Asked by
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of
the persistence of the gender pay gap, and what steps they are
taking to close it.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Foreign, Commonwealth
and Development Office and Department for Work and Pensions
() (Con)
I assure the noble Lord that we are continually looking at and
assessing the gender pay gap. The national gender pay gap has
fallen significantly under this Government and by approximately
one-quarter in the last decade. The gap is caused by a range of
factors, and reporting regulations have helped to motivate
employers and focus attention on how improving equality can
happen in the workplace. However, to continue making progress we
need to understand in even more detail the real barriers that
women face in the workplace and then take action to ensure that
everyone has the opportunity to fulfil their potential.
(Lab)
My Lords, the gender pay gap continues to blight the lives of
many women, denying them access to good food, housing, education,
healthcare, pensions and economic freedoms. I ask the Minister to
commit to two things: first, not to award public contracts to
organisations that have failed to eradicate the gap and,
secondly, to give women a statutory right to know the pay of male
colleagues doing equivalent work, with appropriate
confidentiality.
(Con)
As ever, the noble Lord is very incisive and focused on the
things he wants to change. I note the two points that he makes.
While I cannot commit to doing them, I will go back to the ranch,
tell them that the noble Lord, , is on the prowl again, and see
what they say.
(Con)
My Lords, I take this opportunity to wish the Minister a very
happy birthday.
Noble Lords
Hear, hear!
(Con)
Guidance from the Government Equalities Office states that
employers reporting on the gender pay gap should record their
employees’ gender identity, not their biological sex. Some argue
that for the vast majority of people, gender identity matches
birth sex and that recording employees’ gender identity would
therefore have no significant impact on an organisation’s gender
pay gap. However, in male-dominated professions such as
telecommunications, where fewer than 5% of the workers are
female, even a small number of misclassifications can have a
significant distorting effect on the data. Does my noble friend
agree that this is the case? Will she now review the GEO guidance
so that it makes it clear that employers must record employees’
birth sex, not their gender identity?
(Con)
Let me be very honest and straight with my noble friend: the
Government have no plans to change the guidance. Gender pay is
not supposed to be a data-collecting exercise, and to make it so
would increase the burden on employers.
(CB)
My Lords, the world of work is changing. One of the effects of
the pandemic has been more working from home, which I think will
continue. There is a real danger that the gender pay gap, rather
than being diminished, will actually increase because we will
have more people working from home with caring responsibilities,
and this will disproportionately affect lone parents and women.
What will the Government do, not just to reduce the gap but to
prevent it widening?
(Con)
The gender pay gap is something that the Government take very
seriously. The point that the noble Baroness makes about flexible
working and working from home, and the impact that those have on
women in particular, is well noted. Flexible working is
wide-ranging and includes part time and flexitime, and it can be
crucial for opening up opportunities, particularly for women. I
cannot give a categorical answer about what we will do other than
to say that we are mindful of this in everything we do in the
Government Equalities Office. It may be that I come back to the
noble Baroness with a bit more detail.
(Lab)
My Lords, my supplementary question handily spans both parts of
the Minister’s multitasking portfolio—an opportunity too good to
miss, and a sort of birthday present. Will the Minister
acknowledge that one of the biggest consequences of the gender
pay gap is the gender pensions gap? Can she therefore outline
what steps the Government are taking to address that specific
dimension of the problem? When will action be taken to address
the acknowledged shortcomings in the benefits that accrued from
automatic enrolment for the many women on low pay in broken
employment?
(Con)
I thank the noble Lord for that wonderful birthday present. Let
me just say that auto-enrolment has been a fantastic success, and
we want that to continue. On the point he raises about net pay
and the pensions gap, the Government are absolutely going to
rectify the anomaly. We published a call for evidence. The
Government will pay a top-up to low earners, making contributions
to pensions schemes using a net pay arrangement, from 2024-25
onwards.
(LD)
My Lords, I wonder if the Minister has heard of the book The End
of Bias: How We Change Our Minds, by Jessica Nordell, on the
incremental, cumulative effect of unconscious bias. Her model
found that only a 3% unconscious bias in performative evaluation
resulted in 87% of men in the top jobs. It is a shocker, but it
explains a lot. If the Minister has not seen it, could she have a
look and consider its implications for government policy?
(Con)
I wish I had known about this before, because somebody could have
bought it for me for my birthday. I will go out and find that
book, and I will read it. As for changing bias and the
distortions in salaries between men and women, no one needs to
push our door on that—we are there. As the good man Sir Winston
said, those people who can change their mind can change
anything.
(Lab)
I join other noble Lords in wishing the noble Baroness a happy
birthday. Research by the Fawcett Society found that three out of
five women who had been asked about salary history believed it
damaged their confidence in negotiating better pay and believed a
low past salary was coming back to haunt them. Does the Minister
recognise that, when companies ask about salary history, it can
mean that past pay discrimination follows women, people of colour
and people with disabilities throughout their working life? Does
she share my concern that this issue means new employers
replicate pay gaps from other organisations? Could the Government
consider this matter and allow it to be part of the influencing
of their policy?
(Con)
I completely agree with the noble Baroness. You can sit in front
of an employer and tell them what your salary is, and then they
think they can get away with paying you just a little bit more.
That is not on. I share the noble Baroness’s concerns, and I will
feed those back into the policy-making process.
(Con)
I declare my interest as in the register, and I echo the birthday
wishes to my noble friend. Following on from the question from
the noble Lord, Lord Davies, I am delighted that Her Majesty’s
Treasury will introduce measures to top up the pensions of those
women who are receiving lower net pay each week due to the
pension choice of their employer. The gender pensions gap is an
urgent issue; it is twice the size or more of the pay gap. What
measures are the Government taking to ensure employers help to
close the gender pensions gap?
(Con)
My noble friend has been a long-term campaigner on the gender
pensions gap and the net pay issue, and I am glad that we have
some good news on the horizon. It was a Conservative Government
who introduced mandatory gender pay gap reporting, in 2017, which
means that all large employers—those of more than 10,000
employees—have to calculate it publicly. This has placed the
gender pay gap at the top of the agenda and prompted
conversations with business. Employers are now focused on
understanding and tackling the causes of the gaps in their own
organisations.
(Lab)
Does the Minister agree—and I ask her to be bold in this
instance—that complete transparency of income is the best way of
dealing with the gender pay gap and discrimination on the grounds
of race and disability? Surely the only answer is that we should
have all incomes in the public domain through the tax system;
that way we would know who is earning what and where
discrimination takes place, and we would also see who is on the
fiddle.
(Con)
You cannot argue with that. On transparency, I am absolutely with
the noble Lord, but the issue of publishing everything on tax and
salary is well beyond my pay grade. I will talk to my friends in
the Treasury.
