Move to bridge gender pay divide

Women often end up in poorly paid jobs

Women in Wales are being paid less than men doing identical jobs.

The Equal Opportunities Commission is calling for new guidelines to help close the gap by making employers check that their pay systems do not inadvertently discriminate.

Both men and women earn less in Wales than in the rest of the UK.

The average pay packet for men is £400 a week and that figure dips sharply to £313 per week for women.

Baroness Jay has pushed for better pay and conditions

The EOC report, compiled by researchers at the University of Wales, Swansea, also found women in Wrexham were earning 30% less than men.

Two other pay "blackspots" are Flintshire and Newport, where women on average earn just three-quarters of what male workers take home.

Only in Caerphilly is anything like parity between the sexes being achieved.

Even in Cardiff, with its range of higher paid jobs, women's rates of pay lag 20% behind men.

Health, banking and sales have been highlighted by the New Earnings Survey as areas in which pay differences occur.

Part-time work, where women dominate, pays even less well with the average rate of just over £6 an hour.

Women in part-time work make up 47% of female employees and many are more poorly paid than their full-time contemporaries.

The EOC has now called for employers to carry out an audit of pay scales, to see if they are discriminating without even realising it.

The organisation is now calling for immediate changes in the law to eliminate the pay gap within eight years.

Baroness Jay, from the government's Women's Unit, commissioned a report by the London School of Economics to investigate the pay divide.