Manufacturers are likely to be concerned that the gender pay gap in their industry is larger than others because of the gender imbalance that exists in the sector as a whole.
The disparity between men’s and women’s pay currently stands at 19.2%, a figure that has barely moved in four years, irrespective of a government pledge to eliminate it within a generation.
The difference for full- and part-time workers means a woman earns typically 80p to every £1 earned by her male counterpart.
A way in which government intends to tackle the issue is through gender pay reporting, however, EEF’s Verity O’Keefe told The Manufacturer that for manufacturers, this currently is a convoluted process and by no means the “silver bullet” to solving the issue.
O’Keefe told TM, “The gender pay gap is an interesting one. We have always supported the principal of closing it, but my fear is that in its current form, when you are looking through the draft regulations, instead of focusing on a singular metric, which would have been quite powerful and effective, the Government has introduced a wave metric.
Manufacturers are likely to be concerned that the gender pay gap in their industry is larger than others because of the gender imbalance that exists in the sector as a whole.
“We have the mean and median gender pay gap, and the mean bonus gap. We are going to have league tables, and that’s quite a lot of information for an employer to pull together.”
O’Keefe urged that manufacturers may be baffled by the amount of data when trying to draw a comparison with a competitor.
“We could have simplified it more effectively,” she continued. “They want to be able to see the gap so they can close it.
“If the policy aim is for employers to spotlight where they have a gender pay gap and fix it, for that stakeholder looking for that number to make a comparison, maybe one or two metrics might have been better than a whole host of them.
“There’s work to do on gender pay reporting, it’s not the silver bullet.”
