The proportion of female high earners has stayed the same at just over a quarter for the last four years
The proportion of female high earners has not increased over the last four years.
Research released today by law firm Clyde & Co discovered that, using data obtained from HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC), the proportion of women who pay tax at a higher rate had remained unchanged at 27 per cent over the time period.
However, thanks to an increase in the total number of people paying tax at the 40 per cent higher rate, the overall number of women in this bracket has increased from 951,000 in the tax year ended 2012 to 1.2m in the tax year ended 2015.
By comparison, 3.3m men were higher rate taxpayers in 2015.
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In light of its research, the law firm is calling for changes to be made to the proposed gender pay reporting rules, which are expected to come into force early next year.
“Over 40 years since we saw the first legislation aimed at tackling differences between the sexes in the workplace, these further initiatives, and the intent behind them, are welcome,” said Charles Urquhart, employment partner at Clyde & Co. “We don't know yet precisely what figures employers will be required to publish but if it's simply a matter of reporting an average of men and women's basic pay and bonuses every three years, it won't tell us much more than we already know.
“For gender pay reporting to be valuable, a like-for-like comparison across all levels within an organisation, from the chief executive to unskilled levels of employee, would be needed. This would be much more useful than ‘average’ data across an organisation, but it would create far more of a burden on employers, which the government will no doubt be wanting to avoid.”
Read more: Gender pay gap data will include bonuses
In July, Prime Minister David Cameron revealed that companies with 250 employees or more would have to publish what they pay their male and female workers and, in October, he extended the proposed rules so that they included bonus pay.
Heidi Watson, another employment partner at Clyde & Co, added: “If this regulation does one thing, it will highlight issues which we already know about – lack of women in senior roles, more women in part-time work, more women in low paying sectors – so that governments and individual companies will be further fuelled to tackle them, which seems to be the aim.
“Employers can get ahead of the game by focusing on their diversity programmes, voluntarily giving more information about these initiatives to put their figures in context. The key will be demonstrating a positive picture to clients and potential recruits, and ideally showing a reduction in the gap over time.”
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