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www.menzieslaw.co.uk
White Paper
The Gender Pay Gap: Why it’s time to know your risks
September 2016
www.menzieslaw.co.uk
0117 325 0526
@menzieslaw

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Contents
Equal pay bites in the private sector 4
Our approach 5
The Gender Pay Gap challenge 6
What exactly do we mean by ‘equal pay’? 9
Equal with who? 10
How far can you defend unequal pay? 12
Beware the evaporating defence! 14
Do you have gender ghettos? 16
The dangers of pay protection 18
Time limits and back pay 20
Just around the corner 21
The Gender Pay Gap Reporting Duty 22
Why you should act now 24
The key steps 26
Have an audit even if you think you don’t need one 28
Conclusion 30
Gender Pay Gap Audit & Advice Service 31
The Gender Pay Gap: Why it’s time to know your risks
September 2016
HR professionals need to become experts on the Gender Pay Gap, and fast. You need to understand the factors
causing the gap to persist, even after four decades of equal pay legislation. You need to understand the likely equal
pay risks in your organisation, how to spot them and how to mitigate them. And if your organisation has over 250
employees you need to calculate your own gender pay gap figures, prepare to publish them and decide how best to
reduce your organisation’s gap before the avalanche of claims begin.
In this White Paper, our Pay & Reward team provide the key information you need to understand the gender pay
gap, equal pay risks and how to start tackling them. We explain why there is no time to be wasted in carrying out
an equal pay audit, and why you should do so even if you don’t think you need one.

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Equal pay bites in the private sector
The Equal Pay Act was 46 years old in 2016.
Surely we aren’t still deliberately paying women
less than men for the same work? So why is it
the year’s big employment law news story?
Well, there are a few reasons. The last two decades
have seen mass claims against public sector employers,
in which legal principles have been developed to take
the right to equal pay much further than was envisaged
in the past. Now, many of the public sector actions are
running their course (with other public sector bodies
having got their houses in order) and claimant lawyers
are looking to target private sector employers who
have traditionally considered themselves relatively
safe from this type of action.
Other developments have meant that the sorts of
claims that might previously not have got off the
ground are now either easier or more financially
viable. This includes legal changes about limitation
periods for bringing claims, as well as a movement
(albeit a slow one) towards greater pay transparency.
With Employment Tribunal fees making individual
employment claims more expensive to bring, there is
a greater incentive than ever for lawyers to promote
group claims, where the costs can be spread between
a large number of individuals. Good news for the
individuals; not so good for the employer.
But the key reason why it is top of the agenda now
is that it is being driven by the Government. David
Cameron personally launched the introduction of
mandatory gender pay gap reporting and it was clear
that he personally feels
strongly about it;
and it already seems
clear that Theresa May
will continue to treat
it as a key priority
for Government
employment policy.
Our approach
In this White Paper we will:
• Define the gender pay gap challenge
• Explain the key aspects of equal pay that every HR professional and senior
executive needs to know
• Explain the gender pay gap reporting duty
• Describe how to identify your gender pay gap
• Explain why having a good pay structure or a job evaluation process is
not sufficient on its own.
...it already seems clear
that Theresa May will
continue to treat gender
pay gap reporting as a key
priority for Government
employment policy.

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The gender pay gap, as you might expect, is
what we call the difference between female and
maleaverageearnings,eitherwithinaparticular
employer or nationally.
In 2015 the national gender pay gap (based on median
average hourly earnings) for all employees was 19.2% .
That’s a broad, national picture. We can guess that
some of the gap is accounted for by women suffering
a ‘motherhood penalty’, with time out of work holding
back their career progression. Some of the gap may
reflect different career choices that men and women
tend to make (and the value that society – or their
employer – consequently places on those choices).
Some may reflect direct discrimination with individual
women being paid less because employers feel they
can get away with it.
Full-time/part-time
comparisons
An interesting thing happens when you look at the
differencebetweenfull-timeandpart-timework. When
part-time workers are excluded from the comparison,
the gap for full-time employees was down to 9.4%.
The reason for the large difference between the full-
time and part-time gender pay gaps is that the vast
majority of part-time workers are women, and most
part-timers get paid less per hour than full-timers. So
if you are both a woman and you work part-time, you
get penalised twice on pay.
Since equal pay is just as important for society whether
you work full or part-time, we tend to concentrate on
the combined figure of 19.% to describe our national
gender pay gap.
The Gender Pay Gap challenge
New push for equality
If we accept (as we surely must) that any significant
gender pay gap is a Bad Thing, then as a society we
should be moving towards reducing and eliminating it.
And we are – although at such an incremental rate that
present predictions suggest it could take up to 50 years.
All three main UK political parties have expressed an
intention to accelerate this process, and the result is
that the current Government has now legislated to
compel larger employers to report on the gender pay
balance (or imbalance) within their organisations.
These changes are intended to lead to greater pay
transparency and the underlying assumption is that
employers with large pay gaps will be pressured
(whether through negative internal or external
publicity or through litigation) to reduce them. The
proposed penalty for non-compliance with the new
publishing duty is a fine of up to £5,000, but the
risk of exposure to serious reputational damage and
potentially costly equal pay litigation means the stakes
are, in reality, far higher.
Risks
Having a gender pay gap is, itself, not unlawful. There
might well be many good reasons why the average pay
within your organisation (or within particular parts of
the organisation, or staffing grades) vary between men
and women. Unfortunately, equal pay law is fiendishly
complicated, and what you may see as a ‘good reason’
might not pass muster at court. Just consider the fact
that Birmingham City Council has reportedly had to sell
the NEC in order to fund what’s said to be a £1 billion
back-pay bill for its female workers, even though it has
operated complex pay structures and Job Evaluation
programmes for decades, which are of course intended
to avoid the creation of equal pay risks.
There are plenty of claimant lawyers out there who
make a living from putting together ‘class action’ equal
pay claims. Historically, they’ve targeted the public
sector, but, with many of those claims having run their
course, and the gender pay gap reporting obligations
set to provide a bonanza of information about which
private sector employers don’t have their house in
order, that looks set to change.
Furthermore, the more high profile your organisation,
the more damning a poor gender balance can look,
regardless of any illegality. Recently Oxford University
had to face tough questions over the fact that only 8%
of its top-earning academics are women, when 21%
of its professors are women. A trickle of stories like
that will become a deluge from April 2017 onwards,
as ‘household name’ employers begin to publish their
own gender pay gaps.
In summary, the risks arising from the existence of a
gender pay gap are:
• payment of compensation to remedy the gap in
the current year
• back-pay of up to 6 years to remedy any past
gender pay gap
• legal fees costs
• considerable demands upon management, HR and
Finance team time and effort
• ‘piggy back’ claims by other men and women able
to compare themselves with either the claimant or
the comparator
• external reputational harm to the employer
• internal harm to employee relations and industrial
relations
• harm to relationships with shareholders,
customers and other stakeholders
• negative impact on the employer’s attractiveness
in the recruitment market
• ‘naming and shaming’ by the Government of
those employers who fail to publish their gap, or
who have particularly poor gender pay gaps.
...most part-timers get paid
less per hour than full-timers.
So if you are both a woman
and you work part-time, you
get penalised twice on pay.

