Equality minister rapped over pay gap

London: Harriet Harman was on Wednesday slapped down by national statisticians over her claims that women are paid a fifth less than men.

The Women and Equality Minister was told she must no longer use a single figure to describe the complex differences in the earnings of men and women.

Instead she will have to give three measures — among them one which shows that far from earning less than men, women in part-time jobs are actually paid more on average than their male counterparts.

The ruling from the Office for National Statistics is the culmination of a running row between Labour's deputy leader and Whitehall watchdogs, who called her use of figures on the gender pay gap ‘misleading'.

It will also affect the workings of Harman's Equality Bill, as until now the minister has insisted that public sector bodies — which will have to say whether their pay scales are unfair to women — should use her way of working out the pay gap.

A report from the ONS called Presenting Gender Pay Statistics said no one measure of the pay gap was adequate or appropriate for Government bodies to use. Instead, it said three different figures should be counted.

One is Harman's favourite measure. This lumps in all workers, both full-time and part-time, and gives a pay gap of 22.5 per cent. But this fails to take into account that because more women choose to work part-time than men, the average pay for women is artificially driven down.