The Guardian view on the gender pay gap: enough excuses; time for action | Editorial
With only a fortnight left before the deadline, not even a third of companies, charities and public bodies have met their legal requirement to publish figures on their gender pay gaps. There was plenty of notice that all with more than 250 employees would need to do so. The slow pace indicates the low priority afforded to such concerns and, perhaps, a hope that embarrassing figures will be buried in a late rush of filings. It seems probable that many organisations will not comply, and it is unclear whether and how they will be punished. They should be.
The figures are not perfect. The refusal of law firms to include the earnings of (mostly male) partners, for example, produces technically accurate but misleading results. Nonetheless, the data published so far is powerful. Few if any women will be surprised that male colleagues outearn them per hour. But cold statistics have real force when they show disparities as stark as these: men at the UK wing of Goldman Sachs International earn more than twice the mean hourly pay of women. The impact is potentially reminiscent of #MeToo, if so far more muted. Such figures demonstrate to each woman that the problem is not an isolated case, but structural. They are not alone. Now they can prove it.
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