Bank of America CEO on raising minimum wage: It's an investment in our teammates President Joe Biden stops to talk to the media as he drives a Ford F-150 Lightning truck at Ford Dearborn Development Center, Tuesday, May 18, 2021, in Dearborn, Mich. A visual representation of the digital Cryptocurrency, Bitcoin on December 07, 2017 in London, England. Ethereum's 27-year-old founder says we're in a crypto bubble. Did it just burst? Vitalik Buterin, co-founder and inventor of Ethereum speaks during Samsung Developer Conference in San Jose, California on October 30, 2019. QAnon is spreading in churches. These pastors are trying to stop it Left: James Kendall is the Senior Pastor at Grace Community Church in Madera, California. Kendall gave a sermon at his church warning congregants about QAnon. Right: Ben Marsh is a pastor at First Alliance Church in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He has seen members of his church share conspiracy theories on their social media pages. Carlos Ghosn says he has to tell his side of the story TOPSHOT - Former Renault-Nissan boss Carlos Ghosn looks on before addressing a large crowd of journalists on his reasons for dodging trial in Japan, where he is accused of financial misconduct, at the Lebanese Press Syndicate in Beirut on January 8, 2020. - Ghosn arrived at the venue, making his first public appearance since skipping bail in Japan. The fugitive tycoon, who denies any wrongdoing, skipped bail while awaiting trial on multiple charges of financial misconduct including allegedly under-reporting his compensation to the tune of $85 million. (Photo by JOSEPH EID/AFP via Getty Images) BTS and McDonald's launch exclusive meal with two new dipping sauces B25_25594_R James Bond (Daniel Craig) prepares to shoot in NO TIME TO DIE, an EON Productions and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios film Credit: Nicola Dove © 2020 DANJAQ, LLC AND MGM. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Why does the gender wage gap still exist? (CNN Business) — Most companies in Britain are still paying women less than men. A lot less. More than three quarters of large UK employers are paying women less than men on average, according to new data. And the gender pay gap is actually growing at roughly half of the companies. Companies with 250 or more employees in the United Kingdom had a deadline Friday to publish gender pay data, the second consecutive year of mandatory disclosures designed to encourage equality. The data show that women are paid less on average across all industries in the public and private sectors. The average median gender pay gap among the 10,450 firms that reported data was 12%. Only 14% of the companies paid women more on average, while 8% reported no difference in median pay between men and women. The reports show that little has changed since the first mandatory gender pay reports were published a year ago in Britain. “While we have made great strides in the number of women in the workforce and top leadership positions, this has not led to better pay,” said Shainaz Firfiray, an associate professor at Warwick Business School. Experts said the data, which compares median and mean salaries, as well as bonuses, is not always detailed enough to provide a complete picture of gender pay within a company. “In some cases, employers will have a wider gap because they have taken on new female junior staff to build their pipeline,” said Sam Smethers, CEO the Fawcett Society, a gender equality organization. “But unless they can demonstrate that, it is more likely that they’ve failed to make changes,” she added. Many companies said the data, which comes from a snapshot of pay taken in April 2018, fails to capture improvements they’ve made since then. Yet experts say companies need to do much more. The UK Equality and Human Rights Commission said in a report published last summer that only one in five companies have put in place a gender pay action plan with specific targets. “Employers need to set out a five-year strategy for how they will close their gender pay gaps, monitoring progress and results,” Smethers said, adding that the government should require the plans to be published. Banks and airlines were among the most unequal companies for the second year in a row. Jefferies (JEF), for example, reported a gender pay gap of just under 50%. That means the median woman at the investment bank is paid half what the median man gets. The company didn’t respond to a request for comment, but it said in a report published alongside the data that “we recognize that we still have more work to do.” Big banks including Barclays (BCS), HSBC (HSBC), Lloyds Bank and UBS (UBS) also revealed median gaps of between 30% and 45%. KPMG and Facebook (FB) were among the companies that said their gender pay gap had widened from the previous year. The result of efforts to reduce the pay gap at KPMG would be “better observed over a number of years,” the company said. Facebook said its gap had widened because more women were hired into lesser paid positions. Gender