Significant measures announced to help bosses and staff tackle gender pay gap

27 November 2014 -

A government initiative for driving cultural change in the handling of female staffers’ careers is set for dramatic expansion. We take a look at what’s in store

In the wake of this year’s Equal Pay Day (4 November), minister for Women and Equalities Nicky Morgan launched Mending The Gap – the 3rd annual progress report of the government’s Think, Act, Report initiative.

The scheme encourages companies to collect, analyse and publish data on the recruitment, retention, progression and pay of female employees. Its aim is to help drive culture change, so that greater transparency around women in the workplace gradually becomes the norm – and to improve best-practice sharing, so that companies are able to effectively utilise, and fairly reward, their female staff.

Sign-ups to the initiative have doubled in the past year, with more than 260 companies covering around 2.5 million employees now on board. But the government recognises that there’s more it can do to make collecting and reporting gender equality information easier. As such, it has announced a significant package of new measures to help both employers and employees to tackle the gender pay gap.

These include:

1. Free pay-analysis software, to be made available to all companies to calculate their gender pay gaps

2. Revised and simplified guidance for employers on how to carry out pay analysis

3. Further measures for strengthening the existing Think, Act, Report initiative

4. Guidance to help women compare their pay to their male counterparts. The first part of this is available here

5. A £50,000 budget for further advice designed to enable female employees to hold their companies to account, if they think they are not being paid correctly

On top of that, a further £2 million has been made available to fund a training and mentoring programme of events for women – including those working part time and older workers – to be carried out by the UK Commission for Employment and Skills. It will target women working in the science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) arena, plus the retail, hospitality management and agricultural sectors.

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