ONS

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

January 3, 2025 By Nigel

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

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

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

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.

Ethnicity #2 – How many categories are there?

September 13, 2021 By Nigel

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.

Pay Gaps #22 – My 7 + 5 recommendations for amending UK pay gap legislation

June 30, 2021 By Nigel

When gender pay gap reporting was introduced by the government for the 2017 snapshot date for all employers with a headcount of 250 or more, it was made clear they would evaluate how the legislation had worked after 5 years. We are now in the 5th year of pay gap reporting and I would like to submit to the government 7 recommendations to improve the way employers’ data is reported and 5 recommendations to improve the data used in the calculations and to reduce various distortions.

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

April 19, 2021 By Nigel

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?

COVID19 Cases #1 – Latest Data and Trends for England

September 27, 2020 By Nigel

Last updated on 27th September 2020 but downloadable spreadsheet in section 3a was updated on 19th October 2020. I will update the post when I get the time!

The latest data for COVID19 (Coronavirus) cases in England as of Saturday 26th September 2020 shows the number of people testing positive for COVID19 is up 60% from a week ago but this masks extreme regional disparities that make the national trend meaningless. The North is in the grip of a second wave unlike the South which is not. Unless recent trends in the North abate, the scenario of 50k positive tests per day by the end of October recently postulated by the Chief Scientific Officer remains feasible.

Pay Gap Case Study #4 – What is the gender pay gap at Novartis UK?

September 15, 2020 By Nigel

Welcome to my next case study where I look at the 2019 pay gap figures of Novartis UK. They caught my eye when they posted on LinkedIn the following statement.

“… our 2019 gender pay report which highlights that on average, women earn more than men across all of our UK sites and divisions…“

When I looked at the two legal entities that were required to report gender pay gaps, I saw that both reported pay gaps favouring men instead. Something odd is going here and it’s a perfect case study to show why anyone who analyses pay gaps needs to pay more attention to a Bletchley Park codebreaker from world war 2 who introduced the world to Simpson’s Paradox.

COVID19 Deaths #2 – Are Public Health England’s Figures Misleading?

July 25, 2020 By Nigel

During the first wave of the COVID19 epidemic, the daily number of deaths published by Public Health England (PHE) has been the main headline in the news. On 17th July, Matt Hancock, Secretary of State for Health, called for a review of this time series after a blog published by Yoon Loke & Carl Heneghan of Oxford University questioned whether definition used by this time series was appropriate. I myself had noticed a change in the PHEr time series in my tracker of COVID19 deaths in England but I hadn’t understood why this might have been the case. After looking at the data again in more detail, I have concluded that this time series is overestimating the number of deaths by 42 +/- 13 per day since the 23rd May and it needs to be revised otherwise it will create confusion should a second wave come.