New analysis of more than 10,000 first-round gender pay gap reports by XpertHR has identified the gender pay gaps and the bonus gaps by industry and organisation size. XpertHR also investigated if the industries with the highest proportion of men in the top quartile were also those with the widest gender pay gaps.
Its analysis revealed that the mean gender pay gap across UK employers with 250 or more employees is 13.3% and the mean gender pay bonus gap is 20.1%.
The widest mean gender pay gaps were found in finance and insurance at 26.9%, followed by construction at 23.3% and then mining and quarrying at 20.6%.
At the other end of the spectrum, the sectors with the narrowest mean gender pay gaps were accommodation and food services (7%), water supply, sewage, waste management (7.4%) and human health and social work (7.7%).
The top three industries with the widest bonus pay gaps were finance and insurance with 54.6%, mining and quarrying (45.4%) and then construction (45.3%).
A number of sectors have bonus gaps of zero, reflecting the fact that bonuses are not a significant feature of reward for employees in these areas – including education, public administration and health and social care.
The data also highlighted there is no obvious link between an organisation’s size and the width of its gender pay gap. The largest gaps are in organisations with between 250 and 999 employees (mean 14.2%) but the gap is narrower in the very largest companies and the smallest.
XpertHR also investigated if there is a link between companies with a large representation of men in leadership roles and the size of their gender pay gap. Its findings were mixed.
The company mapped each industry’s gender pay gap against the percentage of men in the top pay quartile and established a line of best fit through the data points.
It showed that in the finance industry the gender pay gap is more than double, a figure which can be explained by the fact that there are more men at the top.
However, in the transport sector and in water supply, the gender pay gap is smaller than might have been expected given the preponderance of men at the top of the organisation, at 8.1% and 7.4% respectively.
Commenting on the findings, XpertHR content director Mark Crail said: “Our analysis reveals that the gender pay gap can’t be explained simply by there being an over representation of men in top positions in companies. Several other factors are clearly driving the gender pay gap. These include the unequal number of women in frontline jobs, and issues such as occupational segregation, with a disproportionate number of men in higher-paying occupations such as IT.”
“However, there is a clear pattern when it comes to the size of bonus pay gaps and the size of an organisation. The larger the organisation, the larger the gender bonus gap. Those organisations with more than 20,000 employees have a mean bonus pay gap of 35.3%, while those with between 250 and 499 employees have a mean bonus pay gap of 16%.”
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