The original objectives of my investigation were to investigate the gender pay gap in Scotland vs UK over five years, specifically focusing on SMEs compared to large companies. Additionally, the investigation also sought to find any specific areas of industry with “biases in the recruitment, training and promotion of staff” (Delivering for Scotland, 2021) leading to suggested actions for SMEs to take to reduce the gender pay gap further. Overall, the investigation aimed to answer whether SMEs have been more successful in closing the gender pay gap compared to large companies.

I feel the project kept to its objectives; however, I extended the areas for analysis to include age, sector, employer, industry and part-time/full-time. This broadened the investigation and looked at the gender pay gap from a multitude of perspectives which I felt would be informative.

It was interesting to see that in 2019 – 2020 the submissions were much lower. Investigating this, I discovered that the UK government suspended the legal requirement to report due to COVID-19, resulting in a huge drop in submissions.

I was surprised that there was little variation in pay gap data for SMEs (under 250 employees) compared to 250 to 4999 employees. Part-time employees also tend to be less impacted by the gender pay gap disparity.

I was able to investigate the intended aspects of my planning stage. The only drawback I feel occurred is I may not have been able to complete more in-depth analysis of certain areas due to a lack of time, knowledge, and skills. For example, the employer focus of my report I would have liked to have been able to filter by employer, year and either mean or median values to show hourly pay disparity and trends over the timeframe of this.

There are several recommendations I would make to SMEs based upon the findings of my investigations. Whilst SMEs have made some efforts to reduce the gender pay gap disparity, there is still a distance to go. Additionally, there has historically been literally variance in gender pay gap between employer size, so SMEs could undertake improvements to lead the gender pay gap reduction. Additionally, in Scotland the gender pay gap for full-time employees remains wide and effort should be made by the Scottish Government as well as all employers to reduce this further. The public sector has the highest gender pay gap and effort should be made to bring this in line with non-profits and private sector businesses whose gender pay gap data is significantly lower in comparison. The pay gap for 30-60+ remains high and this should be investigated within individual organisations to reduce the disparity between generations. Several industries show high gender pay gap disparity and the timescale data indicates little has been done to reduce this across five years. Therefore, regulation within industries should be implemented and strategies undertaken to improve the gender pay gap.