Women in the UK earn, on average, 14.9 pence less per pound than men, based on the latest data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS). This means that while men are getting paid from January 1, women have effectively worked for free for the first 53 days of the year. That makes February 23 "women's pay day".
The ONS gender pay gap is calculated by dividing the median pay for women by the median for men. The resulting ratio tells us that women earn, on average, 85.1 pence to the male pound—or 14.9% less.
This covers employees doing all jobs. It's not the same as men and women getting paid differently for doing the same job, which is illegal.
But calculating the gender pay gap in different ways can highlight the different causes of the gap and which groups of women are more or less affected.
The median is the middle amount when all wages are listed from smallest to highest. This is different from the mean, which you find by adding everyone's wages together and dividing by the number of people.
The median is less distorted by top earners, who are mostly men. If a survey of 1,000 people included Elon Musk while everyone else earned minimum wage, this would probably give an "average" wage of hundreds of pounds an hour based on the mean. The median would be the minimum wage.
The ONS figure of 14.9% is based on hourly pay, so compares pay for a fixed one-hour amount of work. Comparing weekly or annual pay would give bigger gaps because they're directly affected by the...
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