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Slightly oddly, the original Equal Pay Act
1970 and its current provisions in the Equality
Act 2010, apply only to male/female pay
differentials. It is gender equality, not the wider
idea of ‘equality’ as we now understand it. It
is of course also against the law (obviously!) to
pay a black worker less because she’s black, or
a disabled worker less because of his disability,
but that would have to be challenged as a
standard discrimination claim rather than an
equal pay claim.
The very specific, technical regime of equal pay law
looks at whether there is equality of pay and other
terms of employment between men and women doing
the same work or work of equal value. Thus it allows
a broad comparison between different roles of equal
value, being designed to enable women to challenge
the very deep-seated causes of gender-based pay
equality. For example, a female cleaner could allege
that she should be paid at the same rate as a male
handyman. A female therapist could allege that
should be paid at the same rate as a male chiropractor,
and so on.
When we say it’s a ‘very specific, technical regime’, we
mean it. The rules are complex.
The comparison exercise applies to all contractual
terms. Employers might think, well he negotiated
a higher salary, but she’s got a better car and a gym
membershipandweletherworkfromhomeonFridays,
so over all they both get more or less the same deal.
However, there’s no defence of ‘it all comes out in the
wash’, so in this example both the salary differential
and the benefit discrepancies could form the basis for
claims. Wages, bonuses, pensions, rewards, company
cars and other benefits all fall within the ambit of
equal pay law, and all can be compared individually.
Contractual versus
discretionary
There’s a further complexity when it comes to the
difference between contractual and non-contractual
(discretionary) pay and benefits. Equal pay law
technically only concerns itself with contractual terms
of employment, so discretionary pay and reward items,
such as a discretionary bonus scheme or M&S vouchers
for ‘Employee of the Month’, are not covered by equal
pay law. However, these things are still covered by
mainstream sex discrimination law, which is of course
also founded on the principal of complete equality
between the sexes. So, although in an Employment
Tribunal case a claim for (contractual) pay inequality
and a claim for inequality under a discretionary bonus
scheme would be treated in slightly different ways, the
usual risks – and outcome – are almost always still the
same for the employer.
What exactly do we mean by ‘equal pay’?
... so discretionary pay
and reward items, such as
discretionary bonus schemes
or M&S vouchers for
‘Employee of the Month’, are
not covered by equal pay law.
Now is the time to act
We await a deluge of gender pay gap reporting, media
interest, reputational harm, Employment Tribunal
claims and far higher employee awareness once the
data starts being reported from April 2017.
In the meantime, every HR professional needs to
become something of a gender pay gap and equal pay
expert. If your organisation employs over 250 people,
the reporting duty is upon you and the risks are clear. If
youworkforasmallerorganisation,youarestillgoingto
experience a raised awareness amongst your workforce
of equal pay issues. This isn’t going to go away.
We strongly suggest that now is the time for all
organisations to conduct an equal pay audit, identify
their gender pay gap and take steps to start reducing it.
It will take time and hard work, and a lot of senior
executives may not understand, or want to understand,
its importance or the risks that are present. It is the
responsibility of HR and employment law professionals to
provide leadership and education in this key area of risk.
Equal pay claims
Currently only an individual employee or worker who
is negatively affected by a gender pay gap personal to
him or her can bring a claim against the employer.
Such a claim will normally be brought in the
Employment Tribunals. However, if the Tribunals’
6-month limitation period were to be missed, the
claim could be brought in the civil courts instead, up
to 6 years after the last payment which is claimed to
have been unlawful.
The risks for an employer (of any size) associated with
an individual equal pay claim are:
• payment of compensation to remedy the gap in
the current year
• back-pay of up to 6 years to remedy any past
gender pay gap(s)
• reimbursement of the claimant’s Tribunal or
court fees
• a penalty of up to £5,000 issued by the Tribunal for
the employer’s failure to comply with legislation
• the employer’s legal fee costs
• the claimant’s own legal fees if the claim is brought
in the civil courts.
Currently the Government does not have its own
method of bringing any enforcement action against
an employer suspected or known to be operating any
gender pay gaps. However, the mandatory gender
pay gap reporting duty, which we shall look at later,
includes the duty to submit the business’s gender pay
gap statistics to the Government and a strong hint has
been given by the Equalities Minister that enforcement
powers are being considered as a next step. (A current
example of Government enforcement would be HMRC’s
power to enforce the National Minimum Wage.)
Before then, the Government has indicated that it
intends to publish league tables of employers and
their gender pay gaps, and carry out some ‘naming
and shaming’.