pay gaps can reflect numerous factors at companies including a lack of women in top jobs. Firms must disclose gender breakdowns across four salary bands, and men dominate the ranks of top earners at many. Both KPMG and Facebook both said that hiring more women now would eventually help to increase their representation in lucrative jobs and help reduce their pay gaps. The problem of not enough women in senior roles is particularly pronounced in the engineering and industrial sectors. At Alstom (ALSMY), for example, women hold only 7% of the best paid jobs. The rail transport company said the figure reflects its “heavy engineering background” and a “national shortage” of women in science and technology roles. It said a number of programs have been put in place to attract women. Airlines provide another example: pilots are paid a lot more than cabin crew, and most pilots are male. EasyJet (ESYJY) reported a median gender pay gap of 48%. AB InBev, meanwhile, pays its typical female employee 39% more.<doc-sep>If you place all the men and women working at a company into two lines in order of salary, the median pay gap will be the difference in salary between the woman in the middle of her line and the man in the middle of his.<doc-sep>U.K.-based film and TV firms still have a way to go to close the gender pay gaps in their ranks, the latest statistics show. Most companies have reported some progress in shrinking the disparity, but a handful saw the numbers heading in the wrong direction, with Viacom’s Channel 5 and Turner Broadcasting among the backsliders. The BBC, Cineworld, ITV Studios, Sky, and Vue managed to keep the difference in average hourly pay for men and women down to single-digit percentages in 2018. At the British Film Institute, the gap was just 0.4% in favor of male employees, while TV production and distribution giant Endemol Shine and news network CNN, which reports separately from Turner, actually recorded higher pay for their female staff. But all these companies were outliers. Overall, the numbers show that film and TV firms largely remain a long way from achieving earnings equality. Under British law, companies with more than 250 employees in the U.K. must report gender pay information annually. The reports for 2018 are the second since the requirement was introduced. Among broadcasters, the BBC’s 8.4% difference in male-to-female pay was down from the 10.7% posted last year. Tony Hall, the pubcaster’s director general, has set a target of closing the gap by 2020. “We want to go further and faster to build on what’s been achieved so far,” he said. ITV, one of only six companies in the FTSE 100 with a female CEO (Carolyn McCall) also narrowed the gap slightly, from 16.4% to 14.9%. Within the company, production and distribution unit ITV Studios recorded a much smaller disparity than the broadcasting side of the business. BBC Studios, the BBC’s commercial arm, registered a gap of 19.6%, and acknowledged the need to be proactive in increasing the number of women in senior roles. “While it is part of a wider societal trend – which will take time [to reverse] – we must play our part in changing it,” the company said in its report. Channel 4 posted its figures months ago, revealing that a yawning 28.6% gap in 2017 had improved somewhat to 22.6%. That leaves plenty of work to do to hit CEO Alex Mahon’s goal of an even split of top earners between men and women by 2023. Viacom’s Channel 5 was one of the few to show an emphatic reverse in 2018, with a gap that widened to 14.6% in favor of men from 2.85% in favor of women in 2017. James Currell, president of VIMN U.K., conceded that “clearly this year’s numbers are tracking in the wrong direction.” He said the broadcaster has “implemented a number of new measures which we are confident will help us achieve gender parity over time.” In the pay-TV sector, Sky and Virgin both recorded very small increases in their pay gaps, which came in at 5.3% and 10%, respectively. Disney has added staff to its ranks – and is losing some – as it reorganizes following its acquisition of Fox assets. In the U.S., it is facing a class-action lawsuit alleging systematic underpaying of its female employees. In the U.K., its latest gender pay gap was 20.9%, a slight improvement on the previous year. Warner Bros. Entertainment saw its gap fall from a whopping 30.9% to 25.3%. More encouragingly, both Disney and Warner Bros. were among the film and TV firms with the highest proportion of women among their top earners. There was disparity across the British operations of other studios. Sony, which posts film and TV numbers under the Columbia Pictures moniker, posted a small increase in the pay gap to 25.6%. NBCUniversal was the best performer of the Hollywood bunch, with a gap of 7.9%. Discovery has just set up an international pay-TV base in Amsterdam but retains a hefty presence in the U.K. The gender pay gap in its U.K. ranks shrank slightly to 12.7%. Another major channel operator, Turner Broadcasting, went from an already high 30.2% to an embarrassing 35.6%. It attributed the rise to a “very small number of one-off payments” that had skewed the average, and said there was “encouraging movement” by other measures. It also flagged an even 2018 gender split in staff recruited for, or promoted to, senior roles across the EMEA region. Fremantle and Endemol Shine are among the few producer-distributor groups sizable enough to be required to report. The former, now under the stewardship of Jennifer Mullin, more than halved the gap in earnings between the sexes to 15%. Endemol Shine, under the leadership of Sophie Turner Laing, went from almost even gender pay to a 2.5% gap in favor of its female staffers.