More countries require data on remuneration
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The United Kingdom is one of the first countries to require employers to report gender pay gaps.
It has been illegal in the U.K. to pay men and women differently for the same roles since the Equal Pay Act of 1970, which was incorporated into the Equality Act of 2010.
In 2017, the U.K. government introduced gender pay gap transparency regulations in compliance with the law to reveal differences in average earnings between men and women.
Under the rules, all private-sector employers, and some public-sector employers, with more than 250 employees in England,
Scotland and Wales are required to publish differences in average earnings between male and female employees. The rules do not apply to companies in Northern Ireland, which has some devolved powers and has yet to incorporate them into its employment law.
The regulations require companies to report:
• Median pay gap statistics
• Mean pay gap statistics
• The proportion of men and women in each quartile of the pay structure
• The gender pay gap for any bonuses paid
Employers do not face sanctions for gender pay gaps and are able to give a written response to outline the reasons behind any gap and steps being taken to address the gaps.
Australia introduced similar legislation in 2012. In January, employees of companies with 500 or more staff in Germany were given the right to access certain information about how much colleagues of the other gender are paid.
And after a mass protest in 2016, the government of Iceland vowed to close the country’s gender pay gap completely by 2022.
In the United States last year, the Trump administration abandoned an Obama administration proposal that companies report data on how much they paid workers of different genders, race and ethnicities, saying it would be too burdensome for employers.
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