A new report from the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) Committee has suggested that small businesses should be required to publish gender pay gap figures alongside big companies.

Currently, only businesses with more than 250 staff must report on their gender pay gap.

The Committee noted that only around half the members of the UK workforce are expected to be covered by the present reporting requirements. The report said that with evidence that the pay gap is higher in smaller businesses, it is calling on the government to widen the net of organisations required to publish gender pay gap data to those with over 50 employees (from the current 250).

The report also recommends that organisations should be required to publish, alongside the figures, an explanation of any gender pay gap and an action plan for closing the gap, against which they must report progress each year, as part of normal reporting requirements.

Rachel Reeves MP, Chair of the BEIS Committee, commented, "Gender pay reporting has helped to shine a light on how men dominate the highest paid sectors of the economy and the highest paid occupations within each sector. Our analysis found that some companies have obscene and entirely unacceptable gender pay gaps of more than 40%.”

“Our report recommends that the government requires all organisations with over 50 employees to publish annual gender pay gap data from 2020,” Reeves said.

Sarah Kaiser, Employee Experience, Diversity and Inclusion lead at Fujitsu EMEIA, also commented, “Creating a collaborative environment which is open to different ideas, perspectives and styles of thinking should be a priority for any business – small, large, private or public. The first step for any organisation is to ensure equal and fair pay amongst colleagues, no matter their gender, sexual orientation, age, race or background. However, reporting gender pay shouldn’t be limited to large organisations: closing the UK’s national pay gap needs a collective and national effort from all organisations.”

Kaiser added that “for businesses, gender pay gap reporting is a critical step in any plans to attract, retain and develop a diverse talent population.”

“When reporting any pay gap, businesses must be honest. Employees and customers want to hear how the company feels about any gap and what they're doing about it. The time has passed for apologising for gender pay gaps, this should be about taking action and closing them,” Kaiser said.

The Committee’s report calls for clarification of the way in which the remuneration of equity partners is included in the gender pay figures, before next year’s figures are published.

The report also noted that while the median pay across the economy is 18% in favour of men, at an organisational level, the new figures reveal found that gender pay gaps of over 40% were not uncommon in some sectors and 78% of organisations are reporting gender pay gaps in favour of men. A new analysis by the Business Committee also found that 1,377 employers (13% of the total) have gender pay gaps in favour of men of over 30%.

Furthermore, the report noted that the exclusion of the highest paid people in organisations made “a nonsense of efforts to understand the scale of, and reasons behind”, the gender pay gap and that the government was wrong to omit the remuneration of partners from the figures required in the Regulations. The report recommends that the government uses the guidance to clarify how data on partner pay should be calculated and included in time for the publication of data next year.