Companies have started disclosing their gender pay gaps — and it’s worse than we thought

It’s embarrassing for articles like this Business Insider one to claim the gender pay gap is “a total sham” when the companies themselves are now coming out and admitting to paying men and women vastly different amounts.

Maybe it’s to beat news outlets like us to the punch, maybe it’s in an effort to actually fix things (nah), but the gender pay gaps revealed by companies are staggeringly high, and, in some cases, clock in as high as 36 percent.

For many of these companies, it’s a race to the finish line. With talk in the UK of a new law — active April 2018 — requiring companies to calculate the difference between the pay rates for male and female employees to display on their websites, employers everywhere are getting nervous.

Last year’s White House Report states clearly there’s still a big pay gap between men and women in America, so this hardly comes as a revelation. But before seeing the numbers clearly, I don’t know if I would have described the discrepancy as cavernous. Now, cavernous hardly begins to cover it.

For example, Virgin Money disclosed that men who work at the bank earn on average 36 percent more than women and similar companies have disclosed gaps of 24 percent and 15 percent.

It’s impossible to deny men hold a bigger proportion of senior jobs which are, (duh) paid better but even with this factor eliminated, men are still making more.

A Washington Post article published in 2015 urges women to check their facts when it comes to the equity of pay but the facts are right here, handed to us by the men who willed them into reality — and they are outstanding.

In 2015, women working full time in the United States were paid just 80 percent of what men were paid – a gap of 20 percent. And judging by the slow in recent years, continuation at the rate seen since 2001 would leave us without equal pay until 2152. These numbers offer a sobering look into the work that still needs to be done by these companies to repent for the misdeeds they thought would remain covered up.