International Women’s Day: 20 well-known UK companies and brands with huge gender pay gaps

Social media is awash with warm words about equality this International Women’s Day (8 March).

But there is one Twitter account that has been making waves in its efforts to shine a spotlight on rampant hypocrisy among UK employers – the Gender Pay Gap Bot.

Each time a company tweets about International Women’s Day, the account jumps into action, retweeting them with a message to let the world know what the firm’s gender pay gap is.

The account uses data published by the UK Government.

All companies with 250 or more employees have to submit data on their pay gap each year – although the Government suspended the mandatory collection in 2019-20 because of Covid.

NationalWorld has analysed the last three years’ worth of data (as of 8 March 2022) to rank companies by the size of the pay gap in their last report.

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The gender pay gap is the difference between the median hourly salary of female employees compared to male employees. The median is a measure of the average that takes the middle value, when salaries are lined up from smallest to largest.

A pay gap of 10% means women on average earn 90p to every £1 earned by men. Bonuses are not included in this calculation - although employers also have to report on gaps in bonus awards.

Employers must also reveal what proportion of the top 25% highest paying jobs are held by women.

The deadline to report figures for 2021-22 is 30 March for public authority employers and 4 April for all others, so the figures may change imminently.

Below is a selection of 20 well-known companies with some of the biggest pay gaps at their last count, including what proportion of the top 25% of jobs are held by women.

Note: Since publishing this article Young’s Brewery has contacted NationalWorld to say that its figures for 2020-21 were distorted due to the fact that the vast majority of its staff were furloughed when pubs were closed during Covid (figures for 2020-21 are a snapshot as of April 2020).

This however would be true of all other hospitality businesses which did not make this list due to having smaller gender pay gaps.