The UK equality watchdog must be more aggressive to enforce changes that would reduce the size of the gender pay gap, Harriet Harman has said.
The Labour MP – a key architect of the Equality Act 2010, which requies businesses with 250 or more employees to reveal the differences in what they pay men and women – said that the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) should set up a series of inquiries and force change.
Ahead of Wednesday’s deadline for companies to report, Harman criticised the “pitiful” excuses that some businesses have given. And she said that the EHRC should act as the Ofsted of the gender pay gap.
“What we need is for the Equality and Human Rights Commission to get in there and force the pace of change. The big question is whether they are going to do that,” she said. “In a way the EHRC is like the Ofsted of the gender pay gap. Who is in special measures? Who is outstanding?”
The EHRC has the power ultimately to take companies that fail to report their gender pay gap to court, and has repeatedly stressed that while not reporting is unlawful, wide pay gaps are not. But Harman said its focus should not be on illegality but on putting companies with large pay gaps under pressure to take action.
“The critical thing now is not just to look at the figures and go ‘oh, that’s awful’, wring our hands and wait for women to bring individual cases [or] unions to negotiate for incremental change to happen a snail’s pace,” she said.
“The EHRC have the power to do inquiries and issue codes of conduct and they have to use those powers. They need to do inquiries into particular firms, sectors and regions, so that people don’t just publish their gender pay gap and then get on with pay discrimination as usual.”
Large gulfs in pay between men and women have already been exposed among the 9,000 or so companies the Government Equalities Office estimates to have fulfilled the reporting requirement. Some are predictable, with banks and asset management companies showing big differences, such as a median gap of 43.5% at the Barclays International banking group, 29% at HSBC, 32.8% at Lloyds and a 22.6% gap at the Co-operative Bank. Others less so: Guardian analysis has suggested that women working in academy school chains suffer some of the worst gender pay gaps in the UK.
But Harman, who has spoken about the sexism she has faced since she entered parliament in 1982, was not surprised by the figures.
“I always thought the pay gap would be large and I always thought the excuses from management would be pitiful,” she said. “And that’s exactly what we’ve got – large pay gaps, pitiful excuses. But we are not interested in the excuses or justifications any more.”
The mother of the House of Commons has spoken before about her – at the time deeply unpopular – insistence that the Equality Act 2010 include a clause requiring companies to be transparent about their gender pay gaps. But she batted away an opportunity to talk about her pride in the legislation.
“It has unveiled the particularity and the scale of the problem, but the transparency is a means to an end,” she said. “What it was never designed for was just to increase the justified resentment and anger of women at pay discrimination.
“We’ve had the exploding of the gap, the exposing of the myths. We’re now in the doing phase – it has to be a spur to action.”
