The CIPD, the professional body for HR and people development, has carried out initial analysis on employers’ gender pay gap figures for 2020.  

It finds that: 

• The median gender pay gap was 12.8% or, alternatively, for every £1 the median male worker earned the median female worker earned 87 pence. 
• By contrast, in 2019 women received 86 pence while in 2018 they got 87 pence for every £1 a man earned.
• The number of employers reporting their pay data has varied: 10,833 organisations published their numbers for 2018, but just 6,150 did so for 2019 and 2,440 for 2020. The decline for 2019 and 2020 is probably attributable to enforcement action being suspended and delayed respectively.  

In response to the figures, Charles Cotton, senior reward and performance adviser at the CIPD, said:

"We are now into our fifth year of gender pay gap reporting and there has been markedly little change in the figures. This is to be expected, however, given improvements can’t be made overnight and some of the measures employers have taken to close their gender pay gap may well initially result in it widening. However, we are more concerned by the sharp drop in employers who have so far chosen not to report their figures this year. While this is not that surprising given enforcement action has been delayed by six months, it does raise questions about the commitment of some employers to tackling their gender pay gap.

"Reporting is an integral part of an organisation’s fairness strategy and without it employers lack a valuable tool to assess the fairness of how they recruit, manage, develop and reward their people. We would therefore urge those that have not yet filed their figures for 2020 to do so now, rather than waiting until October. With the pandemic disproportionately affecting women financially, it’s even more of an imperative for employers to ensure gender pay reporting returns to the top of their agenda."

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