In two weeks, the deadline for companies reporting on the gender pay gap closes.
Big names such as the BBC and Channel 4 have already reported their figures, but there are still far more to come, with around 9,000 companies and public bodies obligated to comply with the Government’s request.
Employers will have to publish their mean and median gender pay gap figures, as well as information on bonuses.
Here’s everything you need to know about the statistics.
What is the gender pay gap?
It is the difference between the average salaries of men and women in a given company or public body. It isn’t the same as equal pay, where firms are required to pay men and women doing the same job the same salary.
A company may pay men and women in the same role the same wage but still have a gender pay gap, for example if most of their senior positions are filled by men who earn more.
What is the difference between mean and median?
To work out the mean, the hourly wage of each male employee is added together, and then divided by the number of male workers. The same is done for each female employee, and the numbers compared.
For the median, the hourly wage of each male employee is put in order, lowest to highest, and the middle value is taken. The same is done for each female worker, and the numbers compared.
Which is better?
The median is helpful because it discounts outliers – if the male chief executive of a company earns a lot more than the average worker, it will distort the mean figure and drag it up, but not affect the median so much.
A mean gender pay gap that is higher than the median may mean there are more senior male figures in a company.
What does the gender pay gap percentage actually mean?
The percentage difference shows how much lower the average female pay is than the male pay.
For example, if the average male earned £50 compared with £40 for a female, there would be a gender pay gap of 20%, because 40 is 20% lower than 50.
What else do employers have to publish?
Companies have also been told to submit how many men and women are in each quartile of their payroll, so the gender split among senior and junior roles can be seen.
They have also been asked to publish the mean and median gender gap between bonuses, and the proportion of men and women who received bonuses.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here