Men earned more, on average, than women at 16 of the 17 government departments that published details of their gender pay gaps before the end of the year.
The Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth was the exception, reporting that women earned 3.5 per cent more than men per hour on average.
The gap in favour of men grew at three departments – Education; Further and Higher Education; and Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media – while it was unchanged at another.
It was cut at 11 departments, most significantly the Department of Finance, where it fell from 10 per cent to 4.3 per cent, and Justice, where it was reduced from 5.3 per cent to 1.3 per cent.
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Four had pay gaps of more than 10 per cent, with the Department of Transport (13.7 per cent) reporting the highest. In 2022, the Central Statistics Office put the gender pay gap across the entire economy at 9.6 per cent in favour of men.
The Department of Agriculture’s report could not be found despite the statutory date for its publication having passed.
The figures in the reports are calculated by taking the total number of men and women working in each department, adding all pay and dividing by the number of hours worked to come up with averages. The average hourly rate at the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment, for instance, was €32.57 with men earning €34.46 and women €31.17.
Men and women in the Civil Service, as elsewhere, must be paid the same amount for doing the same work and what the figures in the reports tend to indicate is the disparity in numbers of men and women at different levels of organisations.
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Women make up more than half of the workforce in a majority of government departments but tend to be over-represented in more junior roles and under-represented in the most senior positions.
Organisations are required to include the proportions of men and women at different earnings levels and while the figures for many departments do show women making up a majority of those in the top quarter, they tend to be less well represented at the highest levels than in the lowest ranks in a number of departments.
At Enterprise, for example, which reported having had 857 employees on the day in June on which the calculations were based, 57 per cent of the workforce was female. Some 63 per cent of the lowest earners were women and 47.5 per cent of the highest earners were female.
In the commentary on its report, the Department of Education, which reported a gender pay gap of 1.9 per cent, up from 0.4 per cent a year ago, said it has strong levels of representation in senior grades but “37 per cent of the overall number of female staff employed by the department are in the clerical officer grade, which is the administrative grade entry point to the Civil Service and 80 per cent of our clerical officers are female”.
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The Department of Further and Higher Education points to the higher numbers of female staff participating in job share or similar schemes as a factor for its pay gap and it states that 97 per cent of staff availing of Civil Service family-friendly schemes are female.
At a number of departments the figures are also impacted by the presence of professional and technical staff. In Transport, just five of 72 such staff are women, something it says contributes significantly to its pay gap of 13.7 per cent. The Department of Defence also cites it as a factor in its 11.5 per cent gap. It says the “highly gendered nature” of some of these roles makes the task of hiring more women for them “challenging”.
The gender pay gap for the Defence Forces, meanwhile, is 2.8 per cent, indicating that the 557 women among the 7,451 personnel earned more per hour on average than their male counterparts.
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