New research has revealed that female managers in the retail sector earn an average of £4315 less a year than their male counterparts.
According to new data from the Chartered Management Institute (CMI) and XpertHR, females in the retail industry earn 19.4 per cent less per year.
Despite a pay gap of nearly a fifth, it is considerably less than the national average pay gap of 26.8 per cent.
The new data comes following new government regulations introduced in April this year forcing all companies with over 250 employees to disclose their gender pay gap.
In retail the average female manager‘s salary is £17,937 while the average male manager‘s stands at £22,252.
As of today, just 80 of the 7850 UK companies have fulfilled obligations to close the gap.
The results also found that women are significantly more likely to hold a junior management positions (66 per cent) than men (34 per cent), while men are almost three times as likely to hold senior management positions.
“We have always known that the gender pay gap appears to widen with seniority,” XpertHR content director Mark Crail said.
“But the results we are publishing today enable us to quantify the gap using a large volume of reliable, checked and verified pay data, drawn directly from employer payroll systems.
“Some people have tried to explain the gender pay gap away as being the result of different working hours or individual career choices.
“But when the analysis is based on the pay of more than 100,000 individuals in well over 400 organisations, it is clear that the pay gap is a very real fact of life for UK managers.”
Research has suggested that closing the pay gap could add up to £150 billion per year to the UK economy by 2025. However 1.5 million of the 1.9 million new managers needed to fulfill this would have to be women to achieve balance.
Click here to sign up to Retail Gazette‘s free daily email newsletter