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An equal pay claimant has to show that she (or
he) and her (or his) has a comparator of the
opposite sex and they are doing ‘equal work’ but
she is getting paid at a lower rate for it.
‘Equal work’ comes in three flavours…
‘Like’ work
‘Like’ work essentially means that the claimant does
the same job as her comparator. Of course, with many
roles there are nuances – if you have a teacher who
also has a few management responsibilities, is that still
‘like work’ in comparison with the other teachers? It
usually comes down to questions such as what are you
managing? How much of your time does it take up?
Do you need extra qualifications or experience? Do
you use them?
These are the sort of questions that Employment
Tribunals dealing with equal pay claims might have to
hear evidence on. In reality, however, even the most
antediluvian employers now generally realise that
paying “pin money” to “the girls” is not acceptable
and so nowadays we tend not to see many claims for
unequal pay between people in exactly the same role.
Most claims, therefore (and certainly most group
claims) do not involve ‘like work’ at all.
Work rated as equivalent
You can bring an equal pay claim if you believe that you
are being paid less than a person of the opposite sex
who is doing work that has been rated as equivalent to
your work under a Job Evaluation Scheme (“JES”).
Maybe your organisation has carried out a JES that’s
been agreed with your workforce. Many brownie
points if you have. But unfortunately that doesn’t
mean you have nothing to worry about.
The history of equal pay litigation in this country tells us
that just because a JES has been done, it doesn’t mean
that the results of the JES have been implemented.
Many women succeed in claims because they are
being paid less than men at the same level as them on
the JES, or even less than men who are meant to be
below them under the scheme!
Furthermore, there is a nasty tendency for the people
who were earning more before the evaluation to
somehow, co-incidentally, to end up being the very
folks that do quite nicely after the JES, thank you very
much. This result often comes by way of pay protection
or ‘bonus’ schemes put in place to ease the transition
– both can be challenged.
And there’s another risk too. The fact that a JES has
taken place isn’t the end game for an equal pay claim.
If a female worker can show that the evaluation
methodology itself is discriminatory or unreliable then
the whole scheme can be thrown out of the window.
Work of equal value
Finally, you can bring an equal pay claim if you believe
that you are being paid less than a person of the
opposite sex who is doing work of equal value to you .
This is the key equal pay risk nowadays, and it is often
a hidden risk.
Equal with who?
It is an important ‘gateway’ to bringing an equal pay
claim, allowing workers to compare themselves to
workers of the opposite sex in completely different
roles elsewhere in an organisation, regardless of
whether or not there is a JES.
Crucially, it opens the door to large claims where
workers in a predominantly female-occupied role
(typically cleaning or caring) can compare themselves
to (almost inevitably higher-earning) colleagues
in typically male-dominated roles, such as those
involving outdoor work, anti-social hours or a very
techy skill-set. (Heaven forbid that we should suggest
any comparison between HR and Finance…)
How can you tell if a dementia carer’s work is of
equal value to a caretaker’s? Or if a PR executive is
contributing as much to a business as a software
engineer? It’s difficult. All the more so when you take
into account that the value of any ‘instinctive’ answer
is likely to be severely compromised by longstanding
social norms with an inherent gender-basis.
To answer this crucial question in a ‘work of equal
value’ claim, the Employment Tribunal has a whole
special procedure for conducting ‘equal value
hearings’, which includes gathering lots of evidence
about the different roles and, usually, appointing
an independent expert to determine the issue.
It’s like an additional trial outside of the main
hearing. Lengthy, costly and something you really
want to avoid if at all possible.
Which comparators
are allowed?
In a public sector context (where most of
the case law so far has originated), should
a cleaner at a school be able to compare
herself to a worker at the refuse centre
where both are employed by the local
authority? What about where one or
both roles are outsourced? What if
they are outsourced to companies
set up by the council specifically
to try to avoid equal pay
liability?
In the private sector, can
an employee in one group
company compare herself
against a male employee in
another group company?
In this context, there are five main gateways to
comparison. An employee can compare herself to:
1. Her predecessor or successor in her own role;
2. A male worker at the same establishment (on any
terms and conditions);
3. A male worker at another establishment which
uses the same terms and conditions (whether
employed by the same employer or an associated
employer);
4. A male worker employed by a different employer
where there is a ‘single source’ of terms and
conditions (e.g. a national collective agreement);
and
5. A male worker previously employed by the
same employer, where the female worker has
subsequently been TUPE’d out to a subcontractor.
Businesses which operate through associated
companies or over multiple sites need to be aware of
discrepancies that might arise, particularly when the
gender pay gap reporting obligations kick in, leading
to more information being available across a
disparate workforce.
Equal work comes in three
flavours...
Like work, work rated as
equivalent and work of
equal value.

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Equal pay legislation does allow some common
sense and relevant commercial factors to be
takenintoaccount,whendecidingwhetherthere
is an equal pay claim, through the ‘material
factor’ defence.
However, be warned. This is the one and only defence
to an equal pay claim and it only goes so far, often
expiring in its protection far sooner than employers
expect or hope for.
Material factor defence
The fact that a woman can point to a male comparator
who is doing equal work but being paid more than
her does not automatically mean that she has a good
equal pay claim. In such a situation, an employer may
be able to rely on a ‘material factor’ defence. To do so,
it has to show that a significant factor other than the
gender difference can explain the pay gap.
A ‘material factor’ must be:
• genuine and not a sham or pretence;
• a significant, material factor which definitely
caused the whole of the pay differential; and
• not itself tainted with any sex discrimination.
Unequal pay scenario
The ‘material factor’ defence operates in two ways,
aligning with the principles of direct and indirect
discrimination.
First, if the ‘material factor’ relied on has nothing to
do with gender, then the defence succeeds. Let’s
take the case of a small chain of restaurants where a
female branch manager seeks to compare herself to
a better paid male branch manager. There could be
any number of reasons for the pay gap between them.
Perhaps his restaurant is bigger or busier, or he has
more experience, or he got a better appraisal rating,
or the HR Advisor made a mistake and offered him
£2,000 too much in the offer letter, or he was TUPE’d
in when the store was bought and his pay is therefore
protected. Any of these factors could provide a
material factor defence for the company. If the female
branch manager is the only person affected in the pay
comparison, or it impacts on other males and females
in the company equally, then that is likely to be the
end of the story and the end of any viable claim.
However, if our female branch manager can show
that she and other female colleagues are put at a
‘particular disadvantage’ by any of the factors that the
company relies upon to explain the pay gap, then the
employer will have to objectively justify its actions, in
exactly the same way as indirect sex discrimination
must be objectively justified. So, let’s say that the
bigger, better-paid manager roles are only available
to managers prepared to do night shifts. The female
branch manager may well be able to show that this
inhibits female managers from taking those roles. Is it
justified? The company would have to show evidence
about the necessity of branch managers working at
night and why they need to be paid more to do so.
How far can you defend unequal pay?
Common examples of
legitimate ‘material
factor’ defences are:
• ‘market rate for the job’ (so long as the
employer has solid evidence and refreshes
that evidence annually to justify any
continuing difference year on year)
• a bonus genuinely linked to personal
performance/productivity (so long as the
opportunity to earn the bonus, to the same
level, is equally available to both sexes)
• a pay supplement based on greater
experience or qualifications (so long as
the employer has solid evidence that this
experience or these qualifications are
relevant to the job and are used to help do
the job better)
• ‘red circling’ and other types of pay
protection (so long as the reason for the pay
protection still applies and the original pay
was not itself a case of unequal pay)
• comparator’s role involves supervision of
others, unsocial hours, heavy lifting, complex
machinery, extremes of temperature or
other similar factors making it different to
the claimant’s role.

