The second year of obligatory gender pay gap reporting, applicable to companies with at least 250 employees, has illustrated a worrying lack of movement by companies. Despite the introduction of the gender pay reporting requirement (see article n°9966), the figures published – up to the deadline on 5 April – indicate that 78% of companies still pay their female staff less than their male counterparts. Meanwhile the median difference between the pay received by male and female workers reduced by only 0.1 percentage points year on year, to 9.6% for 2018 compared to 9.7% in 2017 (see article n°10630). The figures also show that the gender gap has either remained the same or increased in more than half of companies, with large firms such as the banks HSBC and Barclays, supermarket chain Tesco, and airline British Airways disclosing worse figures than in last year’s edition.
Of the 10,444 companies that took the time to fill in the documents put online by the UK government, 8,124 paid their male staff more than their female employees in 2018, when the median wage is taken into account. At only 1,425 of those companies were female workers paid more than their male colleagues, while 900 of the firms did not have a gender pay gap last year.
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