UK’s gender pay gap ‘won’t close for 30 years’ at current rates | Gender pay gap

Women in the UK will not be paid the same as men by 2056 at the current rate of progress, according to a Trades Union Congress report.

The TUC said the gender pay gap of £2,548 a year meant women were essentially working for free so far this year.

The umbrella organization’s report says the rate at which women’s earnings are increasing relative to men is so slow that the gap is not planned to close for 30 years.

“Women are effectively working for free for the first month and a half of the year compared to men,” TUC general secretary Paul Nowak said.

“Imagine coming to work every day and not getting paid. This is the reality of the gender pay gap. By 2026, this should be unthinkable. With the cost of living still so high, women can’t afford to lose out. They deserve their fair share.”

The pay gap, which is 12.8% overall, is wider in some sectors, according to the TUC. Educated women earn 17% less than their male counterparts; In finance and insurance, the gap increases to 27.2%.

Nowak said the Employment Rights Bill, which Labor introduced last year, could help address the gender pay gap and other employment rights issues. He said the law was “an important step forward in terms of pay equality for women”.

“It will ban exploitative zero-hours contracts, which disproportionately harm women and their pay packets. It will enable employers to publish action plans to address gender inequalities, but these plans need to be robust, ambitious and built to deliver real change, otherwise they will not work.”

The gender pay gap may have been underestimated for more than 20 years, according to research published by the British Journal of Industrial Relations in August last year.

The Office for National Statistics failed to properly account for the fact that it received more data from larger employers when reporting its annual survey of working hours and earnings (Ashe), researchers found.