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Meaningfully paid paternity leave and Day 1 rights to request flexible working will help reduce gender, ethnicity and disability pay gaps.

These two recommendations form part of a wide-ranging report from the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) aimed at addressing pay gaps, see Fair Opportunities for All. The gender pay gap stands at 18.1%, the ethnic minority pay gap at 5.7% and the disability pay gap at 13.6%.

Flexibility

The EHRC recommends that:

• The right to request flexible working (currently only available to those with 26 weeks’ service) be extended to apply from Day 1 in all jobs, unless there’s a genuine business reason which makes this impossible.
• Employers should offer all jobs, including the most senior, on a flexible and part-time basis unless there’s a genuine business reason which makes this impossible.

Separate research from the recruitment firm Michael Page has questioned the reality of flexible working, especially for young professionals or ‘millennial’ workers, aged 18-27. The results suggest that for this group of employees flexible working remains largely out of reach:

• 60% of millennials who have worked (or have asked to work) flexibly have felt judged or penalised for doing so
• Of those, just under half (47%) have felt judged by company management or senior leadership
• 2 in 10 (20%) millennial respondents have been actively refused flexible working options by an employer, despite asking
• Nearly half see flexible working as a benefit reserved for management or senior leadership

Childcare responsibilities

The EHRC recommends that:

• Men should be encouraged to share childcare more equally and the workplace bias towards mothers as the primary carer needs to be reduced.
• To that end, the government should introduce dedicated non-transferrable, ring-fenced ‘use it or lose it’ parental leave for fathers – with a pay rate that acts as a real incentive to take up (along the successful model used in Scandinavian countries).
• This will encourage will encourage more men to ask for flexible working, reducing the ‘motherhood penalty’ that many women face after having children and increasing the opportunities for them to progress.

The EHRC is also calling on government to extend the current statutory requirement to report on gender pay gaps to disability and ethnicity. It should also publish statistical information on the scale of and trends in disability and ethnicity pay gaps for full-time and part-time workers.

Welcoming the breadth of the EHRC’s new strategy, the CIPD commented:

‘While the right to request flexible working is available to all UK workers who have worked for the same employer for 26 weeks, it is yet to be recognised as such in practice. To make flexible working the norm it’s crucial that organisations challenge assumptions of who it is for and encourage far greater uptake. HR professionals have a critical role in questioning workplace cultures and busting the myths around what flexible working means to encourage businesses to act differently. Through recognition that flexibility is not just about the hours people work and challenging traditionally rigid job design, organisations can create ‘people-shaped jobs’ that enable those with a range of circumstances to access and reach their potential at work, while boosting long-term productivity’.