Equal Pay Audits

Insight

Analysing Pay Data

Once you have decided on your approach to identifying equal work you need to compare pay for men and women to identify any pay gaps.

The basic formula is below:

As an example, let’s say the average hourly pay rate for men in a particular grade is £15, and the average hourly rate for women is £14. This would be calculated as follows:

This is the overall approach for your calculations, and in terms of “average”, two approaches can be taken.

The median is the middle number, that is, the data value at which 50% of data values are above it, and 50% of data values are below it. To find the median, data is listed in numerical order from smallest to largest in order to identify the middle entry.

The mean is more commonly referred to as the average, that is, data values are totalled, and the sum is divided by the population.

The use of the median as a measure of average pay has benefits as small number of high or low earners can skew the distribution. The mean is good at capturing differences across the distribution. You are best to present both and provide a commentary that explains each term and how the gaps have been calculated.

Tip

The Close Your Pay Gap Calculator is a brilliant free resource. You simply input the data and it works everything out for you as seen below: