Introduction
Welcome to the Men for Inclusion assessment of the UK gender pay gap for 2024.
Our review will look at:
- They key headlines
- The change in the median pay gap and when it will get closed
- The change in % of women in top quartile earning and when they will reach parity
- Differences by our special sector indices
- Where does this leaves us?
The key headlines
- The overall headline is…………….nothing much has changed.
- The rate of improvement has slowed (although it least it’s not worsening)
- The median pay gap will not close until 2168 (versus 2180 last year)
- Women will reach an average of 50% of upper quartile earnings in 2046 (from 2044 last year)
- Financial services remains well behind other sectors but are improving the pay gap at a faster rate
- The energy sector is closer to the average across all sectors for the pay gap, but remains well behind on % of women in upper quartile earnings.
The median pay gap
When we look at the median gender pay gap across all companies who have reported, we can see that for every £1 a man is paid, a women is still only paid 88.6 pence, an improvement of 0.1p from last year. Assuming the same rate of progress year on year, the pay gap will not be closed until 2125. This is a significant worsening from last year, which after closing the gap by 0.5p from 2022, closure looked possible by 2047.
If we benchmark this against the gap when reporting first started, the median pay gap will be closed in 2168 – 143 years from now, a slight improvement from the same calculation as last year, when it would have been 2180.
At least this year does see an improvement. In the first two years of reporting post the 2017 baseline, the figure actually got worse and did not go higher than the baseline until 2023.
As a reminder, this is not a measure of equal pay (or pay equity), it is typically a measure of whether women are evenly spread across the earning quartiles within a company, The percentage in top quartile earning roles is likely to have the biggest impact, although that can be offset if women are over-represented in bottom quartile earning roles.
Percentage of women in upper quartile earnings
The % of women in top quartile earnings across all companies has improved from 41.4% to 41.6%. Our estimate, based on the same year on year improvement is that women will reach 50% by 2072, significantly worsening from last year’s estimate of 2044.
Again, this is a slow-down on progress made in previous years, although progress is still is greater against the starting point than the median pay gap. Based on benchmarking progress from the 2017, women should, on average, reach 50% by 2046, a slight worsening of the same estimation approach from last year which indicated 2044.
In terms of a breakdown of when companies will achieve the 50% (and ignoring those who have only reported for the first time this year or have yet to report this year):
- 38% of companies are already at 50% or better (versus 37% last year)
- 23% will never achieve it (24%)
- 6% will achieve during this decade (7%)
- 8% in the 2030s (8%)
- 6% in the 2040s (6%)
- 4% in the 2050s (4%)
- 7% in the second half of this century (7%)
- 6% in the 22nd, 23rd or 24th centuries (6%)
- 1% beyond the the 24th century (1%)
- Ignoring the “never”, the latest date to achieve is currently sat at the year 24117
Special sector indices
Looking at specific sectors of interest, two parts of the Financial Services sector, Corporate/Investment Banks and Asset/Investment managers remain some way behind other industries on the median pay gap, although the rate of closure is faster.
The energy sector is much closer to the overall average, with the technology sector just a little bit behind. Again, the rate of closure is faster.
All of these sectors have much lower percentage of women in upper quartile earnings compared to the overall average. Closure for most of them looks slower than the average across other sectors apart from the corporate/investment banks.
Where does this leave us?
This is yet another indicator that progress towards more gender equal workplaces is slowing. This data covers 2024, so it would not have been influenced by the US government’s push back on equity related efforts.
For many of us who have observed corporate responses to gender pay gap reporting since it was launched, I don’t think any of this is coming as a surprise. There has always been a large number of organisations who have either paid complete lip-service to this or have tried to make all the right noises about “celebrating our women” without actually having any sort of plan to close the gap.
More importantly, women are frequently choosing to either leave sectors or to deliberately not pursue more senior roles, because the culture in their organisations are not conducive to supporting their aspirations (both within and beyond work). Many sectors that have made strides in attracting more women are finding that they are leaving far faster than their men.
At Men for Inclusion, we believe that the great unlock to solving this problem is by focusing on Inclusion. By helping everyone, men and women, become more inclusive leaders and colleagues. When we get the culture right, everyone thrives and greater levels of equity and meritocracy emerge. This needs to be a conscious and intentional set of actions, with a real plan behind them.
Only when companies take these deliberate steps (with proper deep-dives into the data), within an overall transformational change programme, will we really see sea-changes in these data points.
Take a look at our ADUCE programme to see how.