The issue of pay equality continues to feature heavily in the media as more companies publish details of their gender pay gaps in line with the new reporting requirements.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has recently contributed to the debate by publishing an in-depth analysis of the current gender pay gap in the UK. Its article presents:
- an overview of ONS headline measures for the gender pay gap,
- analysis using regression modelling to explore some of the factors that affect men’s and women’s pay, and
- experimental analysis that breaks down the gender pay gap by the factors that influence men’s and women’s pay.
The ONS found that the gender pay gap for full-time workers is entirely in favour of men for all occupations. However, occupational crowding has an effect since those with the smallest gender pay gap also have almost equal employment shares between men and women. When looking at age groups, the gap for full-time workers remains small at younger ages. However, from 40 onwards the gap widens, reaching its peak between ages 50 to 59 for full-time workers.
When it modelled the factors that influence pay, the results showed that both men’s and women’s pay grow for most of their lives. Overall, women’s pay grows less than men’s and also stops growing earlier than men’s pay. This applies to both the private and public sectors; however, the returns to pay are slightly lower in the latter.
The ONS concluded that several factors affect men’s and women’s pay and thus the gender pay gap. From the factors included in its analysis, occupation was found to have the largest impact.
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Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.