UK gender pay gap data reveals companies paying women up to 63 per cent less
New gender pay gap data has been published. (Getty)
The latest UK gender pay gap data has been published, with women earning 90 pence for every man-made pound.
The gap between the median pay of men and women shrunk compared to last year’s: from 10.2 per cent to 9.8 per cent.
One of the worst figures came from Swiss airline EasyJet, where women’s median wage was 36p for every £1 that men earned. Their median hourly pay is 63.6 per cet lower than men’s.
This made it the least equal company of the year, according to data submitted to the UK government.
A spokesperson for the airline company said: “Gender pay submission does not represent a complete picture because the data in April 2021 included pilots, while the majority of our predominantly female UK cabin crew community remained on furlough.
“We have always been clear that our gender pay gap is not a result of unequal pay but of gender balance in our pilot community, which is predominantly male.”
According to 2020 data by the Federal Aviation Administration’s Aeronautical Center data, women made up just 7 per cent of all commercial pilots.
It’s not, however, the airline industry that generates the biggest inequality in the UK.
Analysis by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) shows that in the construction industry, women earn 76p for every pound a man earns. It’s followed by the information and communication sector (83p) and the financial and insurance sector (88p).
The least inequalities were detected in human health and social work activities, with women earning 98p for every man-made £1. In arts, entertainment, and recreation, women earn 96p, and in transportation and storage 95p.
The pay gap recently dominated the news on International Women’s Day, 6 March, when an anonymous bot began sharing the pay gaps of companies marking the event on Twitter.
Though easyjet didn’t make it to the @PayGapApp feed, Ryanair was reported to have women’s median hourly pay at 68.6 per cent below men’s, with Wizzair46.8 per cent lower.
The co-creator of @PayGapApp, Francesca Lawson, told PinkNews: “What I find shocking about this year’s data is the number of schools among the employers with the largest gender pay gaps.”
For example, at Hull Collaborative Academy Trust, women’s median hourly pay is 93 per cent less than men’s this year, despite women making up 83 per cent of their top earners, she highlighted. “So although lots of employers will explain their gap as a representation issue, that’s clearly not the full picture.”
According to a study from 2018, women start earning less between the ages of 12 and 14.
This year, 78 per cent of the companies reported to the government, despite an extension due to the pandemic.
“Now that compulsory gender pay gap reporting is in its fifth year, I would have expected that number to be much, much smaller,” Lawson says. “This shows that the requirement to publish the data is not enough to get companies to actually work on the inequalities within their organisations.”
Last year, a study found that across Europe, North America and Australia, queer women earn more than their cis peers, though the opposite was true for queer men.
Researchers in the US found that trans people were paid 32 per cent less than cis people.
