{"id":2058,"date":"2019-11-08T20:01:14","date_gmt":"2019-11-08T20:01:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/marriott-stats.com\/nigels-blog\/?p=2058"},"modified":"2026-01-31T13:44:44","modified_gmt":"2026-01-31T13:44:44","slug":"pay-gap-12-conflating-equal-pay-with-gender-pay-gap","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marriott-stats.com\/nigels-blog\/pay-gap-12-conflating-equal-pay-with-gender-pay-gap\/","title":{"rendered":"Pay Gaps #12 – Unequal Pay & Gender Pay Gaps are not the same thing!"},"content":{"rendered":"

The 14th November 2019 is being incorrectly marked as Equal Pay Day in the UK by the Fawcett Society<\/a>.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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

If you care about issues to do with Equal Pay, then please support the #MeTooPay campaign instead<\/a>.\u00a0 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<\/a> taking place next year, cases of unequal pay should not be happening in this day and age.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Updated on 22nd November to add a Hall of Shame to section 9 which will be updated regularly (unfortunately!)<\/em><\/p>\n

I had intended to write a short snappy note but a can of worms soon opened!\u00a0 My article is organised as a series of questions & answers as listed below.\u00a0 The first 3 questions provide a concise explanation on the difference between Unequal Pay and Gender Pay Gaps with the other questions providing more depth to my explanation.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. What is Equal & Unequal Pay?<\/strong><\/span><\/li>\n
  2. What is the Gender Pay Gap?<\/strong><\/span><\/li>\n
  3. Why are they not the same thing?<\/strong><\/span><\/li>\n
  4. How is it possible for the 2 figures to conflict like this?<\/strong><\/span><\/li>\n
  5. How do you eliminate a gender pay gap?<\/strong><\/span><\/li>\n
  6. In what way does the Fawcett Society conflate the two?<\/strong><\/span><\/li>\n
  7. Surely unequal pay must be a contributor to the gender pay gap?<\/strong><\/span><\/li>\n
  8. Sorry I need another explanation of the difference!<\/strong><\/span><\/li>\n
  9. Are others conflating the two like the Fawcett Society?<\/strong><\/span><\/li>\n
  10. What is the connection between Bletchley Park codebreakers and gender pay gaps?<\/strong><\/span><\/li>\n
  11. What is the Fawcett Society’s response to this article?<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

     <\/p>\n

    1. What is Equal & Unequal Pay?<\/strong><\/span><\/h4>\n

    The law states that if you and I are doing the same (or essentially similar) job, we cannot be paid differently due to our gender<\/span>.\u00a0 If one of us is paid less than the other either directly or indirectly due to our gender then an Equal Pay violation has occurred and the situation is called Unequal Pay.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

    The key to determining Equal Pay issues is that any comparison must be between actual people e.g. you and me or you and a group of people.\u00a0 For example, the BBC presenter Samira Ahmed used Jeremey Vine as her comparator in her claim of unequal pay against the BBC<\/a>.<\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n

    2. What is the Gender Pay Gap?<\/span><\/strong><\/h4>\n

    Since 2018, all employers with 250+ staff in the UK, must report the difference in hourly earnings between the median man and the median woman.\u00a0 This difference is known as the Gender Pay Gap<\/strong><\/span>.\u00a0 Whilst the median man & median woman will be two specific individuals they are extremely unlikely to be doing the same job.\u00a0 They are instead the chosen representatives of all men and all women working for the employer.\u00a0 If you don’t know what the median is, I explain it in the first point of my post “7 ways to misuse gender pay gap data”<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

    Employers are also required to report the difference between the average man and the average woman.\u00a0 In this case, the comparison is simply between two statistical artifacts and the average man and average woman need not exist in the employer.<\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n

    3. Why are they not the same thing?<\/span><\/strong><\/h4>\n

    I hope you can tell from the descriptions I’ve given that they cannot be the same unless all employees in the employer are doing exactly the same job e.g. everyone working for an airline is a pilot.\u00a0 This is extremely rare.<\/p>\n

    \"\"Rather than use words, I will use this graphic instead which shows the hourly earnings of each employee for an employer.\u00a0 This fictional employer has 20 employees, 10 men and 10 women.\u00a0 There are four roles with five employees in each role.\u00a0 The lowest paid role are Administrators, the highest paid are Managers, with Engineers and Analysts in between.<\/p>\n

    Within each role, the female employees earn 20% more per hour than the male employees<\/strong>.\u00a0 Unless the employer can justify this differential at an Employment Tribunal, this employer is breaking the law as specified in the 1970 Equal Pay Act and are discriminating against men.<\/p>\n

