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Pay Gaps #25A – House of Common’s debate on Ethnicity Pay Gaps – My thoughts

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The UK Parliament debated Ethnicity Pay Gap Reporting (EPGR) on 20th September 2021 in Westminster Hall.  Seven MPs spoke in the hour long debate and, as debates go, I thought it was actually quite good.  There was cross party consensus on the merits of EPGR but I saw a divide between those who recognise EPGR is complex and requires trade offs and those who think the complexities of EPGR can be solved with government guidance.

 

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Pay Gaps #24 – Briefing Note for Parliament’s debate on Ethnicity Pay Gaps

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The UK Parliament is about to debate whether or not ethnicity pay gap reporting (EPGR) by UK employers should be made mandatory.  The debate will start at 4.30pm on Monday 20th September 2021 and is a result of an e-petition reaching the threshold to require a parliamentary debate.  To assist MPs, journalists, campaigners and anyone else interested in this debate, I have written a briefing note which lists 9 key points that need to be addressed during the debate.

Update 20th September – The Parliament TV link is here and my live-tweet thread is here.

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Ethnicity #2 – How many categories are there?

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When I submitted my evidence to the Commission on Racial and Ethnic Disparities (CRED) in November 2020, I recommended that ethnicity pay gap reporting (EPGR) using the Big 5 ethnicities of White, Asian, Black, Mixed & Other be made mandatory.   In the CRED report published in March 2021, recommendation 24 called for analysis of ethnicity to use the Office of National Statistics (ONS) 18+1 ethnicities as much as possible and it is my opinion this is one of the reasons why CRED stopped short of recommending mandatory EPGR in recommendation 9.  In June 2021, I published 7 + 5 recommendations for improving gender pay gap reporting (GPGR) and I made it clear that all 12 of my recommendations would also apply to any EPGR system introduced by the government. However, I stated my 2nd recommendation on number of categories to be reported needed more details before it could be applied to EPGR and this article will fill in those details whilst also recording my response to recommendations 9, 10, 23 & 24 of the CRED report.

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Pay Gap Trends #4 – Did the UK gender pay gap narrow in 2020?

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This article was last updated using data submitted as of 4th September 2021.

In February 2021, the EHRC confirmed that all employers with a headcount of 250 employees or more would have to submit their gender pay gaps based on the 2020 snapshot date.  Due to the lateness of this confirmation, they also stated that no enforcement action would be taken prior to the end of September 2021.  As result, fewer employers than expected have reported 2020 data so far so I have used two methods of imputation to estimate that the median gender pay gap among these employers narrowed by 0.2 to 0.3 pence in the pound in 2020.

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Pay Gaps #23A – How long will it take to close your pay gap?

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Five months ago, I introduced the gender swap number as a superior statistic to the median gender pay gap.  Feedback from clients and others since then has confirmed my hope they would find it more intuitive to use and interpret.  This encouraged me to call on Parliament to amend the UK gender pay gap legislation so that swap numbers could be published for employers with 250 or more employees.  I now want to build on this by showing a couple of simple calculations that can turn a swap number into an estimate of how long it will take an employer to close its pay gap.

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COVID19 Summary #1 – Is the UK an outlier internationally?

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The COVID19 pandemic is not yet over but with vaccinations starting to ramp up worldwide, an end may be in sight.  At that point, an in-depth comparison of countries is likely to take place.  To get ahead of that debate with the respect to the UK, I have been comparing the UK’s COVID19 statistics with a number of countries to see how much of an outlier the UK has been.

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