



More than 60% of councils and nine out of 10 NHS trusts have a gender pay gap. That’s the stark finding, based on submissions from 196 town halls and 74 English NHS trusts. This year, for the first time, all organisations in Great Britain with more than 250 employees will have to publish gender pay gap data. By the end of this week, all public sector bodies in England should have submitted their gender pay gap data (Scotland and Wales already publish their figures), while the deadline for private and voluntary organisations is 4 April. The Government Equalities Office says it will use the results to “better understand the causes of the gender pay gap and to target our efforts effectively as we continue work towards eliminating it”.

Yet, despite warnings this week from the Equality and Human Rights Commission that any organisation failing to report its figures would be breaching the law and could face enforcement action, as of 26 March, around half of all upper tier and district councils and two-thirds of NHS trusts had yet to submit their data.

Currently, the national median hourly gender pay gap for full-time and part-time workers in the UK economy is 18.4%, according to Office for National Statistics figures. In the NHS and local government, the picture is mixed, even accounting for inaccurate reporting. Despite having longstanding pay scales and an overwhelmingly female workforce, sometimes at senior levels, many councils and NHS trusts have above-average pay gaps. Of the 196 councils that have reported so far, 19 have median hourly gender pay gaps of more than the national average, while in the NHS, six trusts have median gender pay gaps in excess of the national average. Four NHS trusts and 15 councils have median pay gaps above 20%.

In local government, Tonbridge and Malling borough council has the largest gap (33.6%), followed by Breckland district council, with a gap of 31.3%. At Dartford council, it is 27.9%. In the NHS, Doncaster and Bassetlaw teaching hospitals NHS foundation trust posted a gender pay gap of 26.5%. The Royal Orthopaedic hospital in Birmingham has a gap of 25.9 %, while it is 22.7% at Burton hospitals NHS foundation trust.

Doncaster royal infirmary. Doncaster and Bassetlaw teaching hospitals NHS foundation trust posted a gender pay gap of 26.5%. Photograph: Alamy

While most have gaps that favour men, some have pay gaps that favour women. At Liverpool community health NHS trust, women’s median pay is 17.3% higher than men’s, while at Bradford district care foundation trust and Sussex community NHS foundation trust it is 4.6% and 3.8% higher for women, respectively. Among the 56 councils with pay gaps favouring women, the largest gaps were at Three Rivers district council (42%) and Pendle borough council (36%), while four councils had gaps in excess of 20%.

John Appleby, the director of research and chief economist at the Nuffield Trust thinktank, welcomes gender pay gap reporting but warns that the headline figures don’t tell the full story. “All of these are just percentages, “ says Appleby. “It’s very basic data. It would be nice to see the actual pay. A lot is going on within one organisation and really all we’ve got is two numbers. There is a whole host of factors buried behind those numbers. Some of it will be warranted and some of it will be a bit fuzzy, and maybe it’s not to do with discrimination directly, but to do with the way society is organised, or the relationships between men and women and the way we treat women who have children. And maybe we don’t make it as easy as possible to get back into work at the level they left at – or even higher. Then there may be some more overt discrimination, because employers can get away with it. So how do we identify those different things?”

We accept that across the NHS workforce there is more we can do.

Modality Partnership, which runs GP surgeries across 35 different locations, has the dubious honour of topping the list so far with a median hourly rate gender pay gap of 63.1%. On its website, the GP “super-partnership” reported that 89% of its 353 staff, which includes doctors, nurses and healthcare professionals, as well as receptionists and administrators, were women. Vincent Sai, a non-clinical partner at Modality,says the company has an equal pay policy and offers equal opportunities for progression through development and training for all its staff. He says more of its GPs are male, not out of choice, but due to a general shortage of GPs. “The numbers are what they are because of what we have as a workforce,” he says. should always look for opportunities to improve.”

But the discrepancy does not necessarily mean there is an equal pay issue. The median is the figure that falls in the middle of a range when the wages of all the staff in an organisation are lined up from smallest to largest. The median gap is the difference between the employee in the middle of the range of male wages and the middle employee in the range of female wages. Equal pay gaps arise where men and women doing the same job or work of equal value are paid differently.

Scarlet Harris, women’s equality officer at the TUC: ‘One of the main causes of the pay gap for women is a lack of flexible working.’ Photograph: Suki Dhanda/The Observer

The main causes of these pay gaps are simple pay discrimination, a disproportionate number of men in the highest paid jobs, and/or the lack of high-quality part-time work and flexible working, says Scarlet Harris, women’s equality officer at the TUC. A 2016 TUC report found that women who work part-time earn 32% less than women working full-time “I was at a meeting [where a woman] said she came back from maternity leave, requested to work flexibly and was told she could only do that if she took a job that was two grades below the job she was previously doing,” says Harris. “That was in the public sector, and she took a pay cut. Another was told that the only way she could work flexibly would be to take a job at a different hospital that was two hours away. It’s a huge issue because it’s not about women leaving the workplace altogether, but how it affects their progression and their ability to maintain the level they were at in terms of their careers.”

The extent of pay gaps in the NHS and local government is surprising, given the existence of longstanding pay structures and pay scales, but Nicola Lee, a national officer at the Royal College of Nursing, thinks the problem in the NHS lies not in equal pay issues, but “inequality of opportunity” in terms of pay progression. “Why is it that senior posts still don’t represent the wider demographics of the workforce?”, she asks. Lee says there are institutional barriers preventing flexible working and the lack of part-time jobs in more highly paid positions. “At more senior levels, it’s historically been frowned upon to job share, or do compressed hours.”

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However, some town halls and NHS bodies seem to be faring much better. Thirty councils and four NHS trusts had pay gaps of 2% or less, in either direction, while 15 town halls and three trusts did not have a pay gap. Christina McAnea, assistant general secretary of Unison, the country’s largest public sector union, says the “worst breaches of unequal pay have been largely ironed out in health and local government”, but there is an issue around how certain job types are remunerated. “People will go to a nursery and drop their child off, and then go to a tube station and the person checking tickets will be earning substantially more than the person working in the nursery looking after their prized possession,” McAnea says. “And that’s not individuals, that’s a fact because we as a society don’t place the same value on things like childcare or cooking or cleaning, or things that are traditionally seen as women’s jobs, so the pay is at the bottom of the pile.”

Claire Kober, chair of the Local Government Association’s resources board, says that more progress has been made in town halls than in many other sectors – addressing gender pay disparities through fundamental reviews of pay and grading structures, and promoting equality in all staffing decisions – but adds that there is no room for complacency. “Gender pay reporting will ensure the talents of men and women are recognised equally and fairly in all workplaces, including in local government, and help to ensure that councils draw talent from both sexes across different levels of income and seniority,” says Kober.

Danny Mortimer, the chief executive of NHS Employers, acknowledges more can be done around flexible working. He says: “We accept that across our workforce – not just for senior colleagues but for every part of our workforce – there is more we can do.” There is already a commitment to achieve a 50-50 gender balance at NHS board level by 2020, he says, and a network has been set up to identify some of the barriers to progression for women leaders. With salaries for senior medics seen as a key driver of discrepancies in the NHS, the Department of Health and Social Care is about to review the gender pay gap in medicine. For now, the pay deal announced last week for the bulk of NHS staff except doctors and very senior managers – up to 29% for the lowest paid – should help reduce the gender pay gap, by lifting pay and narrowing pay bands.

But, as these figures show, even pay bands aren’t a panacea and what’s needed is a culture shift.