The first ever survey research article from employment and reward specialists at Industrial Relations Services (IRS) appeared in the second edition of IRS Industrial Relations Review and Report (a journal which continues to be published to this day, now under the guise of IRS Employment Review), published in February 1971.
It looked at the perennial issue of equal pay, focusing on "the differentials between the basic pay of male employees and that of female employees", and concluding that "there is still much to be done in the field of equal pay before the [Equal Pay] Act [1970] becomes operative".
The Equal Pay Act 1970 (subscription required) is now long established, but a comparison of the headline findings of the 1971 IRS research with latest official data serves to illustrate the glacial pace of progress towards parity of pay between the sexes since its inception.
According to the 1971 IRS survey, women's basic rates of pay averaged 78% of those paid to men (the differential having decreased by 2.5 percentage points from 24.5% as at 9 February 1970 to 22% as at 31 December 1970).
Nearly four decades on, latest official data from Office for National Statistics (ONS) show that - based on analysis of movements in average basic salary levels - the gender pay gap ran at 17.1% (PDF format, 121.7K) in April 2008. This figure represents an increase of 0.1 percentage point from that recorded a year earlier (17% in April 2007), suggesting that progress on closing the gender pay gap has actually gone into reverse.
Although the 1971 IRS survey research and the 2008 ONS data use different methodologies, a rough comparison of the two findings provides a useful indicator of just how slowly progress is being made towards closing the gender pay gap. Such a comparison suggests that the gender pay gap narrowed by only 4.9 percentage points between 1971 (when it stood at 22%) and 2008 (by which time it had reached 17.1%).
The gender pay gap also widened in 2008 when median data were used. Full-time adult women employees earned 87.2% of men's median hourly pay excluding overtime in April 2008. The resulting gender pay gap is therefore 12.8%. This represents a widening of 0.3 percentage points compared with the 12.5% equal pay gap recorded in April 2007. It is back in line with the gender pay gap recorded for April 2006 (subscription required), which also stood at 12.8%.
The conclusion of the IRS 1971 survey that "there is still much to be done in the field of equal pay" therefore rings depressingly true even today, nearly four decades on from the introduction of the Equal Pay Act 1970.
- The IRS survey research programme has a four decade history at the leading edge of HR information. Visit the IRS research website for details of our current programme of surveys. You can also take part in the longest-established IRS survey, our annual survey of graduate recruitment, which has been running for more than 20 years.
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