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Although the ‘material factor’ defence is very
attractive for an employer to deploy and rely
on when seeking to defend an equal pay claim,
or simply to justify why an employee of one
sex is being paid more than a colleague in an
‘equal work’ role who is of the other sex, it is
often actually far more flimsy and short-lived
as a defence than most people believe.
Market rate
Perhaps the most regularly used ‘material factor’
defence is the good old ‘market rate’: “we only pay
him more than her because that’s the market rate for
his work”. This defence may be true and seem very
attractivetoanemployer,butwhenitcomestoactually
deploying it in an equal pay claim, employers can find
that it’s not always as easy as they had assumed.
First of all, the employer has to gather (and then
potentially produce for the Employment Tribunal
hearing, up to 6 years later) the evidence that supports
its case about the ‘market rate’. Do you keep
documentary evidence of every ‘market rate’
salarydecisionyoumake?Doyoustorethat
evidence for 6 years? Many employers
do not, and yet it is critical to do so.
Secondly, the ‘market rate’ defence
evaporates after a time. Employers need
to regularly review their knowledge of
what the current market rate for that job
is, and gather fresh evidence to support
its view. There is no firm rule about how
often you need to do this, but probably
every time you consider a pay award,
so probably once a year.
Protected pay
Another situation to consider is
where someone’s pay is protected,
perhaps as a result of a TUPE
transfer, red circling, a redeployment
following redundancy or a demotion.
We look at pay protection as a
potential defence in more detail
later on, but here let’s look at the
issue of when it might evaporate as
a defence.
Beware the evaporating defence!
It may feel obvious and reasonable at the point
when the pay protection starts that it is justified
and cannot expose your organisation to an equal
pay claim. But consider: how long can the pay
protection argument last? 2 years? 5 years?
After a certain amount of time, the quite fair
and understandable reason why you put the pay
protection in place is likely to evaporate, purely
due to the march of time. As each year passes,
the strength of a ‘pay protection’ defence gets
weaker and weaker. This is because the obligation
to ensure equality of pay and other terms is so
important that it will always eventually endure
over other considerations. In that context,
any reasons for overriding the duty to ensure
equality will only be tolerated by the law for a
limited period.
A good example of the evaporating ‘material
factor’ defence of pay protection is the aftermath
of a TUPE transfer. You inherit someone under
TUPE who is paid more than your existing staff
in the same or similar roles. Initially, of course,
you must honour the new-comer’s higher pay
entitlement, in accordance with TUPE. That’s not
unequal pay – that’s your compliance with TUPE
law. However, after a year or two that excuse
for the higher pay may well be starting to wear
rather thin if it is causing pay inequality with one
or more colleagues of the opposite sex. TUPE
pay protection doesn’t mean pay protection for
life: it’s there to prevent the new employer from
refusing to honour the previous employer’s terms
and to preserve that status quo for a reasonable
period of time. But at some point it evaporates
as a ‘material factor’ defence. Sooner or later,
if there’s a gender pay gap as a result of a TUPE
transfer, the equal pay legislation will trump a
historical TUPE transfer and the risk of a claim
may emerge.
As you may know, TUPE prevents changes to terms
for transferred employees where the change is
because of the transfer. However, a post-transfer
change in terms in order to avoid or to reduce an
equal pay risk is legitimate, since it’s unlikely to
be seen by a Tribunal as because of the transfer;
rather, it’s a change in order to promote gender
pay equality.
Keep alert
So the moral of the story when looking at
‘material factor’ defences to equal pay
claims is to stay alert and be prepared for
your defences to evaporate over time.
Review and refresh your justifications and
your evidence regularly, and store this
information carefully so that you can go
back 6 years if necessary.

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As we’ve already touched on briefly, the most
difficult – and most expensive – type of equal
pay claim comes about when a whole sector of
your workforce is made up almost or entirely
of one gender (generally women) and it seeks
to compare itself with another sector made up
entirely of the opposite gender.
This is the situation that caused Birmingham City
Council to have to sell the NEC in order to settle its £1
billon equal pay liabilities, bought about in the most
part by its dinner ladies (and similar) comparing their
pay with its dustmen (and similar).
Up and down the country, other public bodies have
facedthesameproblems,andprivatesectoremployers
are not immune either.
What about your business? You are likely to have some
roles or areas of your workforce that are (almost)
entirely one gender or the other. In factories, it’s
the (usually) male-dominated shop floor. In law and
accountancy firms, it’s the (usually) entirely female
secretarial and admin staff. In schools and colleges
it’s the (usually) male-dominated site maintenance
team. The long name for it is occupational gender
segregation, but equal pay academics tend to use the
shorthand ‘gender ghetto’.
Apples and oranges
The equal pay risk inherent here are, as you may have
guessed, the ‘equal value’ type of claim. You may pay
your school cooks the same rate regardless of their
gender, and likewise all dustmen get paid the same
regardless of sex, but do both groups get paid the
same? Highly unlikely. But might a Tribunal decide
that they are doing work of equal value? Very possibly.
The question of whether the work done by a cleaner,
carer or cook is ‘worth’ the same (or more) than the work
donebyadriver,caretakerordustmanisalmostimpossible
to answer objectively. It’s like comparing bananas and
socks,andeveryonewillhavetheirownsubjectiveviewon
the merits of bananas (and indeed socks).
Critically, in the case of female-dominated occupations
such as cleaner, carer or cook, we would suggest that
society’s instinctive view of their ‘low value’ is almost
certainly influenced by the fact that they are female-
dominated occupations, and that women have done
them for low pay (or, indeed, without financial reward,
in a home setting) for generations. This means that a
comparison process – whether done through a JES or
an equal value claim – can throw up surprising results.
Can you defend it?
Ifthetwosetsofjobsindifferentpartsofanorganisation
are found to be of equal value– what then? Can it be
a ‘material factor’ defence for an employer to say,
simply, that the going rate for cleaners is less than the
going rate for drivers, and that’s it?
Often, no. Sometimes, yes, if you are lucky and you
can produce robust evidence to prove that the labour
market does indeed work in that way (and isn’t just
assumed to) and you can show that you would not be
able to fill the ‘male’ roles without paying a premium.
But even that’s not the end of the story. Where ‘the
market’ that’s being looked at is an exploitative
market, taking advantage of women and the lack of
opportunities that may be available to them, causing
wage values to be suppressed, then their equal pay
claim could still succeed. A typical example of an
exploitative market would be in low-paid, probably
minimum wage, work in an area without much
economic opportunity. But what about the female City
workers who can point to massive average pay gaps?
Are assumptions being made during their careers
about their aggressiveness, their commitment and
their longevity that lead to a market where a woman is
seen as worth less than a man?
There are plenty of claims out there, waiting to be
brought. If you have roles which are heavily weighted
towards one gender or the other – at whatever level of
the business – then you need to look closely at your risk.
Do you have gender ghettos?

