Closing the Gender Gap: How HR Can Help

The fight for women’s equality in the workplace can often be an issue that slips under the radar because a lot of people think that it’s over. 

Whilst it’s clear that in the last century alone society has made great strides towards improving equality between men and women, there is still a huge array of work to do when it comes to building a society that treats men and women equally and equitable.

The hard fact of the matter is that we are still living with the hangover of old views that fundamentally discriminated against women. No where is this more obvious than in what women are paid when compared to their male counterparts. Changing their unconscious effect on the workplace isn’t something that can happen over night.

In this article, we’ll explore how HR can play a leading role in closing the gender pay gap and provide some hints on the best strategies to use to make pay disparity a thing of the past.

What is the Gender Gap?

The gender gap – also called the gender pay gap – is essentially the difference between the average median hourly earnings of men and women, as Brigid Francis-Devine defines it in a recent report for the House of Commons Library. The gender pay gap predominantly affects women.

That report, titled the ‘Gender pay gap’ and published in early 2024 by the House of Commons Library, outlines the extent of the challenge facing organisations in the UK when it comes to addressing the gender pay imbalance. It found that:

• The gender pay gap for median hourly pay full-time employees in the UK was 7.7% less for women than for men in April 2023 (ie. women were paid 7.7% less than men, on average)
• The gender pay gap for median hourly pay part-time employees was 3.3% higher for women (ie. women were paid 3.3% more than men, on average)
• For all employees in terms of median hourly pay, the gender pay was 14.3% less for women than for men in April 2023. (ie. women earn 14.3% less than men, on average)

The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development has a fantastic set of resources related to the gender pay gap and what HR needs to know about it. If you’re unsure about where to start when it comes to researching the issue, start here. You’re likely to learn a lot.

What causes a gender pay gap?

Whilst there are many complex causes of the gender pay gap, it can be argued that the underlying cause for why women experience a disparity in pay compared to men is the fact that the effect of old-fashioned societal views about work and gender, stretching back decades and hundreds of years, is still with us.

That’s not to say that our views on gender as a society haven’t evolved. They clearly have. Unfortunately, though, social, economic and political values can have a lasting impact on society – even many years into the future. We’re still dealing with those effects even now.

Thankfully, in the last few decades, organisations – and governments – have started to pay much closer attention to the lingering gender pay gap in the economy. They are finally taking steps to deal with the harmful legacy of outdated opinions on gender and sex.

As the CIPD summarises, some of the main causes of the gender pay gap include things like:

• Unpaid caring responsibilities: Women are more likely to be unpaid carers, eg. childcare
• Pay discrimination: Historically, companies paid men more than women for doing the same role
• Working part-time rather than full-time: Caring responsibilities and family commitments mean that women are more likely to work part-time rather than full-time
• Women’s work being undervalued: Traditionally, the work of women was seen as less important than the work of men.
• Gendered work roles: Again, traditionally, some roles were thought of as being intrinsically ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’, and segregated according to gender.

Whilst society’s views may have progressed, the effects of old-fashioned attitudes that discriminated against women from the previous centuries are still embedded in the economy and in the workplace. As a result, it will take a lot of time and hard work for us to reshape our institutions and make the world of work a lot more equal.

Benefits of closing the gender pay gap

There are a number of reasons why closing the gender pay gap is in everyone’s interests.

The first is the most obvious reason – it’s morally the right thing to do. In a society that prides itself on being tolerant and in which all people are seen as inherently equal to each other, the fact that women are still paid less than men for roles is a glaring indication of our collective intentions not matching up with our reality.

In other words, in order to become the society that we think we should be, we need to fundamentally change our attitudes and ways of doing things. This means eliminating the gender pay gap once and for all.

As the CIPD outlines in detail, closing the gender pay gap could also help:

• Improve gender equality
• Improve employee retention and acquisition
• Reduce pensioner poverty
• Increase economic growth
• Enhance your organisation’s reputation

So, what steps can you take as a HR professional to make a meaningful contribution towards ending pay disparity? Here are some ideas.

How can HR address the gender gap?

1.   Ensure that your company is reporting your gender pay gap

As the CIPD outlines, as of 2017, any organisation – public, private and third-sector– which employs more than 250 employees needs to report their gender pay gap annually. You’ll need to do this based on a specific ‘snapshot date’ that corresponds to your type of organisation. This snapshot date is used to calculate a number of things, from defining the deadline that you’ll need to report        within and clarifying who is defined as an employee for the purposes of reporting, through to helping to determine the hourly pay of your employees that you’ll use in the report.

