. I assumed she did it out of delight at being beamed into our living rooms, knowing that everyone was quickly turning off the TV. I’m no great fan of Stephen Fry – an idiot’s conception of what intelligence is, frankly. But he presented that programme with chutzpah and humour, both qualities patently absent from Sandi’s make-up. As is make-up, of course. Sandi also complained that she was

Ann Summers chief executive Jacqueline Gold has been credited with transforming the lingerie company into a more female-friendly business – and in the process has become Britain’s 16th richest woman, according to the latest Sunday Times Rich List. So what was the key to her success? Gold believes that identifying a gap in the market was what turned Ann Summers into such a recognisable brand. ‘I knew that women were desperate to buy sexy lingerie and sex toys, but there wasn’t anywhere they could do that which offered a female-friendly, safe environment.’ she explains. ‘I spoke to friends and saw that we could replicate the popular concept of ‘at home’

There is a group of women who have every reason to feel aggrieved to learn that the BBC is paying Gary Lineker £1.8 million a year and John Humphreys between £600,000 and £650,000. But it doesn’t include Jane Garvey and Emily Maitlis, both of whom appear to be grubbing by on a little below £150,000. It is the 101,000 women found guilty last year of evading the TV licence. If you want a genuinely worrying gender disparity, forget the BBC’s highest-earners and look at the balance of people at the bottom of society who are being dragged through the courts for the non-payment of the tax. The Perry Review into the TV licence,

‘More work needs to be done,’ is what people say whenever some unachievable social goal is shown to be another 200 years away. And it was said a lot this week after it emerged that women still earn 18 per cent less than men on average. As the Guardian reported: The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) also found that the gap balloons after women have children, raising the prospect that mothers are missing out on pay rises and promotions. That was echoed by a separate report yesterday suggesting that male managers are 40 per cent more likely than female managers to be promoted. What’s odd is that almost nowhere in the supposedly

Nearly half a century after Ford Dagenham women sewing machinists struck for equal pay, a new survey shows women are still being penalised in the workplace – for having children. Equal pay for equal work is enshrined in law thanks to the bravery of those strikers, yet a cavernous gender pay gap remains. But now it is the demands of childcare — rather than sexist bosses — that is the enemy of equality. A TUC report has shown that fathers earn 21 percent more than other men. Mothers over the age of 33 typically earn 15 per cent less than women without children. Men usually work longer and harder when

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

Today the Prime Minister has set out to ‘end the gender pay gap in a generation’. It would be an ambitious goal, if a wage gap actually existed. According to the latest ONS figures, women between the ages of 22 – 29 earn 1.1 per cent more on average than their male counterparts and women between the ages of 30-39 are also earning more. And it doesn’t stop there. There’s evidence that when men and women follow the same career path in the UK, women tend to out-earn and out-perform men. There is growing evidence that if you control for similar backgrounds, women actually tend to get more aggressively promoted than