Women in finance in the U.K. still make significantly less than men. While the gender pay gap at financial firms in the country narrowed slightly last year, overall the industry continues to have the biggest disparity.
Men working in finance and insurance made 25% more than women last year, down from 28% in 2019, a Bloomberg News analysis of government data shows. The pay gap is especially wide in investment banking, where some of the highest-paid employees work.
It is the fourth straight year that finance has led the industry rankings, showing that executives are finding it difficult to shrink the gap. Mining and quarrying had the second-biggest pay gap at 23% as the commodity boom boosted the income of workers, who are largely male.
*Gap comparison only available where firms have filed under the same name both years.
Note: Reported data is a snapshot of March 31 for most public authority employers and of April 5 for private, voluntary and all other public employers. Companies with a pay gap greater than 95 percent are not represented on the chart.Companies with a pay gap greater than 70 percent are not represented on the chart. Companies are represented in the industry breakdown if they have provided an industry in their filings. FTSE100 company analysis is based on as-reported names and incomplete where companies have filed more than once or under a different name.
Companies with more than 250 employees in the U.K. have had to publicly report partial data on compensation received by their male and female workers since 2017. The rules have “no teeth” compared to other countries’ efforts, a recent report from King’s College found, because it doesn’t require employers to commit to addressing the problem.
Firms should publish “an action plan to show what they are doing to reduce the gap,” said Charles Cotton, senior adviser for performance and reward at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.
The data is a blunt snapshot of who held the highest-paying jobs around the end of March last year. The numbers don’t measure the pay of men and women doing the same job or adjust for experience or location. The Bloomberg calculations are based on a weighted average.
The gap in finance fell 1.6 percentage points to about 22% when using the weighted median, a metric that removes the impact from the highest-earning employees. Education has the highest pay gap based on that measure.
Companies had until the end of Tuesday to report their data. Those who fail to do so can be investigated and potentially face an unlimited fine. They are also “letting down the women who work for them and damaging their reputation,” Kishwer Falkner, chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, which oversees the reporting, said in a statement last week.
Of firms to report so far, men dominate the highest pay quartile in industries.
The government’s job-support programs may have skewed the numbers during the pandemic as some furloughed workers are not included in the calculations.
Last year’s data was due to be published in April but was delayed because of the pandemic. More than 9,600 companies have so far filed their data for 2020. That’s up from about 7,000 that reported 2019 data while mandatory filing was suspended as Covid spread. Last year’s level is down from about 10,800 that filed 2018 data.