Are you being paid less than a man? Here’s how to find out and what you can do about the gender pay gap

WHEN Amy Bull landed a job as an account executive at an independent telecoms firm after finishing maternity leave three years ago, she was thrilled.

“Wanting to return to work after I had my daughter Isabelle, I was keen to carve out a full-time career,” Amy, now 30, says.

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“I’d only worked part-time as a sales executive at my previous job with little chance of promotion.

“When I was offered this new role, I was told the salary would be £13,000 – a few thousand less than I wanted. But I accepted the job as it was a fantastic opportunity with great prospects.”

But then in June 2014, two months after she started, a throwaway remark from a male colleague who had joined the company not long after Amy threw her salary into question.

“My colleague mentioned he was applying for another role elsewhere because he would earn £2,000 more,” she remembers.

“I’d seen the job he was talking about advertised with a salary of £17,000. It dawned on me that it meant he was being paid nearly £2,000 more than I was, even though we did the same job.”

Amy, who lives in Peterborough, then decided to ask her colleague about his wage and he confirmed her fears.

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“It’s no exaggeration to say that I was absolutely devastated,” she remembers.

“It was horrible to feel so undervalued and was a real blow to my self-confidence. I had the experience required for the role and was extremely good at my job – I even had added responsibility he didn’t have. It was clear I was simply paid less because I was a woman.”

Sadly, Amy’s story is far from unique.

Despite it being nearly 50 years since the passing of the Equal Pay Act, which prohibits men and women in the UK being paid unequally for the same job, there remains a yawning chasm between the salaries of the sexes.

While today’s gender pay divide has narrowed, it still stands at about 18%.*

This means, last year women stopped earning relative to men from November 10, and effectively worked for free from then until the end of the year.

“There are a number of reasons why the pay gap still exists,” explains Sam Smethers, chief executive of the Fawcett Society, a charity that campaigns for gender equality and women’s rights.

“Girls are still steered into traditional career choices, such as clerical and caring professions, which are lower paid than positions in maths and engineering. Then there’s the ‘motherhood penalty’, where women’s earnings are severely impacted once they start to have children.”

According to research by IFS, the pay gap consistently widens for 12 years after a first child is born, by which point women receive 33% less pay an hour than men.

However, this may be about to change.

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In a landmark move, from April 6, every business with 250 employees or more will be required to calculate and publish the overall mean and median gender pay gaps and bonus difference between men and women by April 2018, which will throw disparities into the spotlight.

And about time, too, when you bear in mind that back in 2009 Harriet Harman, the former deputy leader of the Labour party, initiated the push for companies to reveal their gender pay divide.

But the initiative was severely softened after the coalition government took over in 2010 as it opted for a voluntary approach to the issue, which proved unsuccessful.

Then in 2015, the Conservatives announced a move to make the policy statutory for larger companies, and Prime Minister David Cameron pledged to “end the gender pay gap in a generation.”

“The legislation has felt a long time coming,” agrees MP Caroline Dinenage, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Women, Equalities And Early Years.

“This is because we wanted to consult carefully on the issue, and work alongside businesses every step of the way.

“It is only going to work if we can convince businesses that tackling the gender pay gap isn’t just about it being the right thing to do – it’s actually good for business, because it realises the potential of every member of staff.”

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In accordance with this new legislation, the resulting data, which will cover more than 9,000 private and public sector employers and 15 million employees – roughly half the UK workforce – must appear on each company’s website.

The findings will also be published on a government site, meaning that it will be publicly available to anyone from customers to potential future recruits, and will be published as part of a league table.

This transparency could show, for example, that a company pays men on average 10% more than women, or men earn 5% more in bonuses.

“Businesses that may not realise they’ve got a problem can look at the data and question whether they are doing enough to tackle the issue,” says Caroline.

“But this is just the starting point. The next stage is pinpointing the causes of the gap and pushing forward to make a real change.

“We’re tackling this with the aspiration that one day girls will grow up knowing that their lifetime earning potential is not going to be compromised because of their gender.”

The legislation should, in theory, make tackling the issue less problematic from an employee’s perspective.

Something Amy knows about all too well.

“I wrote an official letter of complaint to my female line manager, who ignored it for over seven weeks, which was very stressful,” she remembers.

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“Every day I’d go home upset as I felt the company thought so little of me. But I couldn’t talk to anyone about it at work as I didn’t know who to trust. I confided in my husband Kevin, 26, a company sales director, and he was so angry at how unjust it all was. He gave me the confidence to keep pursuing it.”

Amy ended up emailing the company’s director in August, 2014, outlining the fundamental reasons why the pay difference was unfair.

“At first, he said I was jumping the gun,” she recalls.

“Which I felt was his way of telling me not to make a fuss. But at no point did he deny that my male colleague was on more money than me.”

Finally, after a further two weeks, Amy was informed – with no specific explanation why – that her salary had been raised to £15,000.

Ironically, her male colleague was then sacked because of his poor performance.

Then, in November 2014, Amy was given another £2,000 pay rise as recognition for her performance in a company project.

“It was bittersweet,” she admits.

“I should never have had to fight for the same salary. I totally lost my respect and trust in the business.”

In a twist of fate, just six months after she confronted her bosses, Amy was headhunted by another company and given a substantial pay rise.

“My old bosses were probably annoyed because, in their eyes, they’d done everything to appease me,” she says.

“But the situation shouldn’t have arisen in the first place.”

While next month’s new legislation is a step in the right direction in fighting salary discriminations like Amy’s, Sam warns it may not go far enough.

“It’s not just about the publication of the information, but what is done with it – how it’s used to drive change,” she says.

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Sam also reveals that the government currently has no plans to penalise companies who refuse to comply with the new requirements, although they could be investigated by the Equality And Human Rights Commission, the independent body for enforcing non-discrimination laws.

“There is a risk of non-compliance from some employers,” says Sam.

“We’ve been lobbying government to say there has to be a penalty for this.”

Another sticking point is the fact that the new measures only apply to companies with 250 or more employees.

“In reality, it impacts less than half of the female working population, as a lot of women work in smaller businesses,” Sam says.

“We recommended the government had a threshold of 50 employees. But it felt it should apply the measures to larger companies who have better HR infrastructures, so it would be less of a burden to them. If we want to tackle the problem, we need a lower threshold.”

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There is no doubt that the prospect of being “named and shamed” on a government website could be an incentive for companies to work harder to bridge the pay gap.

However, Emma Stewart, the co-founder of Timewise Foundation, a job agency that finds flexible roles, believes what most firms need is external support on how to make a significant change.

“Many businesses want practical advice on tackling the pay gap,” she says.

“Our research shows that the lack of women higher up the pay scale directly correlates with the lack of opportunities to work flexibly for women, particularly at the point when they have children.

“One of the simplest ways that many of the employers we work with take action on the pay gap is to advertise all jobs as being open to flexibility.”

Sodexo, a company that manages 35,000 staff working in the service industry, is one of the few businesses that opted to make its gender pay gap public months before the launch of the new legislation.

At 7.65%, it was less than half the national average.

For Amy, the message is simple: “Every female employee has a responsibility to challenge disparities in their pay,” she says. “That’s the only way we’ll see a change.”

Source: *ONS. Visit