The vast majority of senior business leaders attending a PwC event on gender pay reporting said the measure has had a positive impact on their business.
At the event, to launch the PwC report ‘Promise, Progress or Failure to Prioritise? What We Learned From 2019 Gender Pay Gap Reports’ attendees were polled on their feelings towards gender pay reporting and 82% of respondents said it has had a positive impact. The remaining 18% felt it has had no impact on their business yet. No attendees reported a negative impact.
However, despite such positivity, much of the discussion at the event was dominated by talk of slow progress in shifting the headline figures over the past year.
A point of discussion was how businesses need to look beyond snap judgements about the headline numbers. Instead, they should establish what change is possible, based on a realistic assessment of the task in hand, and factors such as natural turnover of staff and the availability of the right talent that will be central to rebalancing their organisations.
Attendees acknowledged it may take time before significant changes are evident in the data, but that doesn’t mean change isn’t happening behind the scenes.