    With 10 men, the median man is the average of the 5th & 6th men if the 10 men stand in a line in order of their hourly earnings.\u00a0 As highlighted in the graphic, the median man earns \u00a330 per hour and is an Engineer<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

    With 10 women, the median woman is the average of the 5th & 6th women if the 10 women stand in a line in order of their hourly earnings.\u00a0 As highlighted in the graphic, the median woman earns \u00a324 per hour and is an Analyst<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

    Therefore, the official Median Gender Pay Gap is 20%<\/strong> i.e. the median woman (an Analyst earning \u00a324\/hr) earns 20% less than the median man (an Engineer earning \u00a330\/hr).\u00a0 I prefer to state that for every \u00a31 earned by the median man, the median woman earns \u00a30.80.<\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n

    4. How is it possible for the two figures to conflict like this?<\/strong><\/span><\/h4>\n

    The graphic shows an employer paying a woman 20% MORE than a man for doing the same job whilst at the same time paying the median woman 20% LESS than the median man<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

    The reason for the conflict is very simple.\u00a0 The majority of women (7 out of 10), who are being paid 20% more for doing the same job as men, work either as Administrators or Analysts earning \u00a312\/hr or \u00a324\/hr.\u00a0 The majority of men, who are being discriminated against based on their gender since the employer is breaking the Equal Pay Act, work either as Engineers or Managers earning \u00a330\/hr or \u00a340\/hr.<\/p>\n

    This tells you that what drives the gender pay gap is the gender ratio across the pay scales and job roles.\u00a0 Women make up 80% of the lowest paid role (Administrators) but only 20% of the highest paid roles (Managers).\u00a0 If there is a difference between the gender ratios then pay gaps can be expected to occur.\u00a0 I currently call this difference in gender ratios FIQG (Female Income Quarter Gap)<\/strong> <\/a>but I am considering renaming this as the Gender Ratio Differential <\/b>(GRD<\/strong>) instead.<\/p>\n

    Update March 2021 – I ended up changing the name to Gender Swap Number<\/a> <\/strong><\/span>instead!\u00a0 I am open to suggestions for better names.<\/em><\/p>\n

    Update September 2020 – A variant of the example I used here has happened in real life.\u00a0 See “What is the Gender Pay Gap at Novartis UK?<\/a>“<\/em><\/p>\n

    Update February 2026 – In this presentation about ethnicity pay gaps, I talk about Ethnicity Profile Disparity instead.\u00a0 The idea is to connect pay gaps with the law on indirect discrimination which uses the word disparities.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

    5. How do you eliminate a Gender Pay Gap?<\/strong><\/span><\/h4>\n

    The first step is to have the same gender ratio for every part of the pay scale.\u00a0 Given that this employer is 50:50 men:women, this means all of the 4 roles need to have 50:50 male:female splits.\u00a0 Note the requirement is only to have the same gender ratios, not 50:50 men:women.\u00a0 So the employer can also eliminate their pay gap by having 80:20 men:women in all roles, a situation that exists when the Gender Ratio Differential is zero.<\/p>\n

    The second step is to comply with the equal pay act and not discriminate directly or indirectly on gender.\u00a0 So whilst I like to say gender pay gaps and unequal pay are very different things, it is more correct to say that the issue of unequal pay is only a small subset of the larger issue of gender pay gaps<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

    Finding out what is the best way of achieving these goals is, to my mind, the underlying purpose of the gender pay gap reporting system.\u00a0 By publishing action plans as to their intentions, employers can then report progress over the next few years.\u00a0 That way, we will build up an evidence base of what works and what doesn’t.\u00a0 I have blogged before that this is a Continuous Improvement<\/strong> philosophy<\/a>, which is something that statisticians can offer considerable expertise in to employers.<\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n

    6. In what way does the Fawcett Society conflate the two?<\/span><\/strong><\/h4>\n

    If you follow this link<\/a>, you will see this quote from the Chief Executive, Sam Smethers, which is a response to the latest ONS figures showing the UK’s gender pay gap was 16% in 2018.<\/p>\n

    “Today’s data shows that this year’s Equal Pay Day , the day in the year when women effectively start to work for free,\u00a0falls on 14th November. Progress to close the gender pay gap is dismally slow and at this rate it will take 60 years to eradicate it.\u00a0 As we approach the 50th anniversary of the Equal Pay Act women have waited long enough.<\/em>“<\/p>\n