18 19
The dangers of pay protection
It’s easy to fall into this trap while you are busy with
a restructure, probably some redundancies too and
perhaps dealing with some tough union negotiations
at the same time.
In some public sector claims we’ve heard about, there
is no official pay protection for the male workers but
the impact of the pay changes on them have been
cancelled out by the introduction of (more-or-less
spurious) ‘bonuses’, again negotiated by their union
and not available to roles in other departments that
are mostly carried out by females.
TUPE situations
In the case of a TUPE transfer, the existence of TUPE
would almost certainly provide a good material factor
defence, at least in the initial months after transfer.
But what if the pay differential is so great that the
lower paid employees have no realistic opportunity
to catch up? What if further pay awards are made
on a percentage basis, so the gap actually gets bigger
rather than smaller? There are tantalising comments
from judges in some of the judgments in equal pay
cases about the extent to which an employer will be
expected to take action to ensure that differences are
eventually levelled out. It seems clear that this sort of
defence will not hold good forever, but there is little
clear guidance as to how long it might last.
Don’t forget the
evaporating defence
Even if you have put in place a pay protection
approach that explains the whole of any gender pay
gap, and which is founded on good, fair, non-sexist
reasons, remember – as we’ve said before – that any
pay protection defence is very likely to evaporate
over time. It may hold up for 1, 2 or even 5 years,
but after a certain amount of time, the quite fair and
understandable reason why you put the pay protection
in place is likely to evaporate, purely due to the march
of time. As each year passes, the strength of a ‘pay
protection’ defence gets weaker and weaker.
Best approach
Soeverytimeyouarethinkingofputtingpayprotection
in place, ask yourself:
• Will it favour traditionally ‘male’ roles over ‘female’
roles in our business?
• What will the actual male:female ratio of take-up
and benefit be?
• How long will/should it last for?
• Can we justify its length in a situation where it
creates a potential equal pay claim? If yes, for how
long can we get away with that justification?
Pay protection, or ‘red circling’, may seem like
a good idea in certain situations, and is often
demandedbytradeunionsbut,aswellascosting
you more, it also comes with a considerable
equal pay risk.
The equal pay risk
One of the most common explanations given for
pay differentials in any organisation is one form
or another of pay protection. We can all think of
common situations where pay protection comes about
as the result of an agreement, such as following a
redeployment or a restructure. It can also come about
when a job evaluation scheme is implemented and
transitional arrangements may be put in place to assist
those whose roles are downgraded (sometimes on the
basis that this is cheaper than performing a ‘levelling
up’ exercise). It is a useful tool to have in your pay &
reward toolbox.
Aside from agreed pay protection, we also come across
it in a compulsory sense following a TUPE transfer, if
incoming staff transferring to you come across with
higher salaries.
However, in every case of pay protection there is the
risk of an equal pay claim from a lower-paid colleague
of the opposite sex who is doing the same or similar
role, or one of equal value.
The defence
Of course, the good news is that the presence of a
pay protection agreement (or one imposed by TUPE)
will normally provide you with the ‘material factor’
defence which can usually defeat an equal pay claim
– for a time. However, such a defence is far from 100%
certain, and its protection reduces over time, as we
have already looked at, so every time you agree any
pay protection, you need to think about the following
factors and plan ahead.
To recap, to qualify as a ‘material factor’ defence, you
need to prove that the reason for the higher pay is
a decent, genuine reason and one that explains the
whole of the gap.
It must also not be based on a reason that,
although itself is not sexist, nonetheless leads to sex
discrimination in its eventual outcome. This point
is especially important to be aware of where there
more men than women are getting pay protection, or
where it is only being offered to certain role(s) that are
mostly, or entirely, done by one sex or the other.
Getting caught out
For example, you run a manufacturing business and
you offer pay protection for an entirely genuine
reason unrelated to sex (e.g. restructuring and
redeployment) to your (mostly male) production
operatives, because the shop floor union demands
it. 80% of those who then benefit from the pay
protection happen to be men. But for your office
staff, who don’t have a recognised union, you don’t
offer pay-protected redeployment because there’s
no union demanding it and you think you can get
away without doing so. However, 80% of your office
staff are female. Some of them accept redeployment
into lower-paid roles without the benefit of pay
protection. Your primary reasons for treating your
workforce differently in terms of offering, or not
offering, pay protection appear on the face of it not
to have anything to do with sex: reason 1 is that they
are different parts of the business who traditionally
have always been treated differently; and reason 2
is that one part of the business has a union who
bargains well, while the other part of the business
doesn’t. However, the end result is that your
female staff who are redeployed into lower-paid
roles without pay protection are then worse
off than your male production operatives who
receive pay protection. If one of your female
employees manages to prove an ‘equal value’
connection between her role and one of these
male roles, there’s the equal pay claim.

20 21
How long does an equal pay claim risk last?
How far back in time can the claim reach?
Both these things may be longer than you thought
and are important to factor in when thinking about
potential risk and cost.
Claim time limits
Equal pay claims can be brought at any time whilst the
claimant remains in employment. A change of role or
contract will not usually extinguish the right to claim.
While the inequality in pay continues, the right to
claim continues.
Where a claimant leaves employment, the time limit to
bring a claim in the Employment Tribunal is six months
from the last day of the employment relationship.
There is no discretion to extend this time limit, but
there are a complicated set of rules dealing with
situations where the claimant may have been unable
to claim.
However, although the strictness of the Tribunal time
limits sound like a good thing for employers, there’s
a catch. It’s recently been decided by the courts that
claims can also be bought in the civil courts – the High
Court and County Court – where the limitation period
for such a claim is six years. This is because the claim is
a type of ‘breach of contract’ claim, which always has
a 6-year limitation period.
Potentially, therefore, if you have a population of
underpaid female employees in your business, you
could face claims from all your current employees,
plus any former employees for the previous six years.
Reaching back
An equal pay claimant can claim for back pay of up to
six years (five in Scotland), as well as increased pay
going forward if she remains in employment.
So with the right to bring a claim up to six years after
leaving employment, and the ability to claim back
pay for up to six years, that’s a lot of potential risk.
And cost.
Piggy-back
One more thing to mention. Once a woman has
succeeded in her equal pay claim (or received
increased pay following a settlement), any other
man who does the same work as her but is now paid
less than her is able to use her as a comparator to
demand an increase in his own pay, or otherwise he
can bring his own equal pay claim. This sort of “piggy-
back” claim means that pay adjustments to address
equal pay issues can trigger widespread ‘levelling up’
exercises across the business.
Time limits and back pay
Current Government consultation documents
indicate that all private, public and voluntary
sector bodies with 250+ employees will be
required to take a ‘snapshot’ of what they are
paying their staff on 5 April 2017 and publish
this pay data – both on their own website and
the Government’s searchable online database –
by no later than 4 April 2018
Time to act
We strongly recommend that private sector employers
with 250+ employees should act as soon as possible
to find out exactly what their gender pay gap is. Not
only do you not want any nasty surprises; you also
want to be taking all the action you can during this
first reportable year to close any unjustified pay gaps
that you find, to reduce your ultimate gap when the
time for reporting comes round. Why wait until 5 April
to find you have a large and unsightly gender pay gap
that you now can’t change because it’s too late? The
time to audit and take corrective action is now.
For employers with fewer than 250 employees, it is
still highly advisable to calculate your gender pay gap
and look at what may need doing. Equal pay is the
‘big new thing’ and your employees will increasingly
be talking and thinking about it.
The big new thing
There’s no doubt - equal pay is now not only one of the
big themes in HR; it’s also being talked about by your
employees and the press far more than previously.
The topic has caught the public imagination.
Sustained campaigning by Grazia magazine has
been suggested as one of the reasons this Liberal
Democrats proposal from the Coalition days survived
that party’s inglorious exit from Government, and
articles regularly appear across the media on subjects
from the Hollywood pay gap, to ‘tampon tax’ and
inflated price of pink razors. Financial inequality is
very much on the current agenda, and one aspect of
that will inevitably be increased interest from current
and former female employees in the possibility of
bringing equal pay claims.
Asdaiscurrentlyfacingamassequalpayclaiminvolving
thousands of store workers, the circumstances of
which are very reminiscent of the major public sector
cases of the last two decades. Other supermarkets
have also seen test cases brought, as well as banks,
major transport sector businesses and others.
Specialist (claimant) equal pay lawyers are expressly
advertising that “It’s a good time to bring an equal pay
claim”. Who has your organisation in their sights?
Public sector equality
As we all expected, the Government has now
announced that the public sector will also be required
to collect and publish its gender pay gap data in the
same manner, and at the same time as, the private and
voluntary sectors. Many of you already do, since your
gender pay gap is already a recommended item of data
to publish under the existing Public Sector Equality
Duty, but from April 2017 it will become mandatory.
In the meantime, if you work for a college you will
have had to be living in a cave recently to have
missed the UCU’s big push on equal pay and its rather
worrying gender pay gap league tables. Even if they
were based on poor and out-of-date data, the UCU’s
determined focus on equal pay means that there is
nowhere to hide.
Just around the corner

