This is something unions like Prospect have been calling for for sometime. We see more transparency about pay as being really important to making it fairer and helping companies access all the skills available from both men and women.
The figures that employers produce as part of these regulations do not take account of the differences in how and where men and women work (factors like occupation, pay grade, working hours etc.) and to that extent they are not a measure of equal pay gaps per se, though equal pay issues are likely an important causal factor of gender pay gaps in many cases.
The chart below shows the gender pay gaps for some of the largest employers where Prospect members work in the defence sector.
You can see that the majority have gaps larger than the median for larger companies. The largest gap is a Qinetiq, where the median hourly rate for women is 20.5% lower than for men. In other words when comparing median hourly rates, women earn 80p for every £1 that men earn. Women make up just 13% of the roles in the highest paid quarter of roles.
Prospect members working in companies with more than 250 staff can find out more the gender pay gap where they work on the government’s gov.uk website.