Business consultancy Mazars is advising Irish businesses to crack on with addressing the gender pay gap issue, as legislation mandating gender pay reporting is likely to be passed this year.

Mazars' senior HR consulting manager Sonya Boyce has outlined a series of essential steps that businesses should take to actively address their gender pay gap and reporting requirements.

At a seminar on tackling the pay gap, Boyce explained: “Pay gaps are disruptive and can have serious business consequences leaving enterprises vulnerable to issues such as enforcement actions, lawsuits and loss of contracts.”

Boyce advised businesses to get on with taking some essential steps:

1. Communicate proactively with internal and external stakeholders, particularly employees, before reports are made public. It’s essential to adapt your communication to your specific stakeholders.
2. Review and cleanse your data. Using payroll/HR data, develop a statistical model that determines whether you have a pay gap attributable to gender.
3. Perform a trial run. Quantify the size of the pay gap and identify which employees are affected, and by how much.
4. Guard against future differences emerging by ensuring alignment between total reward and compliance, ongoing analysis of a company’s workforce at a strategic level, adopting transparent talent management and recruitment strategy and providing complete employee performance management.
5. Work out external and internal messaging. Include a narrative with your submission and include details of a clear action plan on how to tackle a gender pay gap and will provide valuable reassurance to stakeholders internally and externally.
6. Create a plan to close the pay gaps with measures such as recruitment changes, mentoring / sponsorship programmes, flexible working arrangements and career development opportunities.

Gender pay and equal pay are fundamentally different, Boyce went on. “Paying men and women differently for the same work is illegal. However, in most organisations there are fewer women in more senior roles and as such organisations have a gap in overall pay between men and women. The average pay gap in Ireland at present is 13.9%.

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“Pay gaps are disruptive and can have serious business consequences leaving enterprises vulnerable to issues such as enforcement actions, lawsuits and loss of contracts. Formal reporting of organisations gender pay gap will shine a spotlight on those companies who promote equality and diversity and actively seek to support women.”

Mazars specialises in audit, tax, consulting and financial advisory services and employs c.450 people in Dublin, Limerick and Galway.

Photo: Sonya Boyce (right) with (l-r) Sandra Healy of DCU, and Dr Graham Love and Mairead Divilly of Mazars. (Pic: Iain White/Fennell Photography)