Assistant Chief Minister Richard Buchanan, who is vice-chairman of the States Employment Board, said that a project to encourage local companies to voluntarily report the average difference in pay between men and women or face being made to do it in future was on hold. The decision mirrors the situation in the UK – where gender pay-gap reporting has been law for companies with more than 250 employees since 2017 –which has suspended the legal requirement for firms to report their figures.
However, Mr Buchanan pledged that taking action to tackle the gender pay gap would still be a priority in Jersey once stability resumed, and he said the government was due to publish its own annual data soon.
‘It is all about trying to place as few burdens on businesses at the moment. As a government our priority is, number one, to make sure people are working and make sure businesses are still there to provide jobs,’ he said.
‘It is definitely very much on our agenda but like everything in life you have to prioritise. As a government we are deeply concerned about keeping as many businesses running as possible at the moment.’
He added: ‘The States are committed to diversity and we want to see as diverse a workforce as possible, and we are still working hard on that.’
Mr Buchanan warned, however, not to expect any great progress with the latest public sector gender pay-gap figures, which he said had been skewed in part by GPs becoming government employees for part of the pandemic during 2020.
‘We are almost ready to publish those figures,’ he said. ‘I don’t think we will see much of an improvement this year, for one reason we had to take on board all the doctors in the Island and a lot of them are men.’
In 2019 the Gender Pay Gap Review Panel recommended that the government should take ‘immediate action to close the gender pay gap’, with men in the public sector earning an average of 13.6% more than their female counterparts. Chief Minister John Le Fondré accepted many of the recommendations, including a call for the government to produce statistics on the public sector pay gap and to act to reduce it.
At the end of that year the government published its first gender pay-gap report, which revealed that the average difference in pay between men and women in the public sector then stood at 18.3%.
In January 2020, the Chief Minister and Mr Buchanan told a hearing of the same panel that they intended to introduce compulsory gender pay-gap reporting if not enough businesses volunteered the data during the year. Such a move would require legislation to enforce it, they said.
This week, equality campaigners in the UK have warned that decades of work to close the gender pay gap is at stake if the country’s reporting service – which is currently under review – is shelved for a second year. The Women and Equalities Select Committee has, however, called for it to be urgently reinstated.
