Only five employers in the UK have complied with the new legislative requirement to publish details of their gender pay gap, in a slow start to the policy designed to tackle inequalities in the workforce.
The new rules apply to about 9,000 eligible employers but only a handful have published details so far.
According to the government website, the companies who have complied so far include an umbrella company in Colchester, a window-blind manufacturer in Cheshire, a cleaning company in Prescot, the official land and property company Registers of Scotland and the Donaldson Trust, a charity for differently-abled children and young people.
The new rules require all private and public sector organisations with more than 250 employees to publish annual figures for both their mean and median gender pay gaps for salaries and bonuses. They must also publish the number of men and women in each salary quartile.
Employers have until April 2018 to publish the data but the government hoped for more compliance just after the legislation came into place on April 6.
Some companies have published details of their gender pay gaps in their annual reports.
There may also be some reputational reasons why companies have been so slow off the mark, with some businesses unwilling to face the backlash that may occur with the release of the data from both employees and the public.
Furthermore, some companies have expressed ‘technical issues’ as a reason for being behind with publishing the data, claiming they have not had enough time to calculate the data.
Rebecca joined the HRreview editorial team in January 2016. After graduating from the University of Sheffield Hallam in 2013 with a BA in English Literature, Rebecca has spent five years working in print and online journalism in Manchester and London. In the past she has been part of the editorial teams at Sleeper and Dezeen and has founded her own arts collective.
