This interactive tool will tell you the exact gender pay gap for your job
LONDON -- The gender pay gap is often talked about as one average figure that affects all women in the same way.
But it's not as simple as that. The gender pay gap differs from person to person, and depends entirely on a person's profession and industry.
The UK's Office for National Statistics (ONS) has built an interactive tool so people can find out the specific pay gap for their particular job.
The tool -- launched by the department for Women and Equalities -- also shows how many women and men work in that role, highlighting the gender representation in certain industries.
Currently, the average gender pay gap in the UK stands at 18.1 percent, which is -- according to the ONS -- the lowest since records began.
The tool uses the latest data from the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings to provide the most up to date gender pay gap data. People can discover the pay gap for their industry using the online tool by selecting the description that best fits their job.
The occupations with the largest pay gap in favour of men include construction and building trades supervisors (45.4 percent); financial managers and directors (36.5 percent); printers (35.1 percent); and financial institution managers and directors (34.1 percent). The occupations where the average pay is most similar for men and women and where the pay gap is closest to 0 percent include waiters and waitresses (0.0 percent); bar staff (0.0 percent); fishmongers and poultry dressers (-0.0 percent); and nurses, (0.0 percent).
The tool shows that in industries where the gender pay gap is close to 0 percent, women far outweigh the number of men in these professions.
For example, the pay gap for waiters and waitresses stands at 0.0 percent, but women hold 69 percent of these jobs. Similarly, the pay gap for bar staff is also 0.0 percent, and women hold 60 percent of these jobs. The tool aims to highlight the difference in rates of pay for comparable jobs and to show that the underlying causes for the pay gap are "more complex".
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According to the ONS, some of reasons for the pay gap include the fact that more women work in lower paid jobs or sectors; more women are likely to work part-time; and women are under-represented in senior roles. "This tool will empower both men and women to challenge this issue in their profession and help people to make more informed decisions about their career," Minister for Women and Equalities Justine Greening said in a statement.
Rachel Thompson is the Features Editor at Mashable. Rachel's second non-fiction book The Love Fix: Reclaiming Intimacy in a Disconnected World is out now, published by Penguin Random House in Jan. 2025. The Love Fix explores why dating feels so hard right now, why we experience difficult emotions in the realm of love, and how we can change our dating culture for the better.
A leading sex and dating writer in the UK, Rachel has written for GQ, The Guardian, The Sunday Times Style, The Telegraph, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Stylist, ELLE, The i Paper, Refinery29, and many more.
Rachel's first book Rough: How Violence Has Found Its Way Into the Bedroom And What We Can Do About It, a non-fiction investigation into sexual violence was published by Penguin Random House in 2021.
