Creating a fairer Britain
In principle, the process followed in an equal pay audit intended to compare the pay of employees with disabilities against those who have not is the same as one based on gender or ethnicity. It involves the identification of equal work groups and the comparison and analysis of the average pay of disabled/non-disabled employees within those equal work groups. Analysing pay by disability typically presents additional challenges:
Many organisations do not have complete and accurate records of their employees with disabilities. That does not preclude comparison of pay of employees who have declared whether or not they have a disability – excluding from the comparison those employees for whom this is not known (or put them in separate category). For guidance on disability monitoring see Example of disability analysis.
The broadest comparison of pay by disability – of basic and total pay by equal work group - will be all (known) non-disabled staff compared with all (known) disabled staff. Those comparisons are useful and are as far as many employers can go, given the quality of their current data.
But they do not tell you how employees with different types of impairment are faring against non-disabled employees.
Beyond that broad comparison of the pay of non-disabled employees compared with disabled employees, the number of possible categorisations of impairments means that, in principle, there is a multiplicity of possible comparisons.
Precisely what comparisons you choose to make will have to depend on the number of disabled people you employ, the quality of your records and your views about the most meaningful statistical comparisons.
If you choose to analyse pay by particular impairments, such as hearing or visual, it is very likely that small numbers of employees will be found in some categories – with attendant problems of meaningful statistical analysis. Again, that does not preclude comparisons but caution is needed in the interpretation of information.
You may wish to check whether people with disabilities in your workforce experience ‘double disadvantage’ because of their gender and/or their ethnicity.
Provided your workforce composition allows for analysis (large enough numbers) you might, for example, compare the pay of women from minority ethnic backgrounds with that of disabled minority women doing equal work, or compare the pay of all minority ethnic employees against that of all disabled minority ethnic employees. The permutations of possible comparison are numerous so you will need to make a judgement about what is appropriate for your organisation.
The precise principles for determining equal pay irrespective of disability are not laid down in law. For the purpose of this guidance, we assume that the principles of the Equal Pay Act - which prescribe equal pay for equal work performed by women and men in the same employment - would 'read across' for disability.