Last reviewed 17 November 2023
The UK's leading charity campaigning for gender equality and women’s rights has said that 22 November will be the day this year when, based on the gender pay gap, women overall in the UK stop being paid compared to men.
The Fawcett Society has designated this as Equal Pay Day.
The gender pay gap is the difference between the average pay of men and women within a particular group or population. The Society uses the mean, full-time, hourly gender pay gap for the UK to calculate the gender pay gap for Equal Pay Day.
This year the figure is 10.7%, only slightly down from 10.9% last year.
Fawcett Society Chief Executive, Jemima Olchawski, said: “Today's data means that Equal Pay Day (EPD) falls on 22 November — this is the date when, based on average earnings, women start working for free until the end of the year. This is just 48 hours later than last year and represents a glacial shift in the gender pay gap of just 0.2 percentage points.”
She also highlighted that the gender pay gap hits black and minoritised women hardest and called for ethnicity pay gap reporting to be made mandatory to improve the quality of the data on this issue.
“Employers must stop asking discriminatory salary history questions, and we need mandatory ethnicity pay gap reporting,” Ms Olchawski continued. “There are so many policy interventions that could turn the dial but the simplest of them all is making flexible work the default.”
See here for more details of Equal Pay Day.
The European Commission has calculated that it falls one week earlier in the EU, on 15 November, as the gender pay gap across the Union is 13%.