UK organisations with over 250 employees are required to calculate and publish their gender pay gap on a specific date each year (‘the snapshot day’) which is the 5th of April, according to maritime HR experts Spinnaker.
Spinnaker also acts as secretariat to the Maritime HR Association, a members club made up of 95 shipowners, shipmanagers, oil majors and commodity groups. Members of the Association benefit from annual salary and bonus benchmarking reports for global shipping.
The Association began collecting gender data as part of the annual salary survey process back in 2016 to gain an understanding of the gender pay gap within the maritime industry. This work has now become the authoritative source of gender diversity data within the sector.
“The Maritime industry is a long way off closing the gender pay gap,” says Spinnaker Chairman Phil Parry (pictured). “The incremental movements we are seeing probably reflect the growing proportion of women in better paid roles, thus slowly pulling up the averages.”
Gender pay analysis differs from equal pay. Equal pay considers the pay difference between men and women who carry out the same or similar jobs or conduct work of equal value; it is unlawful in the UK and most other developed economies to pay a man or a woman differently to do exactly the same job. The gender pay gap (or gender wage gap) is the average difference between the remuneration for men and women who are working within a given group.
The 2022 pay information from the Spinnaker survey comprises data for over 3,800 UK shore-based positions. Interestingly, according to our statistics, the proportion of women employed within the UK maritime industry has shown a slight increase in 2022 after its decline over the past two years, having been steadily rising year on year prior to this.
Spinnaker says that its maritime data shows that the UK tends to employ an equal proportion of men and women. Although women in the UK are most likely to work in Customer Service, Business Development and Finance roles while men in the UK are more likely to work in Technical & Marine, IT and Operations positions.
Its findings from the 2022 salary survey data show that the average (or mean) pay gap is 39.13% in maritime compared to a UK average of 13.9% for all industries. This is a very slight improvement on the 2021 figure which was 40%, compared to a UK average of 14.9%. For reference in 2020 the gap was 42.8%.
Companies must report the proportion of male and female staff within each pay quartile. These four pay quartiles are referred to as the Lower Quartile, Lower Middle Quartile, Upper Middle Quartile and Upper Quartile.
In its survey Spinnaker found that 73% of participants at the Lower Quartile were female compared to just 22.8% at the Upper Quartile.
But considering the proportion of females across the pay quartiles since 2017, Spinnaker does note a gradual increase in the proportion of women employed across all pay quartiles.
With regards to comparative C-Suite data, in 2022 Spinnaker found that women represented 15% of C- suite positions compared to 11% in 2022.
Spinnaker’s Maritime HR Association is currently collecting data for the 2023 salary survey. For more information on how to take part please contact a member of the team mhra@spinnaker-global.com .
