Women in full-time work earned 9.4% less than men on average, showing no change on 2015 numbers, although the total workforce comparison figures, including part-time workers, shows a slight improvement at 18.1%, down 1.1% year on year.

The gender pay gap is the average difference between men and women's aggregate hourly pay.

There were signs of improvement in the gender pay gap at the manager, director and senior official positions, where it fell by 3.1% to an average of 16% pay disparity for women in full-time roles.

In nearly 20 years, the pay gap has fallen from 17.4% in 1997 to 9.4% this year, although it is stagnating with no improvement in the total figures since last year in average pay for full-time female employees.

The gap for all employees (full-time and part-time) is down from 19.3% in 2015 to 18.1% in 2016. Over the last two decades, this has fallen from a high of 27.5% in 1997.

Gender pay reporting

From 2018, larger companies with more than 250 employees will have to report their gender pay gaps which will increase transparency, if passed by parliament. The measure was due to come into effect from 1 October this year but was delayed until the 2017 parliamentary cycle.

Part-time workers – both men and women – earn less, on average, per hour than their full-time counterparts. At the same time, the gender divide is exacerbated as a much higher proportion of women work part-time – 41%, compared with only 12% of men.

The size of the gender pay gap also varies between occupations, as well as the percentage of men versus women in different industries and jobs.

When the total workforce is split by job type, there are stark splits between sectors and the percentage of women employed. In particular, management roles in companies are dominated by males at manager, director and senior official levels with 6% more representation than their female counterparts, while the caring and leisure sectors are predominantly female (3.3% male, 15.8% female) sales and customer service (6.5%/11%) and admin and secretarial (5.5%/17.3%).

The best gender balance is in professional occupations which covers sciences, engineering and health professionals, where there was a 0.6% improvement in the gender pay gap although it still stands stubbornly over the 10% mark.                                            

In professional occupations, the split is more balanced with a slightly larger number of women to men, representing 21.3% to 20.3% respectively, of the total workforce.  

The data is published in the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE)

The latest ONS Quarterly Gender Pay Gap statistics are available here