<doc-sep>Gain a global perspective on the US and go beyond with curated news and analysis from 600 journalists in 50+ countries covering politics, business, innovation, trends and more.<doc-sep>
A quarter of companies and public sector bodies have a pay gap of more than 20% in favour of men, according to new gender pay gap figures. There was no significant improvement in the gender pay gap between 2017 and 2018 with the gap shrinking slightly from 9.7% to 9.6%. Almost eight in 10 companies still pay their male employees more, leading one MP to say Britain still has a “long way to go” to tackle the gap. All organisations with more than 250 employees have to publish their gender pay gap. The deadline for the public sector was 31 March, while charities and companies have until midnight on 4 April to file. Of the 9,961 companies which had filed by 5pm on 4 April, 7,755 paid male employees more than female staff based on median hourly pay. Almost a third of businesses had gaps which were worse than the national average for full- and part-time workers, which the Office of National Statistics calculates at 17.9%. More than a quarter of companies pay women over 20% less than men based on median hourly pay. Just 1.5% pay male employees 20% less than their female staff. The MP Rachel Reeves, chair of the business, energy and industrial strategy select committee, said: “The figures show there is a long way to go to tackle the gender pay gap. “Too few businesses simply file the stats and then carry on as usual, failing to examine why they aren’t attracting female talent, why these pay gaps exist in their firms, and what they need to do to change it.” The Labour party, whose workforce consists of 237 women and 261 men, reported a median gender pay gap of 3%. Jennie Formby, general secretary, said she was proud to lead an organisation taking gender pay seriously. The Fawcett Society said the persistence of the gap was “disappointing, but not surprising”. “The regulations are not tough enough. It’s time for action plans, not excuses,” said Sam Smethers, its chief executive. “Employers need to set out a five-year strategy for how they will close their gender pay gaps, monitoring progress and results. “But we also need to tackle all the causes of the pay gap – introduce more generous leave for fathers that they can afford to take, make every job flexible by default, unless there is a strong business case not to do so, and deal with any outstanding pay discrimination that employers may find.” Since 2017, companies with more than 250 employees are required to report their gender pay gap. Guardian analysis used the median hourly pay gap, which is calculated by lining up male and female wages and comparing the difference between the number that falls in the middle for each gender. Company data also shows a slight improvement in the second year of reporting. The median hourly gap grew in 4,215 companies, and shrunk in 3,840. Vida Healthcare, a private care home provider, paid women just 21p for every £1 men earned, the highest gap of any UK company. Vida Healthcare said the figure was not representative of the company. Another healthcare company, Care Fertility Group, reported a median gap of 66% – up 19 percentage points on last year. It explained that 81% of male employees were directors, doctors or in IT, most of whom fell into the upper salary quartile. Angela Regan, its HR director, said that while men make up only 11% of the Care workforce, they account for 30% of its highest-paid quartile. “However, of Care’s highest paid quartile, 70% are female, suggesting that women are able to progress their careers to our most senior roles. “We are confident that we do not have an issue of ‘equal pay’ within the organisation and we are committed to ensuring that everyone has an equal opportunity to progress to the most senior or highly-paid positions.” Other companies with high gaps included not-for-profit Suffolk GP Federation at 75% and HR service New Millennia Payroll at 74.3%. Some airlines also posted large gaps, including easyJet where the gap rose to 47.9% in the latest reported period, and Tui Airways at 42.5%. Ryanair reported a gap of 64.4%, down from 71.8% gap in 2017. A number of fashion companies filed large gaps, including women’s clothing brand Sweaty Betty which reported a 66.6% pay gap. It stated that women occupy 96% of its highest-paid and 100% of its lowest-paid jobs.