Organizational Policies to Overcome Gender Pay Differences Essay

This essay explores the gender pay gap and evaluates policies organizations can adopt to address pay differences based on gender. It highlights the issue of unequal pay in the United Kingdom, discussing its negative impacts such as structural shifts in employment patterns. The essay proposes several policies, including salary transparency, eliminating negotiation practices, adopting governmental regulations, conducting reviews and feedback sessions, assessing pay parity with audits, ensuring fair hiring practices, and promoting pay scale transparency. The author emphasizes the importance of changing mindsets to create a non-discriminatory work environment and improve employee motivation, ultimately contributing to the achievement of organizational goals. The essay cites relevant sources to support its arguments.

Gender Pay Gap

Essay topic: “Outline and evaluate the policies an organisation might adopt to overcome pay
differences based on gender. For this part of the assessment you can cite the steps taken by
organisations that might be seen as exemplars”
Gender pay gap is an activity in which business organisations pay different value of
salary and wages to their employees performing same work with same skills on the discretion of
gender. This issue of gender pay gap has immensely increased in United Kingdom as it has seen
that numerous business firms are involved in such type of discrimination. Due to differences
between male and female earnings, there are several problems which has to face by business
firms such as structural shifts in employment patterns. In order to resolve this issue,
organisations should adopt various policies and take few respective steps. Policies for resolution
of this issue which often referred as exemplars are discussed as follows. Transparency in salary;
Business organisations should adopt policy of wage transparency in which salary provided to an
employee should not be kept as a confidential information. Female employees should be given a
right to know value of wage their male colleagues are earnings due to which they can have a
sense of equality. Women should be aware if their male colleagues are making any more money
so that they can take a stand for themselves. Eliminate negotiation; it is considered that
negotiation is a man's game when it comes to negotiate for wages. At the time of recruitment,
generally male employees use their skill of negotiation and make attempts to increase value of
their salaries. Whereas women are considered as incapable when it comes to negotiation for their
wages due to which issue of inequality in salary occurs. In order to solve this issue organisations
should eliminate practice of negotiation from their employment process (Bryant, Winters and
Matson, 2012).
Another policy which can be adopted is adoption of governmental regulations in which
Organisations should consider regulations provided by government as a compulsion and allocate
range of salaries for all employees accordingly so that issue of uneven pay can be avoided. By
following this culture, problem of structural shifts in employment patterns can be reduced.
Another policy is Review and feedback which is the most important exemplar of
removing inequality in pay on the basis of gender. By adopting this policy companies can take
feedback of their employees and review their performance by which it can be ascertained that
due to which specific reason performance of female performance is degrading which can
ultimately lead towards resolution of unequal pay. Assessment of pay parity with audits is an
1

another policy in which company have to analyse the size of the company to reduce gender pay
gap. For this purpose an internal audit can be conducted by the managers to examine roles,
responsibilities, skills and knowledge of the employees so that it can be determined that women
and men are paid equally. It is also very important to conduct an external audit to analyse that all
the workers are paid appropriately or not and it also helps to compare the strategies adopted by
the company to others so that policies effective policies can be implemented to remove the issue
of gender pay gap (Smith, 2016).
Ensure fair hiring practices is the policy which helps to eliminate gender pay gap the
employer should pay equal amount to the male and female employees. It is possible with the help
of fair hiring practices so that the gap between the pay scale can be reduced it will increase the
level of motivation in the workforce. It is essential for the employers to set the wage according to
the skills and knowledge of the employees not by their gender. Another policy is “Make the pay
gap transparent” in which management ignore the conflicts among employees and organisation
should make the pay scale transparent so that they get satisfied with their salaries. This step will
also help the organisation to overcome the issues and challenges occurred due to the improper
pat scales for male and female employees.
Change mindset in future is also a policy in which managers focus only on the pay scale
than it will resolve the problem for a short period but to ignore these issues permanently they
have to change the unconscious mind of the employees. It assures that managers are treating both
males and females equal fro future growth opportunities. This step will result in favour on the
organisation and help top create a non discriminatory work environ environment (Lips, 2013).
All the above mentioned strategies can be adopted by the managers and leaders of the
organisation in order to resolve the issues that have been raised due to gender pay gap. It can
help to build confidence among staff members and also motivate them to put more efforts to
attain organisational goals.
2

REFERENCES
Books and Journals:
Bryant, M., Winters, P. and Matson, J., 2012. Gender pay gap. Uhuru. 10(3). p.10.
Smith, M., 2016. Gender pay gap. In Encyclopedia of Human Resource Management. Edward
Elgar Publishing Limited.
Lips, H. M., 2013. The gender pay gap: Challenging the rationalizations. Perceived equity,
discrimination, and the limits of human capital models. Sex Roles. 68(3-4). pp.169-185.
3