Will the Equality Act 2010 close the gender pay gap? In a word - no

She will be partly seeking to respond to critics such as the Fawcett Society (external website), who yesterday claimed that: "The Coalition's failure to implement the Equalities Act 2010 in full risks not just endorsing but widening the gender pay gap in the current and foreseeable economic climate."

As I explain more in a post on Pay Intelligence (Employment Intelligence's sister blog) equal pay is one of the areas of the Act where changes proposed are really quite limited.

The only change highlighted by May in her piece is the provision "to make pay secrecy clauses unenforceable". 

This is actually a very limited provision, as you will see if you look at the FAQ on that subject on XpertHR, part of the comprehensive package of advice, resources, policies and documents, podcasts and other tools added to XpertHR in recent months and fully updated today.

That is not to downplay the significance of the Act as a whole, the history of which is summarised in an excellent article in the Equal Rights Review by Bob Hepple (PDF format, 624K). It was Bob Hepple who, with Lord Lester and others, originally proposed to the new Labour government in 1997 that they should review and reform the UK's anti-discrimination law and practice.

This is what Bob Hepple says:

"The overriding aim of the Equality Act 2010 is to achieve harmonisation, simplfication and modernisation of Equality Law... There must be no hierarchy of equality. The same rule should be applied to all strands unless there is a convincing justification for an exception. To a large extent, the Act achieves this aim.... There is bound to be continuing argument at the margins, particularly where the principle of equality has to be reconciled with the freedom of religion and freedom of expression, but broadly speaking, the drafters have managed to limit the exceptions."