22 23
During 2015 the UK’s gender pay gap was still
at a (median) average of 19.2% in favour of men,
despite the equal pay legislation having been in
place for 45 years.
Since previous attempts to persuade employers to
voluntarily publish their gender pay gaps had failed,
the Government announced in 2015 that it would
legislate to require all private and voluntary sector
employers with 250+ employees to publish such data
annually and during 2016 it brought the Equality Act
2010 (Gender Pay Gap Information) Regulations 2016
into force. Hot on the heels of that, in August 2016 the
Government announced that it will apply the reporting
duty to public sector bodies too.
The new regulations will require all employers with
250 or more employees to collect and analyse their
pay data as it stands in a ‘snapshot’ on 5 April 2017
and to publish it within the following 12 months, in
other words by no later than 4 April 2018. (Public
bodies outside England will require separate devolved
legislation before this requirement applies to them,
but that is very likely to occur shortly.)
Reporting requirements
Qualifying employers must publish the following
gender pay gap statistics about their employees based
in Great Britain:
• the mean and median average gender pay gap
figures for the organisation;
• the bonus pay gender pay gap for bonus payments
over the preceding 12 months; and
• the number of men and women working across
the 4 salary quartiles.
To help explain any pay gaps they may have, employers
willbeabletoincludeadditionalnarrativethatprovides
context and sets out any actions the organisation
intends taking. If the pay gap is particularly high then
employers may choose to provide more detail (i.e.
broken down by hours and/or job grade) where this
would help to present a more favourable picture.
The report must be published on the employer’s
website every year and left there for at least three
years. It must also be uploaded onto a special website
which the Government will operate.
The Gender Pay Gap Reporting Duty
We expect that the Government’s website will make
an employer’s report easy to find and comparable
against all the other employers’ data. It suggests that
a ‘name and shame’ policy may well be pursued by the
Government, sooner rather than later.
For private and voluntary sector employers, the data
only need relate to employees who ordinarily work
in Great Britain (i.e. England, Scotland and Wales,
but not Northern Ireland) and whose contracts of
employment are governed by UK legislation. For public
sector employers, currently only those bodies based in
England are included and it is not yet known whether
the data will need to cover only their employees based
in England, or whether it might also need to include
any based in other parts of the UK. Additionally, the
devolved parliaments of the rest of the UK is likely to
enact their own legislation covering their own public
bodies.
It is not yet entirely clear whether the reportable pay
data will cover just employees or also the wider range
of those who employment law calls ‘workers’ (e.g.
consultants, temporary workers, casual workers and
other non-employees who are contracted to provide
personal work and service to a business). The private
sector legislation appeared to limit the data to only
‘standard’ employees, which was at odds with equal pay
and sex discrimination legislation, and it was not known
why such a discrepancy existed. However, the recent
consultation paper for the public sector in England
suggests that this discrepancy will be removed for all
types of employer, and that ‘workers’ will be included.
This development is something to keep an eye on.
Other Government action
The Government has indicated that it intends to:
• run periodic checks to assess for non-compliance;
• produce tables by sector of employers’ pay gaps;
• highlight employers who publish particularly full
and explanatory information; and
• ‘name and shame’ employers who fail to comply.
Non-compliance
The Government has confirmed that civil penalties will
not currently be introduced, but this will be kept under
review in the light of rates of compliance by employers
in the first few years of implementation. We believe
it is quite likely that, over time, the Government will
decide to give enforcement powers to a body, perhaps
HMRC.
Further, the Equality and Human Rights Commission
will be able to investigate employers who fail to comply.
What is “pay”?
The Regulations define “pay” as including:
• basic pay
• paid leave
• maternity, paternity, adoption, parental
leave and shared parental leave pay
• sick pay
• area allowances
• shift premiums
• bonuses
• car allowances
• standby/on call allowance
• clothing allowance
• first aider and fire warden allowance
However, pay does not include:
• overtime pay
• expenses
• any amounts sacrificed under a salary
sacrifice scheme
• benefits in kind
• redundancy pay
• arrears of pay and tax credits.
Pay must be calculated before deductions for
PAYE, NICs, pensions, student loan repayments
and any voluntary deductions.
What is “bonus pay”?
The Regulations define “bonus” pay as
including:
• profit-sharing, productivity, performance
and other bonus or incentive pay,
piecework and commission;
• long-term incentive plans or schemes
(including those dependent on company
and personal performance); and
• the cash equivalent value of shares on the
date of payment.
Gender Pay Gap Report

