Update, 15:50, 3 April 2018: This post has been updated, with an interactive table of the data now available.

By Friday, public sector bodies with 250 or more employees had to submit data as part of the government’s gender pay gap reporting exercise.

While maintained schools have generally been outside the scope of the exercise, a large number of academy trusts have been required to report.

This is what we found by looking at the data.

Enormous discrepancy

Out of some 471 academy trusts identified, the average gender pay gap was 31.7% in men’s favour^[1]. That is, for every £100 earned by a man, £68.30 was earned by a woman. For comparison, across all 7,520 organisations that had reported to the government as of 2pm yesterday – covering those in both the public and private sectors – the average was 10.1% in men’s favour.

Median pay gaps at individual academy trusts ranged from a vast 62.7% in men’s favour to 19.2% in women’s favour – though only 11 of these 471 trusts reported pay gaps in favour of women, with three reporting that they had no pay gap^[2]. One in ten trusts reported a gender pay gap 50% or more in men’s favour.

Pay gaps at the largest academy trusts in England are shown in the chart below.

And data for all these 471 trusts is given in this interactive table, which as well as mean and median hourly wage gap figures, gives the percentage difference in bonus pay received and the percentage of male and female employees who received bonuses:

We’ve also made the data available as a CSV file for those who would prefer that. This features all of the columns from the source data file.

And we’ve also making the code we used to analyse the data available, to allow others to build upon our analysis.

Some thoughts on the data

There are some things it’s worth saying about the data.

Firstly, gender pay gaps the government has required these organisations to report are not calculated on a like-for-like basis. That is, the data doesn’t take account of the fact that men and women may be in different roles or different grades.

Some will consider this a limitation of the data – though it could be argued that using this approach in fact shines a greater light on the large gender pay discrepancy that exists in part precisely because of differences in roles and seniority.

The data is also unaudited – meaning to some extent we are having to take the numbers on trust.

Another limitation when attempting to draw comparisons between different organisations is that the figures only cover employees. If one academy trust employed cleaning staff directly, they would count in the figures, whereas for another academy trust which had outsourced its cleaning they would not. If we supposed that cleaning staff were generally female and low paid, this could have a flattering effect on the figures of this second trust.

As well as these data quality issues, there appear to be a number of academy trusts that should have reported as part of this process but which have not done so. In theory at least, these trusts could face fines from the Equality and Human Rights Commission for their non-compliance.

In contrast, there were at least 12 trusts which reported pay gap figures despite not being required to, on account of having fewer than 250 employees. Props to Charles Darwin Academy Trust, Chilford Hundred Education Trust, Churchill Academy, Holy Family Catholic Academy Trust, Holy Trinity Catholic Multi Academy Company, the Learners’ Trust, Lymm High School, Nexus Multi Academy Trust, The Blyth Quays Trust, Trinitas Academy Trust, United Endeavour Trust, Warrington Collegiate Education Trust and any others that did so.

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