Government gender pay gap revealed: Women paid almost 17 per cent less than men at Department for Transport

Female civil servants are paid almost 17 per cent less on average than their male colleagues at the Department for Transport, according to official statistics which highlight the scale of pay inequality across Whitehall.

Theresa May called on companies in October to do more to improve workplace equality as she urged them to report their gender pay gap and to take action to close it.

But the latest data released by Government departments suggests the Prime Minister has much to do to crackdown on the gender pay gap problem on her own doorstep.

The Department for Transport is one of handful of departments where men are paid significantly higher on average than women.

Men are paid 16.9 per cent more than women and also receive bonus payments which are 25.2 per cent higher.

The Department for Transport has attributed the pay gap to the fact that a larger proportion of female employees work in more junior grade jobs while a larger proportion of male employees are in more senior roles.

An official report into the department’s performance states that this is mainly due to the large number of women who work in administrative roles at the DVLA - the largest employer under the transport umbrella.

This brings the average pay for women down and, according to the report, can “go some way towards explaining the gender pay gap”.

Meanwhile, at the Department for Exiting the European Union there is a gap in favour of men of 15.26 per cent and at the Department of Health it is 14.2 per cent.

Bonuses at the Department of Health are 33.1 per cent higher for men.  

At the Ministry of Defence, the difference between men’s and women’s average hourly pay is 12.5 per cent.

This has been attributed to the higher number of men in more senior civilian defence roles and also the fact that there is a greater proportion of the female workforce at the minimum end of each pay scale.

At the Home Office the average gender pay gap is 10.1 per cent.

The latest transparency data is likely to prompt calls for Mrs May to do more to tackle gender pay inequality within the civil service.

It comes just weeks after she urged companies to take action on the issue.

The Prime Minister said in October: “Tackling injustices like the gender pay gap is part of building a country that works for everyone.”

Some of the departments with the lowest average gender pay gaps were the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport with 3.3 per cent and the Department for International Trade where the gap is 3.6 per cent.

The Government has introduced a legal requirement for all employers with more than 250 employees to publish their gender pay and bonus data by April 2018.

In April 2017 the gender pay gap for full-time employees in the UK stood at 9.1 per cent.

However, this figure is based on median earnings and as such is not directly comparable with the mean gender pay gap statistics released by the Government.