Gender pay gap wider for minority ethnic women, Labour finds
Most UK women from minority ethnic backgrounds have already stopped earning two months before Equal Pay Day, a new analysis by the Labour party shows, renewing calls for the government to introduce mandatory ethnicity pay gap reports.
Last year, 18 November was marked by Fawcett Society as Equal Pay Day, the day in the year where the average woman stopped earning relative to the average male worker because of the gender pay gap.
New analysis of ONS data by Labour, released to coincide with Black History Month, shows Equal Pay Day for Black African women falls on 27 September (a 26% pay gap compared with the average male worker), and 19 September for Bangladeshi women (a 28% gap). Pakistani women had the worst gender pay gap, with Equal Pay Day falling on 8 September (a 31% gap).
The data also added that Black Caribbean women earned 18% less on average than men, making 26 October Equal Pay Day for them in the UK.
The data for Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) women was calculated by taking the median hourly pay and percentage difference between hourly earnings with employees by gender, using the most recent ONS published dataset from October 2020.
Anneliese Dodds, the shadow women and equalities minister, called on the government to “get a grip” on racial inequality in the cost of living crisis, and to back Labour’s policy of introducing mandatory ethnicity pay gap reporting.
“The pay gap for all women is already bad enough; disturbingly, these figures show it’s even worse for many Black, Asian and minority ethnic women,” Dodds said. “It’s no surprise that so many Black women are struggling with the cost of living crisis when many earn a fifth less than men.”
In 2017, the Trades Union Congress (TUC) analysis of the 3.1
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