Humiliation for Harriet Harman as statisticians dismiss her claims on equal pay



Harriet Harman has been left red faced by statisticians

Harriet Harman was yesterday slapped down by national statisticians over her claims that women are paid a fifth less than men.

The Women and Equality Minister was told she must no longer use a single figure to describe the complex differences in the earnings of men and women.

Instead she will have to give three measures - among them one which shows that far from earning less than men, women in part-time jobs are actually paid more on average than their male counterparts.

The ruling from the Office for National Statistics is the culmination of a running row between Labour's deputy leader and Whitehall watchdogs, who called her use of figures on the gender pay gap 'misleading'.

It will also affect the workings of Miss Harman's Equality Bill, as until now the minister has insisted that public sector bodies - which will have to say whether their pay scales are unfair to women - should use her way of working out the pay gap.

A report from the ONS called Presenting Gender Pay Statistics said no one measure of the pay gap was adequate or appropriate for Government bodies to use. Instead, it said three different figures should be counted.

One is Miss Harman's favourite measure. This lumps in all workers, both full-time and part-time, and gives a pay gap of 22.5 per cent.

How they compare

But this fails to take into account that because more women choose to work part-time than men, the average pay for women is artificially driven down.



In the past the ONS has favoured a figure that counts just full-time employees. This shows men earning 12.8 per cent more than women.

From now on, yesterday's report said, both figures must be used, together with a third setting out the gap between male and female parttime workers, which is 3.5 per cent in women's favour.

During the summer, watchdog Sir Michael Scholar, head of the UK Statistics Authority, wrote twice to Miss Harman's department warning of misleading use of gender gap data.

He told the Equalities Minister in the spring that her interpretation of state earnings surveys could 'confuse the general public' and 'undermine public trust in official statistics'.

Yesterday the ONS report pointed out that because 41 per cent of women in employment work parttime, compared with only 11 per cent of men, Miss Harman's preferred method skews the figures to make women look worse off.

Miss Harman's officials welcomed the acceptance by the ONS of the 22.5 per cent figure as one of the measures which will be used in future.

The Government's equality watchdog, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, said the ONS report was 'important' but insisted it should also have compared the pay of full-time men with part-time women - which gives a 39.9 per cent pay gap in men's favour.