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Companies with over 250 employees will be required to publish salary information. techUK urges government to understand the complex issues behind gender pay gap.

Recently, the Government announced that the UK's large employers will be asked to publish detailed information about gender pay imbalances in their workforce. 

Companies with over 250 employees will publish both their mean and median gender pay gaps for salaries and bonuses, as well as information on the number of men and women in each salary quartile in their business. The Government has stated that it will use this information to publish a league table, divided by sector, and rank the companies. Employers will not have to publish any information until April 2018, and the Government has set aside a fund to assist with the administrative costs associated.

techUK’s Women in Technology programme works on a number of issues that address gender equality in the tech sector. Amongst some of the wide-ranging activities within the programme, techUK facilitates workshops which increase the number of women on boards, runs the "Back to Work" programme with partners, and works with members to increase the number of girls in STEM. techUK will, with its members, continue to address equality in the tech sector through the pipeline.

Commenting on the announcement, Charlotte Holloway, Head of Policy at techUK said:

“Fair remuneration is rightly an important issue for the Government to look at. As the causes of the gender pay gap are deep-seated and complex, it’s important that efforts to understand and ameliorate the gender pay gap take into account the full picture of how companies operate in practise. There is a risk that, by focusing on mean and median wages, this could result in the unwarranted singling out of companies that are taking great strides to get more women into the industry, for example, through graduate programmes and more entry-level technical roles. We encourage the Government to listen closely to business to understand these issues. techUK is committed to getting more women into the sector from entry-level to Board-level, and we will continue to work with tech companies of all sizes toward that aim.”

Read the Government's announcement here.