From research undertaken in 2012 on where public bodies were at on Equal Pay and closing the gender pay gap, it was concluded :
government can finally, after more than 40 years, ensure that the missing piece of the jigsaw which has left equal pay for women as a job too long incomplete, is finally retrieved from behind the sofa cushions of public sector apathy. By commissioning a consortium of the major equality groups to construct and manage a centralised equal pay gap database accessible to all – ministers and members of the public - and designed to hold equal pay gap data submitted directly and annually by all public sector bodies, real mainstreaming, accountability, transparency and powerful drivers for effective performance management on delivering equal pay for all the protected characteristics would %ensure equal pay across the equality spectrum did not require another 40 years.
In 2015, when research returned to look specifically at Councils in Scotland and where the gender pay gap was [2.33% ] the conclusion then was :
Having had over 40 years to embrace the work required to deliver equal pay for women, the stark reality is that for Scotland’s Councils making equal pay happen for women remains something which has been reluctantly embraced by them. The evidence suggests that but for the active intervention of trade unions and court cases, closing the equal pay gender gaps may well have dragged on for another few decades.
This lack of enthusiasm for eliminating gender discrimination is reflected in the emerging visibility of the substructure of organisational pay gaps, where the most common causes are identified in Council reports as the preponderance of women in low paid and/or part time work, with it being implied that women are choosing these jobs and so culpable in creating the organisational gender pay gaps.
There is a complete absence in equal pay gap reports published by Councils of an understanding of the cultural, historical and political elements which created and sustains the institutional discrimination in relation to gender which permeates society and its structures, of which Councils themselves are a part. It is no surprise that with the absence of that understanding, Councils have no real plans for eliminating the gender discrimination embedded in their workplaces in the form of occupational segregation. As Argyll & Bute Council put it so eloquently:
“The persistence of the overall organisational pay gap is, like most local authorities, mainly caused by the relative numbers of lower paid female dominant roles.”
“The remaining organisational pay gap is mostly reflective of the relative large numbers of lower paid female employees in high number occupancy roles. This is not anomalous in a local authority context.”
Subsequent research reports in 2019 the Gap was going in the wrong direction and had reached 3.99%.
That same research also revealed that the ethnicity pay gap was -7.87% and the disability pay gap was 7.71%.
In 2023, research found that the Gap was 3.58%. Critically, the research also looked at what Councils were doing on Occupational Segregation, which is recognised as playing a significant role in creating and sustaining the Gap. It was found that Councils were in fact doing little of real substance to reduce and eliminate Occuopational Segregation. In fact, it was found that in 2015 the ratio of women:men employed by Councils was 70.44%:29.56%. At 2023 the ratio is 74.86%:25.14% - the dial is moving in the wrong direction.