Gender Pay Differences in UK Universities
What is gender pay gap analysis and what did we do?
Gender pay gap analysis looks at the difference in earnings between men and women, and aims to identify where those differences exist and the reasons why.
Our analysis looked at gender pay gap information submitted by 96 universities in England, between 2017 and 2020. The universities were categorised based on whether they transitioned from being a polytechnic to a university in 1992 (defined as post-92) or otherwise (pre-92). The aim of this project was to highlight any disparity between men and women's pay, and to determine whether the extent of the disparity differed between the pre-1992 and post-1992 universities. In this, we also identified the universities which had the greatest disparity and were able to infer potential causes for the gender pay difference.
We explored the differences in the average hourly pay and the proportion of men and women in the lowest paid and highest paid jobs within each university.
What did we find?
Bar chart
Table
This table shows all 96 universities ranked by the average difference in hourly pay between men and women (with 1 having the largest difference and 96 having the smallest). All staff were ranked by salary, then this list was split into 4 equal brackets. The male LQ (%) and male TQ (%) shows the percentage of men in the lowest pay bracket and the highest pay bracket respectively.
Pictogram
What does this mean?
The results make a clear case that there is a disparity in hourly mean pay between men and women at English universities. The bar chart (Figure 1) shows that pre-92 has a higher pay disparity relative to post-92 universities. Inspecting the pictogram (Figure 2) indicates a possible cause for this as women dominate low pay jobs in both university categories and high pay jobs are roughly an equal spread for post-92 or more swayed to men at pre-92 universities. This would cause the hourly mean wage for women to be lower in women than men with a larger difference at pre-92 universities. The median pay difference helps to reduce the effect these extremes have and could give a fairer picture of pay. There is a reduction in the disparity for both categories but there is still a significant difference, so it is likely that there are other factors to consider.
For future work, an analysis into why there is such an extreme difference in percentages of the genders working in low pay jobs would be the next step in understanding why there is a pay difference. Low-paying jobs are much more likely to include part-time jobs than high-pay jobs, so sub-setting the data into part-time and full-time work would also be useful.
Data sources
Data source: https://gender-pay-gap.service.gov.uk/