New employer guidance has been published by the Government Equalities Office (‘GEO’). The guidance has been created with the aim of making gender pay gap reporting a simpler task with clearer instructions. It is also now easier to locate it all in one place on GOV.UK. While no factual changes have been made, duplicated information has been removed to streamline the guidance.

The guidance is now broken down into the following subheadings for user-ease:

1. Who needs to report;
2. When to report;
3. What to report;
4. Preparing data; and
5. Making you calculations.

These updates have been published ahead of the forthcoming reporting deadlines, which are 31 March 2023 for public-sector organisations with over 250 employees and 5 April 2023 for private companies with over 250 employees.  

To view the guidance, please click here.

The latest analysis from the Trades Union Congress (TUC) demonstrates that the current gender pay gap is 14.9%, resulting in women working an average of 54 days per year for free.

The TUC also observed that women working in finance and insurance experience a 31.2% pay gap – the equivalent of 114 days of unpaid work. and women in female-dominated fields (such as education and healthcare) receive (on average) less pay per hour than men. This is likely to be because they may be in part-time and/or less senior roles due to family responsibilities, as demonstrated by the TUC’s analysis that the pay gap widens once a woman gives birth.

Discussing the issue, the TUC General Secretary Paul Nowak said “Working women deserve equal pay. But at current rates of progress, it will take more than 20 years to close the gender pay gap”.