Median

Pay Gap Case Study #8 – 33 London Councils – We Are One

November 18, 2025 By Nigel Marriott

I am breaking a golden rule of pay gap reporting in this article, I am benchmarking the 33 London Borough Councils on their gender pay gap data!

Before you gasp in horror, let me say straightaway the outcome of this article is complete vindication of this golden rule. Benchmarking of employer pay gap data is statistically worthless. Pay gap data of all kinds is inherently multivariate and cannot be reduced to one number league tables. The story I will tell of the 33 councils of London in 2024 proves this point in spades. In effect, none of the councils have a gender pay gap despite all of them publishing data to the contrary.

Pay Gap Trends #8A – Is a Smaller Pay Gap Good News?

January 3, 2025 By Nigel Marriott

The gender pay gap in the UK continues to narrow in 2024. The good news is the pay gap is narrowing at a faster rate since 2017 when Gender Pay Gap Reporting (GPGR) for employers become mandatory. The bad news is women are not progressing up the pay scale and are working longer hours, men today are worse off than their fathers were 20 years ago and the smaller pay gap is simply the by-product of wage compression induced by above inflation rises in the minimum wage. This is a sobering picture which tells me on balance, a smaller pay gap is not good news.

This article is part A of a 2-part blog. Part B will be published at a later date.

Pay Gaps #31 – When is Equal Pay Day in 2024?

November 23, 2024 By Nigel Marriott

When is #EqualPayDay in the UK in 2024?

No-one knows is the correct answer. That’s because there are no national measurements of the extent of unequal pay in the UK e.g. a woman being paid less than a man for the doing the same job.

If you see anyone talking about “Equal Pay Day“, they are in fact talking about #GenderPayGapDay, the day on which the typical women “starts working for free” when compared with the typical man irrespective of what job they are doing. Of course, as everyone knows, gender pay gaps do not measure the extent of unequal pay in any shape or form.

For 2024, the ONS (Office of National Statistics) has published 30 different gender pay gap statistics. This means we could have 30 different gender pay gap days so how do we decide which one to use?

Pay Gap Trends #7 – UK Ethnicity Pay Gap 2012 to 2022

January 3, 2024 By Nigel Marriott

In November 2023, the Office of National Statistics (ONS) resumed publishing estimates of the UK Ethnicity Pay Gap after a 3 year hiatus for the Covid19 pandemic. I have organised this data into a user-friendly (hopefully!) Microsoft Excel spreadsheet which allows you to see how the median hourly pay has changed between 2012 & 2022 for a variety of ethnicities & other categories. This article explains how you can use this spreadsheet and why you must look at ethnicity pay gap data in a different way than you would for gender pay gap data.

Pay Gap Trends #6 – Are we there yet?

May 10, 2023 By Nigel Marriott

Has 6 years of mandatory gender pay gap reporting (GPGR) made a dent in the UK’s gender pay gap? According to a recent BBC article, not one bit at all. Unfortunately, too many people on social media have been taken in by this misleading article and I will be submitting a formal complaint to the BBC soon to get it amended. I rebutted this at the time with this LinkedIn post and I will now expand on that here to show what the true trend is and whether or not mandatory pay gap reporting has had an impact.

Pay Gap Case Study #7 – Does the Department for Work & Pensions have a Gender Pay Gap?

March 5, 2023 By Nigel Marriott

The Department for Work & Pensions (DWP) says for every £1 paid to the median man in March 2022, the median woman was also paid £1. In other words, their 2022 median gender pay gap using hourly pay was 0%. However, their Gender Swap Number per 1,000 employees for this date was +26 which immediately raises the question “Have the DWP made an error in their calculations like Cleveland Police did in 2017?” This was my first reaction which seems remarkable for an employer with 91,006 full pay relevant employees on a public sector pay scale and the largest pool of statisticians of any government department.

Pay Gaps #21 – No employer has a gender & ethnicity pay gap! Let’s celebrate!

April 19, 2021 By Nigel Marriott

It’s April 2029 and the government is trumpeting the fact that no employer in the UK has a gender pay gap or ethnicity pay gap. All employers say that their median woman’s hourly pay is the same as the median man’s hourly pay and their median white employee’s hourly pay is the same as their median non-white employee’s hourly pay. Would you be joining in the celebrations?

Pay Gaps #17 – How to Spot an Incorrect Median Gender Pay Gap

August 11, 2020 By Nigel Marriott

I have a spotted an incorrect median gender pay gap published by a well known name in a certain industry. They shall remain nameless for now since I am trying to get them to accept their error and publish a new gender pay gap report on their website. I know they have made an error because their published data violates the laws of mathematics as I will explain in this blog. All it takes to spot such an error is a simple calculation you can do in your head and an understanding what the median measures.

Pay Gap Case Study #3- Will the BBC’s gender pay gap narrow after losing to Samira Ahmed?

February 13, 2020 By Nigel Marriott

The BBC presenter Samira Ahmed has won her claim for equal pay at the employment tribunal. She successfully claimed that Jeremy Vine was an appropriate comparator for her pay. She is not the only female presenter to make a claim with over 50 more claims under consideration at present. Assuming that these are all successful, will these have any effect on the BBC’s gender pay gap for 2019 of 7p in the pound?

Pay Gaps #12 – Unequal Pay & Gender Pay Gaps are not the same thing!

November 8, 2019 By Nigel Marriott

The 14th November 2019 is being incorrectly marked as Equal Pay Day in the UK by the Fawcett Society. By having a campaign name that conflates equal pay issues with the gender pay gap, the Fawcett Society runs the risk of misleading men and women in the UK in their understanding of what these two concepts mean.

If you care about statistics being used correctly then please lobby the Fawcett Society to rename this as Gender Pay Gap day instead.

If you care about issues to do with Equal Pay, then please support the #MeTooPay campaign instead. This is a new campaign, led by Dame Moya Greene, who are explicit about the distinction and are saying, quite rightly, that with the 50th anniversary of the Equal Pay Act taking place next year, cases of unequal pay should not be happening in this day and age.