The pay gap. In 2019, all businesses are well aware of the blatant difference between the average male and female salary. All across the world, the average for women tends to be lower than that of men, despite a significant rise of educated, strong women entering the workforce every year.
PricewaterhouseCoopers, or PwC for short, is a diverse organization and one of the largest employers in the world. This big four company has been interested in looking more deeply into the statistics of Ireland that surround gender inequality. Recently, this firm came out with it’s own set of statistics, which vary significantly from those published in the past.
PwC has reported that it has a pay gap of only 5.7pc in Ireland, which differs from the Ibec report that averaged the difference to be at 8.2pc. A partner at PwC Ireland spoke on the companies behalf, saying that the pay gap is due to the larger amount of male counterparts in higher ranked positions or higher paying jobs within the same company. Beyond this, she notes that there is little to no difference.
Even with strong female representation of over half of the employees in PwC Ireland, the company notes that there is still an unproportional number of women in senior roles. Many companies that have been aiming to diversify their employee based have faced this same problem, but are currently working to lessen the gap between women’s and men’s pay.
The Irish government too is very interested in this topic. There has been speculation that drafting for a bill is currently in the works; this bill may require all companies to publish an annual report on the average pay of all women workers vs average pay of all men workers.
While this seems to be a good idea, the data can easily be skewed by an outlier within the set. In general, those who are fighting to eliminate the pay gap are interested more in the availability of higher level positions for women in a male dominated market and how their salaries compare to those of men who are of the exact same position. An average in this case has the potential to remove a very telling aspect of inequality.
Overall, PwC’s statistics seem to be showing positive figures but by only providing the average to the public does not give ample evidence for them to claim that their company is breaking barriers for equality.
