Male employees in senior positions get paid 23% more than women at director levels, according to new research from Movemeon.com and Payspective.com.
Movemeon.com, a strategic and commercial professionals hiring channel, and its sister data provider company Payspective.com, carried out its 2021 Work and pay research compiled from 35,000 data points to see if there was a gender pay gap in businesses.
The research found that the gap is as high as 23% for directors and 9% for associates, with half of this coming from bonuses, which are lower for women than men. The gender pay gap in 2020 was 22%, compared to 19% in 2019 and 25% in 2018.
Men at an associate level with typically between two and five years of experience are awarded 50% higher bonuses than women, receiving an average of £14,000 versus £9,000. This is despite numerous studies proving that having women in senior positions directly contributes to stronger balance sheets in companies, according to the report.
In addition, the research highlighted that when it came to job satisfaction, men were happier in their jobs than women. Men gave an average score of 6.82 out of 10 regarding overall happiness with their jobs, compared to 6.29 for women.
Nick Patterson, co-founder of Movemeon.com, warned that employers must keep gathering and publishing their data around diversity and pay or risk damaging their reputations, as women earning 23% less than their male counterparts in 2021 is “simply staggering”.
“With diversity, organisations benefit from a wealth of different perspectives, different points of view, richer ideas based on wide-ranging experience. Now, as we recover from the pandemic, employers must continue to offer flexible working hours and locations, providing an opportunity to get women back. Gender equality must remain high on the agenda,” he added, before commenting that with more transparency around pay, these “hugely unfair” inconsistencies can begin to be ironed out.