Women face £400,000 pay gap at top

The average gender pay gap for UK executives is more than £10,000 a year, while women receive less than half what men are given in bonuses, the Chartered Management Institute (CMI) said.

The research also showed that 4.3 per cent of female executives were made redundant in the past year, 1.1 percentage points more than male bosses.

Women now make up 57 per cent of company executives, but only 40 per cent are departmental heads and fewer than one in four are chief executives.

The CMI estimated that a woman taking up an executive job at 25 and working until 60 would earn almost £1.1m, compared with more than £1.5m for men.

A survey of more than 38,000 executives revealed a “substantial” gender pay gap at the higher end of the executive career ladder.

CMI chief executive Ann Francke said: “A lot of businesses have been focused on getting more women on boards but we’ve still got a lot to do on equal pay and equal representation in top executive roles. Women make up almost three out of four at the bottom of the ladder but only one out of four at the top.

“This lack of a strong talent pipeline has to change, and fast. Allowing these types of gender inequalities to continue is precisely the kind of bad management that we need to stamp out.”