How Your Business Can and Should Report on the Gender Pay Gap

In the U.K., it is now mandatory to comply with gender pay gap reporting every year for both private and voluntary sector employers with 250 or more employees. This is also true for public sector employers in England. Even if these criteria do not apply to you, it is good business practice to calculate and report your gender pay gap. This can have multiple benefits for your business, as outlined below, and can be simplified into several easy steps, as we will also advise on further.  

Pay gap reporting does not automatically imply that there is discrimination in your organisation. In fact, it can help your organisation understand any underlying issues within the business that have led to any pay gaps and help develop strategies to rectify them. This could be, for example, in the form of a positive action plan or a change in recruitment which actively encourages more women to apply for senior positions. Consistent reporting will allow your organisation to review how effective these changes are in developing your business into what you aspire it to be.

It is of no doubt that junior workers look to such transparency and disclosure when deciding whether to join a work force. Being transparent about the gender pay gap, as well as the firm’s initiatives to close or the gap, or maintain satisfactory reporting, is rather likely to attract more talented employees.  

Therefore, we have compiled a few simple steps that will simplify the process for your organisation.

1.     You will need to publish 6 calculations in order to disclose accurate gender pay gap data. This includes the following:

Mean and Median gender pay gap in hourly pay

Mean and Median bonus gender pay gap

Proportion of males and females received bonus payments

Proportion of males and females in each pay quartile

The mean should be calculated by adding the hourly pay rate and then dividing by the number of employees, whilst the median is the middle pay rate of your pay rates when put in order of lowest to highest.

2.     You can then publish this information on your website as a PDF, perhaps with useful illustrations to show your data in comparison to the national average, and this should also be published on the government gender pay gap reporting website.

3.      Ensure that you report on this data every year before the deadline, particularly if your organisation is more than 250 employees and this is required by law.

4.     Do not forget about the gender pay gap date once reported! Remember that this must be published every year and employees and the Government take these figures seriously. The calculations should provide opportunity to improve equality and diversity in the workplace.

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