Gender pay gap report: March 2017 data

In 2017 the Equality Act 2010 (Gender Pay Gap Information) regulations came into force. This legislation requires public bodies with 250 or more employees to report on their gender pay gap by 31 March 2018. This is the first year where legislation requires the publication of such data, however the GLA was an early adopter and originally published an initial gender pay gap report in July 2016 and supplemented this with a more comprehensive and granular gender pay gap report in October 2016.

As a result of the GLA being a leader, and publishing its 2016 gender pay gap data in advance of the formal regulations being agreed, and the different calculation and reporting methodology used, the 2016 and 2017 reports are not directly comparable. These differences arise because the calculation and reporting methodology used for the 2017 report is fully in keeping with the regulations. In 2016 the GLA

• included all staff including women that were on maternity leave/other staff on reduced pay
• did not adjust salaries to take account of salary sacrifices for cycle to work or childcare vouchers,
• did not include additional payments such as out of hours allowances or on call allowances and,
• did not include details of any ‘bonus’ e.g. recognition payments

The current regulations require the above adjustments that were not made in 2016. For the purposes of this report all calculations are in accordance with the Government Guidance.

The GLA particularly welcomes the requirement for organisations to publish their gender pay gap information and to then develop action plans to address inequality in gender pay. The GLA is publishing alongside its 2017 gender pay gap report, its own action plan which sets out a programme of activity for the organisation to work towards addressing the gender pay gap.

The GLA is a single status organisation and does not have different staff groups. Salaries at the GLA are determined through a job evaluation scheme (Hay). Job evaluation evaluates the job and not the post holder. It makes no reference to gender or any other personal characteristics of existing or potential job holders. Therefore, we are confident that the GLA is paying the same salary to roles of equal value.

In line with the regulations the GLA is publishing their overall mean and median gender pay gaps. As a public sector body, the snapshot date for the data collection was 31 March 2017.

The data below represents the gender pay gap data for the Greater London Authority as at the end of March 2017. The data where appropriate has been broken down by both full-time and part-time staff. As at 31 March 2017 there were 816 employees in the GLA of which 797 are counted for gender pay gap reporting purposes. This represents 98% of staff. Of the 797 staff included in the data below 54% are women and 46% are men.

Table 1: overall gender pay gap, all staff (full and part-time)

Table 2: data by full time and part time

The quartile data has been calculated in accordance with the methodology as set out in the regulations by “dividing the workforce into four equal sized groups and separating them according to the hourly pay rate, starting from lowest paid to the highest paid.” The Government adopted this approach in preference to calculating quartiles by dividing the overall pay distribution into four equal proportions. Splitting the data in equal groups by salary range could result in very small groups e.g. an entire quartile based on only the very highest earners’ salary and in some cases that could be a single person.

Table 3: quartile mean hourly pay

The 2017 population is 199 (90 women and 109 men) with the upper quartile pay gap being 8.55%. Based on the numbers of staff at this level and the low turnover rate, addressing gender pay gap at the senior level is a long-term aim.

Table 4: quartile median hourly pay

For senior staff (upper quartile) the median pay gap in 2017 is 4.8%.