24 25
To re-cap, the risks arising from the existence of an
equal pay claim in your organisation are:
• payment of compensation to remedy the gap in
the current year
• back-pay of up to 6 years to remedy any past
gender pay gap
• reimbursement of the claimant’s Tribunal or court
fees
• a penalty of up to £5,000 issued by the Tribunal for
your business’s failure to comply with legislation
• your business’s legal fees costs
• the claimant’s own legal fees if the claim is brought
in the civil courts
• considerable demands upon management, HR and
Finance team time and effort
• ‘piggy back’ claims by other men and women able
to compare themselves with either the claimant or
the comparator
• external reputational harm to your organisation
• internal harm to employee relations and industrial
relations
• harm to relationships with shareholders,
customers and other stakeholders
• negative impact on your attractiveness in the
recruitment market
• harm to your ability to win Government contracts.
If you are a UK private or voluntary sector organisation
with 250+ staff, or a public sector body in England with
250+ staff, you need to calculate your gender pay gap
as soon as possible and take as many steps to reduce it
as you can now, so that your reportable gap is smaller
than it would otherwise be when the first ‘snapshot’
date of 5 April 2017 comes round.
If you are an employer with fewer than 250 staff, you
will still be at a much higher risk of equal pay claims,
now that equal pay is the new ‘big thing’ and everyone
is talking about it.
So whatever sort of organisation you are, now is the
time to act on your gender pay gap.
Why you should act now
...the unions are already
making equal pay a high
profile aspect of their work
and this will only increase.

26 27
Legal
You need to consider whether you have any legal defences to any gender pay gaps you may
find, such as the ‘genuine material factor’ defence, which often works effectively. Again, you
will not fall off your chair to know that we recommend that you engage a genuinely expert
equal pay lawyer to assist you, not simply a run-of-the-mill employment law team. Equal pay
law is very distinct from mainstream employment law and relatively few employment lawyers
have much experience of it. Ensure they really know what they’re talking about (test them out
by asking them to explain the ‘evaporating defence’ or what ‘piggy back’ claims are t!).
You are likely to need advice on whether different roles in your organisation are ‘work of equal value’, which
is where the majority of equal pay risk lies. High risk areas need particularly careful attention.
You then need to prepare a legal strategy for dealing with any equal pay claims that are likely to arise, not
only from current employees but from those who left you up to 6 years ago.
Ideally your equal pay lawyer should work in close tandem with your equal pay auditor. Ensure they do.
The key steps
Start with an equal pay audit
Addressing the risks requires a good understanding of your current position. You should
arrange for a professional equal pay audit of your workforce to be carried out.
Elements to assess include basic pay, any variable like bonus or financial incentives, any
enhancements such as shift pay, weekend pay or overtime, any allowances such as clothing,
tools and travel time and any financial benefits such as PMI and insurance cover.
By undertaking a gender pay gap audit, you will be able to identify where your largest and highest
risk pay gaps are and then:
• investigate the reasons for any gaps;
• decide what pay gaps are defensible with a ‘material factor’ defence;
• refine your view of the extent of any legal risks present, their magnitude and potential cost to
your organisation; and
• formulate a plan to address them and/or defend them, as appropriate.
Data analysis
The results of the audit
data need to be presented
and studied carefully, by
function, business unit and
location. The unintentional
inequity of some of some of
your enhancements and fringe
benefits, for example, might undermine
the fact that your actual basic pay is
itself fairly gender-neutral. Anything
discretionary might be inequitable - you
need to consider and test it. Historical
changes can mean inequities become
hidden in your policies.
Relationships and
communications
You need to prepare to
answer difficult questions
from your employees,
customers, shareholders and
other stakeholders. You may well
need to rebuild trust with any staff who
discover that they have been negatively
affected by any gender pay gap. You
may need to review your employee
engagement, morale and productivity
levels.
When you are required to publish your
gender pay gap you will of course also need
to consider the PR angle and possibly take
steps to prepare for responding to any
negative media reaction. The local press
may be awaiting the publication of yours
stats with interest.
Financial
It may be a statement
of the obvious, but you
will need to plan how
you are going to fund
two important aspects.
First, how you will fund
any gender pay gaps that
you decide you need to close by
increasing the pay of some of your
workforce.
Second, you need to consider how
you will fund any equal pay Tribunal
compensation awards that you might
be required to pay – particularly the
potentially large back-pay claims that
can grow up over the years.
Risk register
If you operate a risk
register, your equal
pay risks may need to
be placed high up on it,
particularly the financial
cost associated with a
‘worst case scenario’ mass
equal pay claim.
2
DIY or external
expert?
No big surprise here!
We recommend that you
engage an equal pay audit
expert to either conduct the
whole audit for you or at least to
scope out for you what is required and
how it should be carried out. You should
choose an expert who combines solid
HR expertise in pay & reward with an
ability to produce and analyse complex
statistics.
3
7
65
4

28 29
As we work with more and more businesses
through our own Gender Pay Gap Audit &
Advice service, it’s become very clear that
even those clients who initially thought they
didn’t need a gender pay gap audit and didn’t
believe they had much of an equal pay risk have
been surprised at the pay gaps – and therefore
equal pay risks – we’ve found consistently
across their organisations.
And those who confidently said that they didn’t
think they needed an audit “because we have a well
designed pay structure” or “because we use a job
evaluation process” have been surprised. While very
helpful in themselves, neither of these things will
mean your business is free from any gender pay gap or
from the risk of equal pay claims.
At the risk of seriously repeating ourselves, remember
that Birmingham City Council recently had to sell the
NECinordertohelpfundits£1billionequalpayliability.
And yes, they had an elaborate pay structure and had
been operating job evaluation programmes for years.
Yet neither of these things helped them avoid huge
inequalities in pay, perpetuated over decades.
Also, while JES processes can be very helpful (if used
properly), all of the organisations that we’ve carried
out an audit on who use any JES have nonetheless
found that they still have significant gender pay gaps.
And sometimes these gaps are alarmingly large.
So having a job evaluation process does not mean you
will have a tiny gender pay gap and does not mean
that you are safe from significant equal pay claims.
In fact, having what you feel is a well-designed pay
structure and/or a job evaluation process can often
lull you into a false sense of security when it comes to
viewing your equal pay risks.
Ask yourself: how confidently can you say that you’ve
nailed all of the following areas of risk?
• Who makes all your decisions on pay? Are they
consistent and sense-checked across the business?
Are they regularly calibrated? The decision makers
themselves may be biased in either direction.
• What pay guidance and policies do you have
in place? Do you actually check that they are
applied correctly, and do you correct any errors?
Uncorrected errors get perpetuated and increase
the bias over time.
• Do you make job offers based on achieving
satisfactory probation? And do you check that
offers made in this way are honoured? Which
roles are handled like this – what’s the gender split
in those roles?
• If you have any sort of incremental pay scales,
how long does it take to get to the top of the
grade? Is there any gender bias present? Lengthy
progression can be discriminatory.
Have an audit even if you think you don’t need one
• Ifyouhavespotsalaries,howisthesalaryidentified
and agreed? We all now know that individual
negotiation generally favours men over women, as
they tend to negotiate differently. What flexibility
do decision makers have? Are their approaches
entirely consistent and calibrated regularly?
• Do you measure your roles using a job evaluation
process, do you sense check the outcomes to
ensure they are consistent? Are you sure the
scheme is unbiased? Are you sure the evaluators
are unbiased? If you have more than one
evaluator, how do you ensure that they take
precisely the same approach each time they apply
the JE process?
• How is pay reviewed annually? If different groups
get different increases, why is this? How do you
ensure that the impact across both genders is
equal in such a situation?
• Do you sense-check any mid-year changes in pay
to ensure they are consistent across both genders?
• Are you using recognised methods and market
data for salary reviews? Are you using economic
indicators?
• If you have any allowances, bonuses, etc., is their
application checked and reviewed for consistency
and gender equality? These are key risk areas.
• Have you made/how do you handle any interim
increases?What’sthedecisionline? Isitunbiased?
• Do you round hourly or pro-rata salaries
consistently? One small amount out of kilter in
basic pay gets perpetuated in all pay elements.
• How do you address salary protection (red-
circling)? Unhealthily long frozen pay or salary
reduction policies can cause gender bias. Do you
check its consistency across both genders?
The chances are that a thorough review of your
organisation, preferably by an independent expert,
will reveal a number of equal pay risks that you may
not have thought about before, or may not have
introduced adequate checks and controls for. And
given all the many responsibilities that HR teams have,
plus the times when senior management will ignore or
overrule your advice, that’s not surprising.
The chances are that a
thorough review of your
organisation, preferably by an
independent expert, will reveal
a number of equal pay risks
that you may not have thought
about before, or may not have
introduced adequate checks
and controls for.

