One year since legislation came into effect requiring all big companies to publish data on their genderpay gap, and a report by Easymoney, the investment platform launched by Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou,the founder of Easyjet, has found that 79% of the 860,000 people earning more than £100,000 a year are men.
“This has fallen only marginally since 2011, when 83% of the top earners were men,” says The Times,calculating that “at the present rate of progress equality between top earners will not be achieved for36 years”.News that the overall number of high-earning women grew by 75% over the past five years, nearlydouble the rate at which the number of high-earning men grew, led Easymoney chief executiveAndrew de Candole, to say: “There is still a long way to go — even though there are cracks, the glassceiling is very much still there. The trends are in the right direction but progress is very slow.”According to the Office for National Statistics, the average pay gap between men and women in theUK is 9.1% for full-time workers, although financial services lag far behind other sectors, with a meanpay gap of 26.8%.Of all the sectors examined by paygap.com, health and social work had the most consistently lowpay gap, with a median of 2%, and a mean of 5.1%.
“This is likely due to the higher portion of that workforce being women, and as a result, a largernumber progressing to senior roles in health and social work organisations” says Consultancy UK.By contrast last year it emerged that many of the biggest names in the City pay their female staff lessthan half that earned by men, with male top-end earners at Barclays receiving bonuses on average79% higher than those paid to women.
“Despite claims that gender diversity within the financial landscape in particular is fast on the rise,The Financial Times’ latest research reveals that this is not the case” says Hephzi Pemberton,Founder of Equality Group.Men still outnumber women three to one within the sector, and women still only hold 27.2% of themost senior jobs, a mere 0.4% increase from the previous year.“With this trivial improvement, it is hugely ineffective to state that the industry is positive about itsability to close this void when no substantial driving force for change has been implemented,” saysPemberton.