Conservative MP Phillip Davies, a recently elected member of the Commons Women and Equalities Committee, has claimed that men actually earn less than women in part-time work. Could this be a surprising twist in the tale of gender pay gaps?
According to provisional 2016 figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), women working between 10 and 30 hours per week do indeed earn more on average than their male counterparts. The figures show that the men in this category earned on average between 25p (3%) and almost £1 (11.5%) an hour less than women in the same category. That is not the full story however. Where full-time and part-time figures are combined across all categories of work there is an evident gender pay gap of 18% across the whole workforce in favour of men.
Part-time workers are generally paid less per hour than their full-time counterparts, and typically a far greater proportion of women than men work part-time (41% of women compared with 21% of men), thus explaining why the gender pay gap for full-time and part-time employees combined is greater than the gender pay gap for full-time employees only.
The reality remains that overall women still get paid less than men per hour of work done, which the new Gender Pay Gap reporting obligations are attempting to address.