Equal pay audits made simple by JobPricing

Employers are being given three years' grace to get to grips with equal pay audits on a voluntary basis - or face new laws which will force them to publish details of their gender pay divide.

But the announcement should hold few concerns for CELRE customers, who can already use the tools that come with their subscription to compare male and female employees' salaries at all levels of the organisation.

Following a long battle within government, the Equalities Bill contains a provision which will allow ministers to bring in regulations of their own choosing by 2013 if they are dissatisfied with the progress being made by employers.

The regulations would affect all companies with 250 or more employers, and would require details of both basic pay and bonuses to be made public. Read more about the Equalities Bill on XpertHR.

Using XpertHR JobPricing - through which CELRE survey participants can build their own tables and reports - customers can already create tables and graphs which show the pay gap for men and women at any job level and in any job function.

Data for the participating company is also shown in the context of the pay gap for the industry as a whole.

To try out this facility on XpertHR JobPricing, follow these simple steps:

• go to XpertHR JobPricing and log in using your user name and password;
• select a salary survey by clicking on the title;
• make your usual selections, choosing job level, function and other variables;
• scroll to the bottom of the screen and under "gender", select and apply both male and female;
• run "show report".

The results initially combine both male and female salaries for the job levels and functions you have selected. Separate these using the button marked "separate table data".

Now click the button marked "show my organisation's data". This facility is available only to customers who have participated in the survey.

Each table now includes a new row of data below each of the sets of figures for the survey as a whole. These new figures, shown in orange, are your organisation's median and average pay and bonus figures based on the same criteria used in the main table.

Of course, once you have the data, you still need to establish why any differentials exist and what actions are needed...

If you are not currently able to see your own organisation's data or would like to take part in future surveys, please call us on 020 8652 4653.