Sarah Henchoz – What price do you attach to equality?

It has been over 45 years since the Equal Pay Act was introduced giving women the right to be paid the same as their male colleagues, yet we know that true financial (as well as non-financial) equality in the workplace has yet to be achieved.

While gender pay reports (which, by the way, I’m strongly in favour of) have helped shine the spotlight on where there is disparity between the sexes, they do not give a true representation of whether women and men doing comparable work are paid equally.

Audits

In order to properly assess equal pay, firms need to carry out a full equal pay audit. This will initially require a deep dive of what roles within the organisation are comparable, and that means looking at not just the same jobs but ones which could be said to be sufficiently comparable to have equal value within the organisation.

We have seen this in the class actions brought against supermarkets where women working in stores have successfully compared their roles to those of male colleagues in distribution centres despite the differences in the role and the different locations at which they undertake their roles.

Reasons for differences

Once comparable roles have been identified firms need to look at what differences in pay exist and what the reasons are for those differences. If they are not gender-related (so, for example, they relate to levels of experience or qualifications, or have arisen due to an employee being hired on more beneficial terms as a result of a skills deficiency in the organisation) this will not give rise to equal pay issues.

However, discrimination may not be overt and so a thoroughly analysis of the reason for the difference and whether that is in any part caused by a woman suffering a gender-related disadvantage will be vital. 

Despite their limitations from an equal pay perspective, what gender pay reports do show is gender seniority gaps within organisations; in other words whether women are generally in the lower paid roles within the organisation.

This in turn is causing organisations to reassess how they make promotion and hiring decisions, how they ensure sufficient female talent in their pipelines, how they make senior roles more attractive and what their position is on flexibility in the workplace.

An equal platform

Combined with recent social media campaigns and the high profile public examples of women being subjected to workplace harassment this means that we really are in a new world when it comes to creating an equal platform in the workplace both from a financial and non-financial perspective.

Sensible organisations will use this opportunity to think about what culture they want to be known for, whether their existing culture and policies are still fit for purpose, whether Codes of Conduct and diversity training and awareness need to be improved, as well as how they will react in the event of a claim for gender-related discrimination whether related to pay or otherwise.

The time to act is now rather than when you are on the receiving end of a grievance or claim.

This article is written by Sarah Henchoz, partner at Allen & Overy