Gender Pay Gap

We recently published our Gender Pay Gap figures, and HR and Directors love to hype it up. However, I read this definition we put out with our results, and wondered how useful it actually is:

The Gender Pay Gap GPG is the difference in the average pay and bonuses of all male and female employees across an organisation. This is different to equal pay which is the comparison of the amount a male and female gets paid for doing the same job.

	Mean %	Median %
Gender Pay Gap 2020	7.3	1.5
Gender Pay Gap 2019	11.2	5.1
Gender Bonus Gap 2020	-28.5	14.1

Pay Quartile	Men %	Women %
Upper	74	26
Upper Middle	66	34
Lower Middle	72	28
Lower	67	33

So I’m not sure what these figures mean. I think these vague figures mean that we are grouping together Directors, Managers, Developers, Support Staff, Admin staff, maybe even cleaners. Then we split them by gender and publish the average.

Even if it was grouped by department, I’m not sure what you could take from the results, although I would quite like to see it. There’s not many women Developers in the UK offices, but there’s a fair amount of Software Testers, and plenty of Managers. I’ve no idea if the average manager gets paid more than the Developers but it could be possible women get paid more in our Department.

I think the second set of figures show how I imagine the Development Department is. There’s generally more men everywhere but the managerial roles that women seem to favour – are higher paid. So the highest proportion of women are in the “upper middle” (34%).

But you can’t conclude anything from these figures other than we probably need more women in general. What we need are the Equal Pay figures, but even then, I think there will be plenty of people that aren’t fairly paid regardless of gender. I wrote about how I was unfairly paid recently and I ended up with a promotion and ~£14k rise.

These somewhat cryptic statistics don’t really mean anything and just seems like a token gesture to appease those that would actually benefit from them if they were accurate. What I always find strange is that the HR department is mainly composed of women, and if these women are actually seeing a problem with Equal Pay, then surely they should sort it because they should have the power to do so.