The travel group Tui has the largest gender pay gap reported to date by a major UK company, with its male employees paid more than double the female staff.
Women at the group’s Tui Airways UK unit earn on average 56.9% less in hourly pay than men, according to data filed under a new government scheme intended to highlight the gender pay gap and encourage employers to address the disparity.
The company said the gap stemmed from low representation of women in highly paid roles such as pilots, engineering, technology and senior management.
All private and public sector organisations and charities with more than 250 employees are required to submit their pay figures to the government by April under a new scheme intended to reveal differences in average pay for men and women. About 1,000 have filed figures so far, but the legislation is expected to affect about 9,000 companies, which collectively employ more than 15 million people.
The gender pay gap refers to the difference between what men and women working for an organisation earn regardless of their roles, rather than men and women in the same role.
The Co-operative Bank, easyJet and Virgin Money are among those that have revealed a double-digit gap in their mean hourly pay rates between male and female workers.
“We know that our gender pay gap is not an equal pay issue, rather a lack of representation in specific roles,” Tui said in its gender pay gap report for its UK & Ireland business.
Tui Airways UK, which was known as Thomson Airways until October, employs 870 pilots earning an average of £111,683, of whom 95% are men. In contrast nearly 80% of its cabin crew, who are paid an average of £26,272, are women.
But even at its head office Tui revealed a pay gap. Although 62% of its 3,308 head office staff are women, men are more likely to hold the better-paid roles in senior management, engineering or technology.
Tui said it was seeking an “inclusive and diverse workforce in all areas of our business” and would try and find answers both internally and with the rest of the airline industry.
“We remain committed to raising awareness within the retail and airline industry on all aspects of diversity and inclusion, as well as effecting change in our own business,” a TUI spokesman said.
Tui’s efforts come after the easyJet chief executive, Johan Lundgren, voluntarily took a £34,000 pay cut to match the salary of his predecessor, Carolyn McCall, as he said he was “committed to giving equal pay and equal opportunity for women and men”.
The FTSE 100 company has a large gender pay gap, with women paid 51.7% less than men. This is because the vast majority – 94% – of its pilots are men.
Only 4% of commercial pilots in the industry worldwide are female. EasyJet has set itself a target that a fifth of all new pilots recruited should be female by 2020, up from 6% in 2015 and 13% now. Last year it recruited 49 female pilots.
Of the 1,000 companies that have reported only Phase Eight, the fashion retailer, has a larger gender pay gap than Tui when looking at the mean. This measures average pay by taking the total paid to each gender and dividing it by the number of employees of that gender.
Women are paid nearly 65% less on average at the clothing business despite making up 97.5% of the workforce. Of just 44 men working in the company, 39 are employed at the head office, including the chief executive. More than half of the senior leadership team are men.
The figures also indicate a difficult environment for women to get ahead, as a far larger proportion of men have been promotedthan women. Despite men accounting for 2.5% of the Phase Eight workforce, 12% of promotions were of male staff.
In its gender pay gap report, Phase Eight said it was confident that women and men were paid equally for doing equivalent jobs and was offering additional training and development and promoting flexible working to encourage women to apply for corporate jobs.
