Gender pay gap: survey says 57 years before reporting is accurate

The Chartered Management Institute have released the results of a survey of the gender pay gap among managers.

It looks as if the £10,000 gap reported is the difference between the means, which doesn't make it particularly useful. While it's both unsurprising and wrong that top-level male managers in big companies make several hundred thousand more on average than their female counterparts (and there are significantly more men than women at this level), most women (and indeed almost as many men) are never going to get anywhere near that sort of job anyway. At the junior management level, there was an average £1,000 annual gap between men and women, which is still fairly substantial.

The study has been reported (or at least, the press release reprinted) quite widely, and all of the major news organisations I've found (Telegraph, Guardian, BBC, and Daily Mail) have generally failed to do any sort of useful journalism:

• They all report the raw figures from the press release (I've rounded them off above because the extra precision is meaningless)
• They all report the '57 year' figure as if a constant rate averaging means anything at all. It makes sense to note it because the fact that the year-on-year improvement is tiny compared with the size of the gap is important - but it should be made clearer that it's an illustration of the slow rate of progress, not a prediction.
• A lot of the headlines and sub-headings talk about this being the pay gap as a whole. The article text makes clear it's only talking about managers ... and none of them mention that the pay gap in general, when they go on to look at the UK's generally large pay gap, is not just composed of pay differentials between equivalent jobs ("horizontal") but also due to women not being employed in the higher paid jobs as much ("vertical"), and doesn't just include managers. There are a lot of class issues and intersections with other discriminations being ignored here.
• Other than the Daily Mail¹, none of them note that part-time salaries were converted to a full-time equivalent. The Daily Mail forgets to note that since women are far more likely to work part-time than men, then the conversion may well hide further problems.
• It's not clear what proportion of the gap is "women being paid less than men for the same job" (which the reporting is assuming and focusing on) and which is "women not being in the high paid jobs" (which seems more likely to be causing most of the gap). The distinction is very important - the Telegraph mentions that the Equality Act will outlaw "pay secrecy" clauses in contracts from October, which will certainly help with the first cause but not with the second - and not actually mentioned. The Guardian mentions Sweden's better record on pay gaps, but it's worth noting that Sweden enforces gender quotas on senior management boards of large companies, so the "vertical" gap is at least slightly reduced there.
• Some of the articles have reprinted the press release's figures of the number of employees (around 43,000) and organisations (around 200) that were surveyed, but none of them mention whether there was any attempt to get a representative sample within the organisations (i.e. do the proportions of male and female managers surveyed at each level represent the proportions within those organisations).

As is typical, the survey raises far more questions than it answers, and the journalists don't ask any of them.

¹ And what have we come to when the - narrowly - best reporting of an equality issue is carried out by the Mail?

The variability of the gender pay gap, and intersections

The Fawcett Society provides a breakdown by local government area of the gender pay gap. (It doesn't say in that document, but I assume it measures the difference in full-time mean annual pay)

It varies more than I'd expect, from East Renfrewshire, where women are paid 32.6% more than men on average, to West Somerset, where men's mean wage is 52.7% more than women's. The regional pay gap varies between 9.5% in Northern Ireland, to 25.4% in London (both in favour of men, of course). There are very few local government areas where women earn more, and it's usually by a small single-figure or even sub-percentage amount. There are far more where the pay gap is in the high twenties in favour of men.

County Durham, at 15.5%, has become a unitary authority, and so the variation within it will soon be hidden - from 2.8% in favour of women in Teesdale, to 26.8% in favour of men in Chester-le-Street, the variation reflects that across the country.

It's hard to tell exactly how many of these differences from the general trend are just statistical effects - the document doesn't give the error bars, but the sampling error for a district council will be much larger than the sampling error for a region. Nevertheless, the variation between regions is still large, and probably larger than statistical error would imply.

Part of the regional difference may be that the really high-paying jobs: senior managers at big corporations, bankers, lawyers, etc. are mainly available in the South East and London (both for where the jobs are and where people doing those jobs live: I'm not sure which this document measures), and mostly held by men. There seems to be a general trend that the pay gap is higher in the richer parts of the country.

The substantial differences at least show that the pay gap is not inevitable, but it's possible that the skewing effect of the highest paid jobs means that imbalances in the lower-paid jobs could be hidden. Quixotess looks at this for a different set of equal pay data that explicitly focuses on the payment to organisation heads (in this case, of US Jewish organisations).

While the headline figure for the mean pay gap may be interesting for showing that there's a problem, the breakdowns of the data might be more useful - how many men and women are in particular pay bands. Comparing only the full-time pay gap also hides class differences.