Sadiq Khan this week said more needs to be done to get women into senior roles to address the pay gap between men and women in the capital. The Mayor of London’s comments came as he published the latest gender pay details in the Greater London Authority (GLA) Group.
The new data reveals there still is a significant gender pay gap at City Hall, Transport for London, the Metropolitan Police and the London Legacy Development Corporation.
The reason for the gender gap in the GLA Group is not due to women being paid less for doing the same job, but instead because there are not enough women in senior roles.
It is an issue Sadiq has made a top priority during his Mayoralty, which is why in November 2016 he published, for the very first time, gender pay data for all City Hall staff and the GLA’s functional bodies. Comparing today’s published data for 2017 to the previous year’s figures with the methodology used in 2016, it shows a barely noticeable narrowing of the gender pay gap drop at the GLA from 4.82 per cent to 4.81 per cent.
The government methodology for calculating this data, which was not available until last year, involves taking into account salary sacrifices such as childcare vouchers, together with cycle to work schemes and bonus payments, as well as the exclusion of employees on reduced pay, such as maternity or sabbatical leave. It provides a new pay gap figure for the GLA of 6.14 per cent that is not comparable with the data for 2016, but will instead be used against future pay gap data.
Since publishing gender pay gap data in 2016, City Hall has put in place a number of measures to promote training and promotional opportunities for women. These include ensuring all interview panels are gender balanced, while departments with fewer numbers of recruitment-trained women managers have been encouraged to take up training. The GLA is also offering access to external mentors for women at senior level.
