Equal Pay for an unequal world

To mark Equal Pay Day 2022 Ambassadeurs Group (AG) has made a £10,000 donation to two charities that put women front and centre. The Girls’ Network promotes women from a young age, ensuring background, gender and parental income are no limit to their potential. The Abbey Centre, based in Westminster, delivers programmes to women in the local community including support groups for carers who are women, wellbeing programmes and an employability programme called Women Off to Work (WOW).

Equal Pay Day is a national campaign led by Fawcett Society. It marks the day each year where women effectively, on average, stop earning relative to men because of the gender pay gap. In 2022 that day was Sunday 20th November.

The gender pay gap is the difference between the average pay of men and women within a particular group or population. Fawcett used 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%, down from 11.9% in 2021.

‘It is deeply disappointing that the gender pay gap has barely shifted in the past few years, especially given the cost-of-living crisis is hitting women the hardest and forcing them to make impossible choices,’ says Jemima Olchawski, CEO of the Fawcett Society. ‘We need more urgent action now, to put women’s equality at the heart of our economic recovery.’

The Fawcett Society has released a new report and data that revealed during 2022 women will, on average, take home £564 less than men each month, up from £536 in 2021. This inequality is referred to by Fawcett as ‘Women’s missing money’.

As part of AG’s commitment to supporting the levelling up agenda, and giving back to causes where there will be the most impact, its donations to The Girls’ Network and The Abbey Centre will be used to continue the work the charities do to support, promote and empower women as they make their way through life.

‘These charities work at the grassroots and what they do is immensely important in helping young girls start out in life and to achieve their aspirations, and older girls and women to develop skills that will help them earn more,’ says Krishna Hathi, AG’s Head of Charity Initiatives. ‘We’re proud to support these charities, however we also recognise that the responsibility to tackle the gender divide, in pay and otherwise, lies with us as organisations, to remove the glass ceiling for women from all social and economic backgrounds’

‘The donation to the Girls’ Network will pay for 50 mentor and mentee pairs to complete their first six months of sessions. Whilst the Abbey Centre will use the donation to support wellness programmes for women, and specifically supporting women who are carers, across the next nine months.’

AG’s commitment to equal pay starts with its own staff. Those who are traditionally among the lowest paid – the hospitality staff known as heart-of house – have recently been awarded an inflation busting pay rise irrespective of whether they are male or female. The pay rise has taken hourly-pay well above the national minimum wage to 12-per-hour. This is boosted further to £15-per-hour when additional AG benefits and one-off payments are taken into account.

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