November 20th named as Equal Pay Day 2024

The Fawcett Society has announced that Equal Pay Day 2024 will fall on Wednesday November 20^th.

The charity, which campaigns for gender equality and women’s rights at work, has also revealed that it is two days earlier than last year. This means that, despite years of slow progress to close the UK’s mean Gender Pay Gap, it has definitively widened for the first time since 2013.

Equal Pay Day is a national campaign led by the Fawcett Society in the UK. It marks the day in the year when, based on the gender pay gap, women overall in the UK stop being paid compared to men.

The gender pay gap is the difference between the average pay of men and women within a particular group or population. Fawcett uses the mean, full-time, hourly gender pay gap for the UK to calculate the gender pay gap for Equal Pay Day which this year is 11.3%, up from 10.4% last year.

Jemima Olchawski, Chief Executive of the Fawcett Society, said: “It’s incredibly alarming to see the mean gender pay gap widen in 2024 and shows that without concerted effort most women won’t see equal pay in our working lifetime.

“Today’s data confirms that the Gender Pay Gap increases with age as women take on more and more unpaid care work for children and older people.

“The draft Employment Rights Bill and commitments to close the gap are important steps but [our] data clearly shows more must urgently be done. Our government must commit to a cross-government strategy to shrink the gender pay gap by 2030 – women cannot wait any longer.”

You can read Fawcett’s explainer on the Gender Pay Gap here.

And you can read Empower Up’s information about Gender in the workplace here.