Given that the UK Government has suspended the 2020 Gender Pay Gap Reporting deadline because it recognises that your HR teams are facing 'unprecedented uncertainty and pressure at this time' you may feel that your business has just dodged a bullet.
However, the world is watching right now.
Organisations are under enormous scrutiny from just about everyone and there's a growing legion of people keen to hold employers to account for any actions that they deem to be unfair. I'm sure that many of us will have spotted the social media lists encouraging boycotts of Wetherspoons and Virgin to name but a few.
Helen Lewis, author of Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights wrote last week in an article for The Atlantic that in times of global crisis (such recently with SARS, Bird Flu and Ebola) women are likely to be more affected, and for longer, than men...
"Academics who studied these episodes found that they had deep, long-lasting effects on gender equality. “Everybody’s income was affected by the Ebola outbreak in West Africa,” Julia Smith, a health-policy researcher at Simon Fraser University, told The New York Times this month, but “men’s income returned to what they had made pre-outbreak faster than women’s income.”
If you believe that your company is truly focussed on equality, diversity and inclusion then you may need to be prepared to prove that. Completing and submitting your Gender Pay Gap Report sooner rather than later is certainly one of the ways in which you can do that.
Show the nation that you take the needs of your employees seriously and that your business continues to focus on fairness and accountability.
Afterall, after the dust settles on the current global crisis, our people will be much more selective when it comes to working for organisations who have demonstrated positive values.
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