Blog
New Gender Pay Gap Remains Stubbornly High
Close the Gap has calculated the difference in pay between women and men working in Scotland using the latest Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE) tables released from the Office of National Statistics this morning.
2016 has shown the stubborn nature of the pay gap with the overall mean figure remaining just below 15% with a slight increase of 0.1% on the 2015 figure, now sitting at 14.9%.
Similarly women working full-time now earn 10.7% less than men working full-time, also an increase of 0.1 percentage points.
2016 did however see a decrease of 1.3 percentage points on the part-time figure to 32.2%, when comparing women’s part-time average earnings to men’s full-time average earnings. This could be partly due to the impact of the introduction of the living wage by a number of Scotland’s public sector employers. Women are more likely to work within the public sector and be concentrated in part-time work in undervalued, low-paid jobs such as cleaning, admin, caring which would benefit most from the introduction of the living wage.
|
Sector |
Overall pay gap % |
Full-time pay gap % |
Part-time pay gap % |
|
Public |
12.1% |
7.3% |
26.8% |
|
Private |
23.6% |
19.6% |
40.6% |
|
Third sector |
15.6% |
11.9% |
38.6% |
Source ONS (2016) Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings Table 25.6A (Accessed OCT 2016.)
The public sector overall, full-time and part-time pay gaps are lower than the national averages, whilst the private sector pay gap is considerably higher for each group. The Public sector pay gap also decreased by 0.9% which may have contributed to the overall reduction in the part-time pay gap. For the first time the new ASHE release has allowed for pay gap’s in the third sector to be calculated. The figures for this sector were all higher than the national averages for Scotland.
Despite there being little change in the Scottish pay gap for 2016 the new figures for Scotland continue to remain lower than the UK overall figure of 17.3% and for the full-time (13.9%) and part-time pay gaps (32.7%).
|
|
Scotland |
UK |
|
Overall pay gap % |
14.9% |
17.3% |
|
Full-time pay gap % |
10.7% |
13.9% |
|
Part-time pay gap % |
32.2% |
32.7% |
Source ONS (2016) Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings Table 3.6A (Accessed OCT 2016.)
The gender pay gap: at a glance
- The mean average overall gender pay gap is 14.9%.
- Women
working full-time earn 10.7% less than men working
full-time.
- Women
working part-time earn 32.2% less than men working
full-time, showing that part-time work continues to be characterised by
low pay.
- The mean is
calculated by adding all employees’ hourly rates of pay together and
dividing by the total number of employees. This includes those on the
highest and lowest rates of pay. As those with the highest rates of pay
tend to be men, and those who receive the lowest pay are more likely to be
women, the mean captures a more complete picture of the gender pay gap.
- The median is
calculated by finding the midpoint in all employees’ hourly rates of pay
and discarding the lowest and highest rates of pay. The median is not
skewed by very low hourly rates or pay or very high hourly rates of pay,
but this method can obscure gendered pay differences
While we're developing our updated annual paper on gender
pay gap statistics, if you want to know about the key indicator of women's
labour market equality, you can find out more from our 2015
paper.
Comments: 0 (Add)
RSSRelated publications
Close the Gap Working Paper 17: Gender Pay Gap Statistics
This paper is an updated version of Working Paper 16: Statistics published in 2016.
