Gender pay gap: Women in IT paid 26% less than men, data reveals

* for comprehensive industry descriptions see here. 

For a quarter of the industries analysed, men get paid at least 20% more than women. These are real estate activities, IT, Education, financial and insurance activities. The industry that has the biggest gender pay gap is ‘real estate activities’, whereby women receive a whopping 31.12% less than men. This sector is described as Activities of real estate investment trusts which includes buying, selling and renting own real estate. 

There are great gender disparities within the IT industry since women represent just 30.31% of the workforce and there is a severe imbalance on male and female pay—with women getting paid 26.07% less than men. The education sector, whereby women represent 69.71% of the workforce, has a shocking 25.82% gender pay difference. The financial sector has a much more equal balance of female to male representation, with women representing 44.04% of the workforce, yet women are still paid a whopping 22.81% less than men. 

 Industries that women are paid the most, compared to men

The industry with the best pay for women compared to men is Activities of households as employers of domestic personnel, with a whopping 36.94% pay increase compared to men. This industry includes jobs such as maids, cooks, gardeners and babysitters—and women represent 72.31% of the workforce. Following this is the construction, mining and quarrying industries whereby women are also paid more than men, on average. In the construction industry, it is unsurprising thatfemales represent just 14.66% of workers, but what is surprising is that women get paid 17.68% more than men on average. Tasmyn Brittain, who works in construction provided some comments on her experiences working in the industry:

“I chose construction as there were very few women within the industry so I wanted to be able to break that barrier, and also knew that within the construction industry there is plenty of space to move up the ranks and learn as much as possible. However, there is a slight surprise if I turn up on a building site - most men seem taken aback to see a woman on site in full PPE. I’m definitely outnumbered in the office in terms of women versus men. A lot of the women in construction, or at least my place of work tend to be in admin or HR roles, rather than physically working in the factories or on site.”  

Industries that have the worst female representation

As well as the gender pay gap being a barrier to female success, there are major disparities in female representation across industries. In eight of the twenty industries analysed, less than 30% of the workforce are women. The industries with the worst female representation (%) are the construction, transport and storage, and mining and quarrying industries. 

Methodology 

1.  Digital PR consultants Reboot conducted this study with the aim of identifying industries with the best and worst gender pay gaps. This study analyses quarterly data estimates from the Labour Force Survey (LFS) for July to September 2022 based on a sample of 69437 individuals.

2. The dataset was sourced from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) which conducts studies of the employment circumstances of the UK population through the The Labour Force Survey (LFS).

3. Our sample was filtered by employment status focusing on employees, self-employed, government scheme and unpaid family workers.

4. An index was constructed to measure and identify industries with most female representation, proportion of females in high positions compared to men (Managers, Directors and Senior Officials), the % of women in each industry that are in a position of power, the number of  females that received bonuses, and lowest gender pay gap.

5. The gender pay gap difference has been calculated based on the average gross hourly pay and taking into account the female and male average hourly pay.

6. The LFS data was collected on a sample of population, to convert this information to give estimates for the population, the *Weighting variables provided by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) along with the LFS dataset itself have been used.

7. The category ‘Other Service Activities industry’ was excluded due to its broad nature.

* weighting variables are PWT20 and PIWT20 for person weight and person wage weight. For each row in raw data, the weight can be thought of as the number of people with those attributes.

* The average hourly pay for women has been subtracted by the average hourly pay for men and divided by the average hourly pay for women.kl