Significant gender pay gap still evident at Solihull Council

Latest figures show that the chasm is narrowing, but the latest averages included in the annual summary are still ahead of what other West Midlands authorities reported last year.

Fresh figures show Solihull Council is still grappling with a sizeable gender pay gap, despite some improvement in this year's statistics.

In 2018/19, the numbers revealed that Solihull had the widest gulf of all seven West Midlands councils.

And while the figures for 2019/20 show that the average gap was shrinking based on key measures, both the median and mean are still above what the other six local authorities reported in the previous 12 months.

At a meeting this week, council officers credited a "bottom-loaded" pay increase for reducing the mean to 15.2 per cent (down 4.2) and the median to 25.1 (down 1.6).

It remains to be seen what ground Solihull has made up on its nearest neighbours, with organisations still having several months to publish the latest data.

Karen Grant, the council's head of equality and diversity, told the remuneration committee there should be "some caution" in comparing figures.

"Not in a defensive way, just in terms of the council we recognise that we have a large percentage of women," she said.

75 per cent of the workforce is women and the catering service, which is still provided in-house, is overwhelmingly female. Although Ms Grant said women were also well-represented at senior level (four out of six of the top team).

Cllr Ian Courts, leader of Solihull Council, said he was keen the organisation broke down some of the traditional perceptions about the jobs that are the best fit for different genders.

In response, Adrian Cattell, the head of human resources, said: "Our head of property services is female, two or three years ago we had chef of the year, who was a male, in our catering  service...

"So there are these examples and we do use those as part of the opportunities to attract people into those types of roles, but it is, to be perfectly honest, slow work."

The annual report highlights the difficulties that this can pose.

It said: "Evidence shows that occupational segregation, which is the concentration of men and women in different kinds of jobs, is one of the main reasons of the gender pay gap."

A legal requirement to publish gender pay gap figures was introduced for organisations with 250 or more employees in 2017.

The trade union Unison has been contacted for comment.