    As you can see, she starts and ends with references to Equal Pay and intersperses with two references to Gender Pay Gaps.\u00a0 This is wilful conflation of the two entirely separate concepts as I’ve explained in this post and must be stopped.<\/p>\n

    This is not the only mistake the Fawcett Society is making but this post would be far too long if I were to enumerate all the errors.\u00a0 I will simply list them and link to another post for explanations.<\/p>\n

      \n
    1. Incorrectly comparing ONS ASHE figures with the GPG Reporting figures<\/a>.<\/li>\n
    2. Calling for pay gap reporting by ethnicity but failing to call for a different system than that used for gender<\/a>.<\/li>\n
    3. Incorrectly calling for smaller employers to be included in GPG reporting<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

       <\/p>\n

      7. Surely Unequal Pay must be a contributor to the UK Gender Pay Gap?<\/strong><\/span><\/h4>\n

      As I stated earlier, unequal pay is a small subset of the much larger issue of gender pay gaps.\u00a0 The Fawcett Society itself lists many of the factors that can contribute to a gender gap in this briefing<\/a>.\u00a0 Note they say in that link, they know unequal pay exists but they provide no data at all on its extent.\u00a0 They merely refer to anecdotal data.<\/p>\n

      #MeTooPay<\/a> are going about this in the right way.\u00a0 They are calling for people to send them their stories.\u00a0 This could have the potential to generate a dataset that could be extrapolated into a national estimate of unequal pay (provided the extrapolation is done by a Statistician!).<\/p>\n

      But you don’t need any anecdotes to verify my statement that unequal pay can only be a small subset of GPG.\u00a0 Take a moment to answer these two questions:-<\/p>\n

        \n
      1. What % of women in work are being paid less than they should be i.e. if these women were replaced by men, what % of jobs would see the man being paid more?<\/span><\/li>\n
      2. Of those women being paid less than a man, how much on average are they being underpaid?<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

        This is just a thought experiment but start with your friends, family and colleagues as a data set to answer the question.\u00a0 For myself, I find it hard to believe that the answer is greater than 20% for both questions i.e. at most 20% of women are underpaid and they are being underpaid by up to 20% on average.<\/p>\n

        Let’s now do the maths.\u00a0 20% of 20% means that nationally, women are being paid 4% less than men.\u00a0 This is my estimate of the maximum extent of unequal pay issues.\u00a0 With a larger set of submitted data, as being collected by #MeTooPay, this estimate could be refined further.\u00a0 However, the ONS ASHE figure for the gender pay gap is 16% which shows that unequal pay can at most be contributing a quarter of this gap.\u00a0 Other factors must be more important.<\/p>\n

        Let’s turn it around.\u00a0 What would the answer to the two questions need to be to attribute the entire 16% to unequal pay?\u00a0 One answer is 50% of women are being underpaid by an average of 33%.\u00a0 That is pie in the sky.<\/p>\n

        <\/h4>\n

        8. Sorry, I need another explanation of the difference!<\/strong><\/span><\/h4>\n

        Supposed the ONS ASHE survey had reported a gender pay gap of zero.\u00a0 Would you celebrate this as a sign of success for the Equal Pay Act?\u00a0 Of course not, unequal pay can still occur and probably will still occur.<\/p>\n

        (See this blog post for more information about the ONS ASHE survey estimate of the UK gender pay gap<\/a><\/em><\/span>)<\/p>\n

        Alternatively, suppose a widespread series of equal pay audits was carried out in thousands of employers and none show an issue but the ONS still reports a gender pay gap of 20%.\u00a0 Would you celebrate the success of the Equal Pay Act?\u00a0 Of course you would, since no equal pay violations have been found.<\/p>\n

         <\/p>\n

        9. Are others conflating the two like the Fawcett Society?<\/span><\/strong><\/h4>\n

        Yes they are unfortunately.\u00a0 Just do a search for “Gender Pay Gap<\/em>” on any social media platform e.g. Google<\/a>, Twitter<\/a>, Facebook<\/a>, Quora<\/a>, etc and you will immediately find around a half of the search results will incorrectly conflate the two.\u00a0 Whilst giving evidence to the Treasury Select Committee in June 2019<\/a>, I noted that Kamala Harris, a candidate for the Democrats presidential nomination in 2020, and the UN’s Women’s organisation had so conflated.<\/p>\n

        On 22nd November 2020, I decided to add a Hall of Shame<\/strong> <\/span>for those who choose to conflate the two.\u00a0 The list may get long!<\/p>\n