• by Sean Hargrave , Staff Writer, April 3, 2019

The latest figures still come with the usual alarming headline figures, but they do also come with the less discussed granular breakdowns, which show with greater clarity where the gap is rooted.

Spoiler alert: it's not about purely about fair pay -- it's about seniority.

In the dumbing down of news we are currently going through, organisations are being routinely castigated for a gender pay gap with headlines that make it appear that they set out to pay men more than women.

It doesn't need an HR expert to point out that this would be breaking the law. It's been illegal for decades to pay a woman less than a man for doing the same job. 

So the granular breakdowns help us get over the headlines we're seeing this week as the deadline for publishing gender pay gap figures, for any company employing more than 250 people, looms tomorrow.

There is, of course, the overall finding that Dentsu Aegis has a gap of a third, in favour of men, and Saatchi & Saatchi and BBH have got their gaps down to 20%.

But take a look through the breakdowns supplied with the previously linked Campaign articles, and you'll see the obvious cause of the gender pay gap. It isn't that men are being paid more than women who are doing the same job -- but more the result of the upper of the four seniority rankings being skewed toward men. 

If you look at the breakdown at Dentsu, for example, women make up more than half of the employees in three of the four quartiles (lower, middle, upper middle) but then drop off to only slightly more than a third of employees at the upper level in London. 

it is a similar story across other agencies' figures with more than half of the workforce in the lower quartile being women (you can roughly say it appears to average out around 60%) and then around 30% to 40% or a slightly higher percentage of employees in the big agencies' upper wage bracket.

Women are overrepresented in the lower-paid jobs and underrepresented at the higher-paid level. It is probably worth pointing out that Publicis Sapient stands out as being the worst offender in today's listings in Campaign. Just 13% of its top earners are women. 

So the question moves away from the dumbed-down version of news headlines of why companies pay women less. Instead, we should be focussing on why women are overrepresented in the lowest-paid roles and underrepresented in the highest-paid jobs. Clearly, there is an obstacle to talent coming through and climbing up the career ladder to reach the top.

It could be women taking out time to raise families and not returning, or perhaps returning but then being overlooked for promotion. It could be women taking out time to look after sick relatives.

We can't ignore the obvious conclusion that despite other possibilities, adland has had a history of being a boys' club at the top, and that needs to change. 

It's an important distinction to make because it's not a box ticking obeying the law on equal pay exercise.

There is clearly a problem, but it's not about wages as much as it is about seniority of women.

That requires a culture change -- and a removal of the proverbial glass ceiling and pretending that this is all about fair pay doesn't help. It's about fair prospects.