UK tech has a month left to bare gender pay gaps, but less than a fifth of firms have ponied up

A month ahead of the deadline for reporting gender pay gap figures, just 16 of 100 major IT suppliers, contractors, telcos and other tech businesses in the UK have submitted their data.

As it stands, the average pay gap – calculated from a comparison of each company's median hourly difference in pay – is 19.34 per cent.

The widest disparity is at software and business services provider Agilisys Limited, where its median difference in hourly rate was 39.1 per cent.

This is better than its 2017-18 figure, when the median gender pay gap was 40.6 per cent. But the 2018-19 figures also show that 40.4 per cent of men received a bonus, compared with 17.7 per cent of women.

At the other end of the scale is Vodafone Group Services, with a median pay gap of 6.4 per cent for its staff, which number between 1,000 and 4,999. The chance of getting a bonus was also similar at 83.7 per cent and 87.9 per cent for women and men respectively.

However, Vodafone Group Services is a member of a much bigger group – and Vodafone Limited had a gap almost double that at 19.3 per cent; Vodafone Global Enterprise Limited, meanwhile, had a gap of 21.7 per cent.

Other decent performances come from outsourcers Serco Limited and Accenture, which both have between 5,000 and 19,999 staffers in the UK, and median pay gaps of 10.6 and 10.5 per cent respectively.

All companies with 250 or more employees must publish the differences between women and men's pay under rules introduced in 2017. For private sector firms the deadline is 4 April, while public sector bodies have until 30 March.

However, with a month to go until the private sector deadline, some 84 firms had yet to file their returns for 2018-19. For context, a total of 1,500 organisations failed to meet this deadline last year.

That includes the UK or European arms of some world's biggest tech firms, such as Amazon Web Services, Apple, Dell, Facebook, Google, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce (EMEA), SAP and Workday.

It also includes Civica, Talk Talk, UKFast and UKCloud, along with NHS Shared Business Services – which was in 2017 fingered for the cock-up that saw almost 900,000 items of medical correspondence go missing.

Others missing from the list are those that were at the top and bottom of last year's rankings.

They include some of the worst performers last year, excluding Agilisys, which slots into third position in this list: Gartner UK Limited (median pay gap 43.3 per cent); Capita plc (42.5 per cent); EMC Europe (39.4 per cent); and Gemalto (39 per cent).

Last year, the company that was closest to gender pay parity – in median terms – was accountancy software pusher Sage, where the pay gap was 0.1 per cent.

Meanwhile, just three companies in the 100 in the El Reg list paid women more than men last year: BT by 2.3 per cent; PlusNet by 3.8 per cent; and HP Inc UK by 12.7 per cent.

When the data is submitted, it will be published on these GOV.UK pages. ®