pay gap trends

Pay Gap Trends #9 – Employer Gender Pay Gaps in 2025 – The Numbers

April 8, 2026 By Nigel Marriott

The deadline for employers to submit their 2025 gender pay gap data has now passed. So what do the numbers tell us about what happened in 2025? How have these changed since 2024 and 2017 when employer gender pay gap reporting (GPGR) became mandatory? Read on to find out the answers and why I have concerns about the government’s plans to make it mandatory for employer to publish action plans to reduce their gender pay gaps.

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 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 Trends #5 – Has pay gap reporting narrowed the gender pay gap?

May 13, 2022 By Nigel Marriott

Disinterested employers were 20% less likely than engaged employers to have narrowed their UK gender pay gap between 2017 & 2021 . I draw this conclusion from a statistical model using ~6,000 employers which removed the effect of confounders such as size, sector, furlough, gender ratio, etc. Once accounted for, I found 61% of those reporting their pay gap for 2019 had narrowed their pay gap by 2021 compared to 55% of those not reporting 2019 data.

Pay Gap Trends #2 – My analysis of 7 sectors for Practical Law magazine

June 3, 2020 By Nigel Marriott

In April, I was asked to analyse the trends in UK gender pay gaps over the 3 years of mandatory reporting from 2017 to 2019 for Practical Law. They were interested in 7 customised sectors and the links to these can be found in this post.