All The Sneaky Ways Companies Can Avoid Telling the Truth About Their Gender Pay Gap

Last night Channel 4 broadcast a sensational story about the misuse of data. No, we’re not talking about the unfolding story of howCambridge Analyticaharvested personal data from people’s Facebook profiles to help Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and, possibly, also the referendum on whether Britain should stay in the European Union.

This is about different but not less significant cover up – the gender pay gap. It’s safe to say that the most recent episode of Dispatches was somewhat overshadowed by the revelations about Cambridge Analytica. However, their findings about the legal loopholes which are helping companies to hide the true extent of their internal gender pay gaps are no less salacious.

The Government’s deadline for all companies with more than 250 employees to publish data about how much their male and female staff are paid – May 30th - is fast approaching. Arguably this is one of the most significant things to happen when it comes to equality in the workplace for quite some time because it should force transparency.

In order to make an informed decision about your salary expectations you need, well, information. The Government’s decision to force companies to declare that information could empower women and, finally, close the gender pay gap. As things stand, the current median pay gap for both part time and full-time workers is 18.4% and, at the current rate of progress, the Fawcett Society and other campaign groups reckon it will take 100 years to solve the problem.

However, as we teeter on the cusp of this potential revolution in the workplace Dispatches have conducted an investigation which reveals that companies are finding completely legal ways to side step the whole thing.

Dispatches reporters posed as a fake cleaning company with 264 employees and went to see specialist consultant to ask for advice on how they should report their gender pay gap figures. One such consultant told them:

‘There’s various um scurrilous, clever legal ruses that we can suggest to you… I mean there’s even potentially options of do you set up a subsidiary, a parent company, and stick all your highly paid bosses in that…So that they get out of the picture’.

So far, so ethically questionable. This advisor then went on to tell the undercover Dispatches journalists that another option would be to make staff members redundant in order to avoid submitting the true extent of their pay gap figures. The consultant said:

‘So say you have 251 employees we might suggest that you might want to make a couple redundant… On 3rd April if you could find a couple to make redundant you know you gonna be there’s obviously unfair dismissal risk there cos it might not be redundancy you might be prepared to take it if you had the odd two to let go’.

In a similarly unscrupulous vein, a different advisor told Dispatches that there probably won’t be any consequences for companies that fail to report their figures. ‘As of today, right now, there is no direct enforcement mechanism’ they said, ‘so, in other words, if you didn’t publish anything at all, are you ever going to get, as of today, a fine or anything? No. Because in terms of the resources that has been put into policing this. It’s zero because there was no enforcement mechanism’.

**READ MORE: Facts About Women Around The World **

Another suggestion made by this advisor was not to include the salaries of company directors or owners. ‘You could structure it on that basis and we know other organisations that have done that’, they said.

Without enforcement or penalties for those who fail to comply, this pay gap reporting will be meaningless. However, if companies do follow any of the suggestions made by the advisors consulted by Dispatches there may not be that much that the Government can do about it. Employment lawyer Josephine Van Leirop said ‘it’s not a breach of regulations to restructure your organisation but it’s not within the spirit of the regulations to do that purely to avoid publishing your gender pay gap’.

Commenting on the suggestion that companies should let people go in order to avoid reporting, Van Leirop said she was ‘fairly horrified at the suggestion that employees should be dismissed in order to avoid reporting your gender pay gap’. But, again, she noted ‘it’s not a breach of the gender pay reporting regulations to dismiss employees but if you dismiss employees unfairly then those individuals are likely to have unfair dismissal claims’.

Finally, Van Leirop said that it’s a ‘legal requirement’ to publish this information for any company with 250 or more staff members. She said that the idea that companies may fail to report their pay gaps because there is no enforcement mechanism ‘demonstrates that we need the European Human Rights Commission (EHRC)’ to be properly resourced so that it can ensure that companies are complying.

Speaking about the findings of this Dispatches investigation, Maria Miller MP, Chair of the Women and Equalities Select Committee said ‘the Equality and Human Rights Commission really has to wake up and smell the coffee and that you know if they are going to make gender pay gap reporting mechanisms work for us then they are going to have to be tough in their enforcement too…’

She added, ‘the EHRC in this country has quite considerable powers to intervene on companies that they feel are breaching the equality act to take cases to court to show the strength of the legislation. At the moment they’re really not making it a great priority to take cases into court to demonstrate how strong that law is’.

Only once the deadline has passed next Month will we know the scale of this country’s gender pay gap across multiple industries. However, if this Dispatches investigation is anything to go by, the figures presented to us may not be as reliable as we would like.

**Dispatches: The Truth About Your Pay, was screen on Chanel 4 on Monday March 19th. You can catch up here. **

Follow Vicky on Twitter@Victoria_Spratt

This article originally appeared on The Debrief.