30 31
Our challenge, then, to all HR professionals is to become equal pay experts. Get fully to grips with
equal pay law, its risks and how calculate them in financial and reputational terms.
Know your gender pay gap and where the particularly weak spots are.
Work out how these gaps occurred and how you can reduce – or better still – entirely remove them.
Become adept at spotting where a deftly placed ‘material factor’ defence will work for you by providing a lawful
justification for certain pay gaps.
Ensure all those who make decisions on pay in your organisation are trained to understand how to spot gender pay
gaps, how they can be created and how they can be perpetuated, even if unconsciously or unwillingly.
Lead the way in bringing greater equality to pay in every sector of the economy and public services.
We would love to help. Our Gender Pay Gap Audit & Advice service is available if you wish to use it and we would
be very happy to tell you more about it if you are interested. It is highly unusual in providing both an equal pay audit
expert and an equal pay legal expert who work together to produce one coherent, joined-up report.
Whoever you use and however you go about it, go forward with determination. Let’s create a world where it’s what
you can bring to an organisation that determines your pay, not your gender.
Pay & Reward team
Menzies Law
September 2016
Conclusion
THE GENDER PAY GAP
How to navigate your way around legislation and guidelines
1
Having a gender pay gap is,
itself, not unlawful. There might
well be many good reasons
why the average pay within
your organisation vary between
men and women.
2
Unfortunately, equal
pay law is fiendishly
complicated, and what
you may see as a ‘good
reason’ might not pass
muster at court.
4
New legislation
will compel employers
with 250 or more
employees to
calculate their gender
pay gap and publish
the findings.
5
This is not only damaging to an
employer’s reputation, but
could also encourage
a barrage of
equal
pay
claims.
6
If a claim is found in the
claimants’ favour, employers
will be liable to pay
compensation to remedy the
gap in the current year, plus
pay-back of up to six-years
and legal costs.
7
On top of that
there is the possible
damage to reputation,
harm to relationships with
customers, considerable
demands on HR and
management time and
a negative impact on
recruitment.
9
Act now whilst you
have the time. 5th
April 2017 is the
first date on which
your gender pay gap
must be measured,
and it’s not far away.
10
Start with an
equal pay audit
to understand
your current
position and
identify your
key risk areas.
11
Get legal and
HR support
to analyse
the findings
and suggest
ways
forward.
12
Address any gender
pay gaps you find as
soon as possible and
be prepared for any
difficult questions or
claims arising from
your figures.
Our super-fast ‘at-a-glance’ guide:
Gender Pay Gap Audit and Advice Service
The Menzies Law Gender Pay Gap service is unique in that it brings together expert
HR and legal advice in one, so you can hire one firm to audit your business, crunch the
numbers and review the findings and suggest steps forward. Visit menzieslaw.co.uk
What is the Gender Pay Gap?
It’s the difference between male and female
earnings either within a particular employer, or
nationally. In 2015 the national gender pay gap
for all employees was 19.2%, but if you take
part-time working out of the equation that figure
falls to 9.4%.
Gender pay gap bills
Birmingham City Council has reportedly had to sell
the NEC in order to fund what’s said to be a £1 billion
back-pay bill for its female workers, even though it has
operated complex pay structures and Job Evaluation
programmes for decades, which are of course intended
to avoid the creation of equal pay risks.
START
Are you an employer of
any type in the UK?
Ok, well you’ll need to
know about this then.
3
Are you an employer
with 250 or more
employees? Or will you
be moving towards that
growth in the next five
years? Then what
comes next is even
more important still.
8
Phew!
But
what
can
you
do?...
13
Publish your gender
pay gap on your own
website and the
Government’s
searchable site by
4th April 2018 at
the latest.

32 33
www.menzieslaw.co.uk
St Brandon’s House
29 Great George Street
Bristol BS1 5QT
@menzieslaw
linkedin.com/company/menzies-law
0117 325 0526
Gender Pay Gap Audit & Advice Service
from Menzies Law
Our Gender Pay Gap Audit & Advice service provides all the audit, data analysis and legal advice you will need to
identify your gender pay gap, understand your key equal pay risk areas and know how to tackle them.
For a fixed fee we will:
• Crunch the numbers for all of your workforce pay and benefits
• Review all your policies and procedures relating to pay
• Provide a detailed equal pay report, looking at our workforce from a number of different angles (grade, status,
job title, department, etc.)
• Identify your GPG and highlight any areas of high risk
• Advise you on the legal risks and how to minimize them
• Support you in formulating an action plan for addressing the various risks.
We also offer a simplified Gender Pay Gap Review, in which we can establish, at a much more basic level, what your
headline equal pay position might be.
For more information, please contact Luke Menzies, Director at Menzies Law
DDI 0117 325 0921 email luke@menzieslaw.co.uk