The gender pay gap among managers has narrowed slightly in Britain, but women are still effectively working free nearly two hours a day.
The pay gap between men and women of all ages and in all professional roles stands at £8,524, with men earning an average of £39,136 compared with £30,612 for their female counterparts. Last year the pay gap stood at £9,069, according to the Chartered Management Institute and XpertHR, a salaries specialist.
This is the equivalent of women managers working free for 57 days a year, and the situation deteriorates further as men and women climb the career ladder. For senior or director-level staff, the pay gap rises to £14,943, with men earning an average of £138,699 compared with the average for women of £123,756.
The pay gap is widest for employees of organisations with between 250 and 999 staff, with women earning on average 27 per cent less working for such employers, making them 5 per cent worse off than even the national average.
Female managers are also missing out across all levels when it comes to bonuses, according to the annual survey of more than 72,000 managers in the UK, with the average man’s bonus of £4,898 nearly doubling that of the average woman’s bonus of £2,531.
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Mark Crail, of XpertHR, said: “An entire generation has now worked its way through from school- leaver to retirement since the first equal pay legislation came into effect in 1970.”
The survey also found that the pay gap widens as women grow older. Women aged 26 to 35 are paid 6 per cent less than their male colleagues, rising to 20 per cent for women aged 36 to 45. This increases to 35 per cent for women aged 46 to 60, and to 38 per cent for women in their 60s. Not only are older women earning less, but there are also fewer of them in executive positions, according to the survey.
Even though women make up 67 per cent of the workforce in entry-level roles, female representation drops to 43 per cent at the level of senior management. Only 29 per cent of director-level posts are held by women.
Frances O’Grady, TUC general secretary, said: “The UK will never really address the problem of unequal pay until there are systems in place to expose and tackle the huge gap between what men and women doing similar jobs in the same workplaces are paid.”
She said that while the government’s move to require companies to publish pay gap information was positive, it did not go far enough. She called for pay transparency and equal pay audits, as well as a requirement on companies to act on the data to close the gap.