The snapshot date is different for different types of organisations:

• Public sector organisations: 31st March
• All other organisations: 5th April

It’s important to make sure that your organisation is complying with these reporting rules. If an organisation fails to submit a gender pay gap report without a good reason, it’s considered a breach of the law – the Equality Act 2010. Not complying with the law could land your organisation in trouble with the Equality and Human Rights Commission, with a range of potential penalties.

2.   ..and ensure that you’re reporting it accurately

If a job is worth doing, it’s worth doing well, as the old saying goes. That’s particularly apt when it comes to gender pay gap reporting where the quality of the data that you collect can have a direct impact on the effectiveness of any interventions you make.

The purpose of a report like this is to provide up to date information on the specific situation in your organisation. Accurate gender gap reporting will help you identify what the state of the gender pay gap is in your organisation and how you might go about tackling it. More accurate information and data will help you to come up with more effective solutions. Basically, the better the data you have, the more informed your decisions will be.

3.   Understand the vocabulary

Reporting your gender pay gap can sometimes feel like you’ve woken up into the middle of an Advanced Economics lecture in a university that you don’t attend. There’s lots of jargon and a number of complicated concepts to try and get your head around – and your skillset is in HR, not theoretical economics.

The CIPD is once again an invaluable resource to consult when you’re trying to understand the terms that go along with gender pay gap reporting. Their factsheet lays out all of the information that you need to know. To summarise and simplify this:

• Median: The midpoint of a range of figures. To calculate the median of an even set of values, arrange them in numerical order and find the middle value of the range by dividing the number of total values by two. If you have an odd number of values, you can find the median by calculating the mean of the two middle values.
• Mean: The average figure. You can calculate the mean by adding up all of the values in a set of data and dividing this by the total number of values.
• Median gender pay gap: The difference between the median hourly pay of male and female employees.
• Mean gender pay gap: The difference between the mean hourly pay of male and female employees.
• Median bonus gap: The difference between the median bonus that’s given to male and female employees.
• Mean bonus gap: The difference between the mean bonus that’s given to male and female employees.
• Quartile pay bands: The proportions of male and female employees in lower, lower middle, upper middle and upper quartile pay bands.
• Bonus proportions: The proportions of male and female employees who received a bonus during the reporting period.

If you can get your head around some of the more technical terms used in pay disparity reporting, you’ll find that the overall process is a lot less daunting to complete.

4.   Report your gender pay gap – even if you don’t have more than 250 employees

It can be a good idea to try and report your gender pay gap even if you don’t have more than 250 employees – especially if you’re in an organisation that’s growing rapidly, or that expects to grow in the next few years.

Creating a gender pay gap report is probably one of the most accurate ways to assess the challenge in your own workplace. A gender gap report can help you to identify particular problem areas that can be addressed and help you to create potential solutions. Ultimately, if your organisation wants to meaningful tackle gender pay disparity, creating a dedicated gap report – along the same lines as the one that organisations over 250 employees are required to create – is probably one of the most useful ways to tackle the problem systematically.

There’s also another practical reason why you might want to report your gender pay gap, even if your organisation isn’t technically required to do so – practice.

Doing this can help to give you and other members of the HR team experience of gender gap reporting that can make the process of submitting the real thing a lot easier when you need to do so. Practice makes perfect, after all.

5.   Create the optional narrative and action plan

Alongside creating the actual report, the Government recommends that organisations create an optional accompanying narrative statement to provide context and identify plans for how you intend to address gender pay disparity. This statement should explore things like:

• An explanation of the overall nature of gender pay gaps in your organisation
• What these gender pay gaps are are
• Measures you are taking to address them

Whilst it might seem like a lot of potential work for something that doesn’t technically even need to be done, creating the accompanying narrative and action plan can be one of the most transformative actions you take in the process of researching the gender pay disparity in your organisation.

The fight for equality at work isn’t over

It’s one thing to have a report that outlines the problem. It’s another to have a strategy for how you intend to solve that problem. We hope this article has given you some ideas and tips about how to play your part in solving the gender pay gap in your own HR practice and developing your own strategy to address the problem.

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