The Republic of Ireland do not publish a national estimate of the gender pay gap. This is somewhat paradoxical given that we now have legislation that requires all large employers to publish their own gender pay gap, yet there exists no publication at national level that estimates the overall gender pay gap, or the gap across the population, sectors, occupations, or age groups.
This has significant implications in terms of data availability, but more fundamentally for policy. While the gender pay gap transparency legislation has the benefit of requiring businesses become aware of their gender pay gap, there is a risk that we will miss the bigger picture. There are two primary problems with this approach. Firstly, an overreliance on gender pay gap transparency data can led to the perception that the solution to narrowing the gender pay gap lies solely with employers and secondly, it’s incredibly difficult, or almost impossible to assess whether we are having any success in narrowing the gender pay gap at a national level if the only information we have on the gender pay gap is from this source.
On the first point, relying on employers alone to narrow the gender pay gap is unlikely to be enough, particularly as there is no requirement on employers to actually do anything about their gender pay gap. They are required to report it but there is no penalty for inaction to reduce it. To ensure action we are relying here on businesses fearing the potential impact of a public shaming day in the media on their business.
More importantly though, in large part, many aspects of the gender pay gap can be explained by a lack of Government policy action. For example, we know that gendered inequalities in childcare responsibilities and a lack of access to affordable childcare is one of the key underlying reasons explaining the gender pay gap. By not having national statistics on the gender pay gap, and instead having the focus on the performance of the local business down the road, the Government gets a free pass.
The most up-to-date estimate of our national gender pay gap relates to 2018. Promises have been made that we will have estimates for 2019 and 2020 by the end of this year, 2022, a time lag of two years. Frustrating as this is, it is not the biggest problem. More concerning is the lack of consistency in terms of data source, and a lack of agreement on the measure that should be used. Ultimately, this means that any efforts to try and assess trends over time should be done with caution. We can’t know how much the changes in the figures relate to changes in data source and how much relate to real changes.
The Central Statistics Office produces the ‘Women and Men in Ireland’ report which includes a comparison of male and female earnings. However, the latest publication in this contained estimates of the GPG based on a comparison of median annual earnings. No rationale is given for the measure used and it is the only CSO publication that presents earnings comparisons based on this measure. It is more usual to see earnings data, and specifically comparisons of earnings by gender, to be based on mean hourly or weekly earnings. For example, the 2013 and 2016 ‘Women and Men in Ireland’ report used mean hourly earnings.
Another CSO publication focused on historical earnings by gender over the period 1938-2015 based upon mean weekly earnings.
The key source of data on the gender pay gap in Ireland is that published by Eurostat, which is focused on capturing the gender pay gap using mean hourly earnings. It is published annually and it is principally cited by those who are reporting on the size of the gender pay gap across Ireland. The latest available data for the Republic of Ireland on the Eurostat is for 2018 where the gap in earnings was 11.3% in favour of males.
Many took the 2018 figure as representing a substantial and significant drop on the year previous (2017) when it was estimated to be 14.4%. As mentioned above we do not really have any idea of how much this drop represented a real decline in the gender pay gap, or how much it related to differences in the data source used to capture the gap.
Over the years a data sources have been used to estimate the gender pay gap. For 2018 figures the Earnings Analysis Using Administrative Data Sources (EAADS). The earnings data taken from the EAADS is based on employee tax data from Revenue of which the primary source is the P35L dataset. The P35L dataset is linked to the CSO and other data to provide demographic breakdowns of earnings similar to those previously provided by the National Employment Survey (NES). The publication provides earnings data by NACE economic sector, gender, age, nationality and region (residence). However, as EAADS data does not contain any breakdown of hours worked or hourly earnings a sample of employments had to be taken from this and surveyed to capture hours worked and other demographic information.
For 2017 (and 2015, 2016), the Structure of Earnings Administrative Data project (SESADP) was carried out, which provided the earnings data and created an earnings dataset for each year. In these years, hours worked was imputed from data captured in the Earnings Hours and Employments Costs Survey (EHECS).
This difference in data sources is a common occurrence and it is important to grasp that this means there is no consistency in estimates of the gap over time. This means that it is difficult to interpret trends over time. This is remarkable given the public and policy salience of gender equality issues over recent years. As already noted we have Gender Pay Gap Transparency legislation, we have had policy action on childcare, we have recently had a Citizens Assembly on Gender Equality. But we still haven’t got our head around the idea that we should probably track the gender pay gap using a consistent and reliable data source more often than every 4 years. We should also have periodic estimates (circa every 4 years) of our adjusted gender pay gap, so that we can understand the importance of different structural factors in explaining the gender pay gap. This would allow us to have an informed conversation about whether we want policy, what policy can do, and what policy instruments should be used to narrow the gap.
This lack of data on the gendered distribution of earnings, relates to a bigger issue about the lack of timely earnings data more generally. An example of the absurdity of this can be taken from the recent publication of the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings data in the UK (and NI) on which many commentators are caveating their discussion of the results with ‘the data was collected in April of this year & so isn’t particularly timely’. This compares to the Republic of Ireland where the latest breakdown of earnings for the Republic of Ireland relates to 2018. We need our National statistics office to provide us with timely & consistent economic and demographic breakdowns of earnings in Ireland.
But back to the gender pay gap and the forthcoming first requirement on employers larger than 250 to publish information on their gender pay gap. There is no specified format for the gender pay gap information and relevant report to be published by the employer for the 2022 reporting cycle, other than that the gender pay gap information must be published on the employer’s website or in some other way in a manner that is accessible to all its employees and to the public, and it must be available for a period of at least three years beginning with the date of publication.
It is obviously as yet unclear how employers will format their reports & the ease on which we will be able to get a grasp on what is going on amongst large companies in terms of gendered gaps in pay. What we do know however is that the Government is developing a central website, which is said going to be in place in 2023 which will consist of a central portal where all employer reports will be uploaded and can be accessed publicly.
This central website needs to be more than just a central portal where employers upload their information reports, it needs to also be a source of analysis. This website has big potential to help us to understand what is going on in terms of the gender pay gap amongst large companies in Ireland in the first instance. We can analyse the overall gender pay gap amongst large employers, variations, whether there are commonalities in reasons for their gender pay gap & where there are companies with particularly small or particularly large pay gaps why is this so? Come the end of December we're going to have a lot of information on the gender pay gap across large employers, which will only become properly meaningful when we utilise the information.