Given the frequency with which the BBC has reported on the so-called “gender pay gap” in the UK, it came as something of a shock when a July 2017 report revealed that the corporation paid its leading men presenters considerably more than their female counterparts.
This issue is endemic throughout the UK, of course, which is why the government introduced the Gender Pay Gap reporting regulations on April 5th, 2017. This initiative required companies with more than 250 employees to publish their results on a government website by April 4th last year, encouraging firms to tackle their own gender pay gap in a more proactive manner.
We’ll explore this further below, whilst asking whether your business is taking adequate steps in gender pay gap reporting?
Who do these Regulations Cover and What Needs to be Reported?
Under the terms of the legislation, the new rules applied to any company that employed a minimum of 250 employees.
For the purposes of the Gender Pay Gap reporting regulations, the term “employment” is defined in section 83 of the Equality Act 2010, and it includes any formal contract of employment and apprenticeship.
In essence, this means that companies will need to include any employee with a formal contract in their reports, whilst highlighting six specific pieces of information in clear and accurate detail.
These include the mean and median for standard pay and bonuses, along with the bonus pay proportion between men and women. The latter refers to any relevant male and female employees who have received a bonus in the last 12 months, whilst the payment should be expressed as a total percentage according to each gender.
What Steps can you take to Meet the Gender Pay Gap reporting regulations?
One of the first things that you need to do as part of the Gender Pay Gap reporting regulations is organise your workforce into evenly-sized quartiles, based on the ranking of full-pay employees from highest to lowest in terms of their hourly pay rate.
You should then report on the percentage of males and females within each quartile, as this will present an immediate insight into whether women are paid significantly less than their male counterparts on average.
To build this type of detailed and accurate report, it may also be worth partnering with an expert service provider like Moorepay.
After all, this payroll service provider boasts some extremely in-depth and insight-driven reporting features, along with a comprehensive HR strategy platform.
This means that you’ll be able to produce incredibly detailed Gender Pay Gap reports, safe in the knowledge that these documents are completely accurate and open to even the most focused scrutiny.
At the same time, you’ll be able to address and gender pay gap issues that are revealed within your business, by identifying the core problems and developing a recruitment and HR strategy to help overcome these.
