Breaking down the gender wage gap

You don’t need to work in TA to know that the gender wage gap represents a real challenge to equity in the workplace. Although the year 2022-2023 saw an increase in the gap for full time employees, there has been a downward trend of around a quarter over the last decade.

Intersectionality and pay

The experiences, skills, and perspectives that women bring to the workforce are rich and diverse. That will always be something to celebrate, and it’s also why challenges around gender equality in the workplace need to be addressed with intersectionality in mind.

Let’s take a closer look at pay.

Ethnicity

Here’s one particularly striking example: An analysis by PwC found that a Bangladeshi woman will earn, on average, 75p for each £1 earnt by an equally qualified white man. It’s a pay penalty of 24.8%. It’s quite the gap, and significant differences can be found in penalties for women of Other Asian (19.4%), Indian (16.2%), and Other Ethnic Group (15.7%) as defined by ONS.

Within those groups, the largest disparity is between White women and men (10.3%) followed by Indian women and men (10%). Black women face a significant pay penalty of 15.5% and are most underrepresented in higher percentiles.

Age

When it comes to age, it is probably not surprising to hear that women aged 46-65 face the largest difference to men of the same age. with women aged 50-59 earning £33,592 to their male counterpart’s £40,768. This gap is more prominent amongst higher earners but has been narrowing in recent years. It is worth noting, however, that the proportion of women in these roles is still not high.

The gap in hourly pay for workers in their 20s-30s is less but begins to diverge in the 40s.

Caring responsibilities

This is something which also plays into the age category, but is worth addressing in itself as there are several different factors involved here.

Analysis conducted by the IFR highlighted that women’s earnings were on average less than half of their male counterparts, which also seems to align with the widening gap with increased age.

Although the balance has shifted somewhat post pandemic, more mums are still working part time around caring responsibilities (37%).

Qualifications

Although the gap in pay is generally smaller in this age group, we still see a difference of around 5% for male graduates at age 25. What might account for that?

One explanation may be the subject areas pursued at undergraduate level. In general women are over represented in areas with lower financial return, i.e. creative arts. There are some exceptions, such as law.

That being said, median incomes for graduates are still higher than non-graduates, with women who attend further education earning more £ 140k over the course of their work life.

Full time vs part time

We know that as of April 2023, the overall median pay was 14.3% less for women than it was for men. However, looking solely at part time wages, we actually see a gap of -3.3%. In these roles, women tend to be paid more than men. The wages for these roles are lower for both genders (with no reporting for non-binary individuals), yet we still see a broader overall gap because women occupy more of those roles.

Location

As the roles available vary immensely by local region, the picture varies greatly across the UK. We do see some trends, however.

A 2019 analysis by Centre for Cities found that 7/10 of the cities with the highest gap could be found in the East or South East of England: with a few exceptions, there were cities with higher average weekly earnings. Interestingly, Northern Ireland saw a gap of -3.5% in April 2023-possibly explained in part by the higher proportion of public sector roles.

Disability

It is worth nothing that the disability pay gap is a subject that deserves it’s own discussion, as in recent years this particular gap has actually been widening (with BME individuals disproportionately affected). Both men and women with disabilities face significant pay penalties: 12.4% and 10.5% less respectively.

Gender identity

This is an incredibly complex subject with very limited data. Through the way employers are required to report and many employees entirely validly prefer not to disclose, it is hard to get the full picture of the wage gap affecting employees who are transgender. 

In short...

...taking a deeper look at the gender wage gap reveals an incredibly complex picture of the pay landscape across the UK.

It’s a real challenge, but having an intersectional insight into the data allows us to acknowledge the diverse lived experiences of women and begin to make strategic decisions that embed equity in our organisations and wider culture.

If you want to dig deeper with your data, our research team is here to help you uncover and understand the insights you need. From Talent Hub locations and ad hoc research to benchmarking, we’ve got your back.