Despite being sizeable in many countries, the disability pay gap (DPG) has attracted limited academic and policy attention internationally, especially in comparison to other protected characteristics, such as gender. The recent draft Equality (Race and Disability) Bill announced in the 2024 King’s Speech suggests a major change in the UK in this regard, with the proposed extension of organisational Gender Pay Gap Reporting to disability.
Using contemporary data from the largest household survey in the UK, the Labour Force Survey, we explore the size and drivers of the UK DPG, with a focus on differences between the public and private sector. Despite sectoral differences in institutional and legislative frameworks relating to pay equality, including in the UK the 2011 Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED), previous evidence of wage compression in the public sector and well-established sectoral differences in equality practices, the role of sector on the DPG has been ignored.
Addressing this gap, we find evidence of a DPG among employees who are otherwise comparable in terms of personal and work-related characteristics, including age and occupation. We use this as a proxy for disability-related wage inequality. While evident in both sectors, disability-related wage inequality is considerably smaller in the public sector (at 4.2% at the mean, compared to 7.4% in the private sector).
We also find evidence that it increases among higher earners in the private sector giving rise to a ‘glass ceiling effect’, potentially reflecting differences in the barriers to promotion. In this respect our analysis is consistent with the more well-developed literature on gender which tends to find lower wage inequality within the public sector. Here, we find evidence that the public sector provides relative wage protection for disabled employees, especially at the top end of the wage distribution.
In relation to contemporary policy, our evidence of a sizeable and persistent DPG and disability-related wage inequality would support calls to monitor and target the national DPG, especially as disability prevalence increases among the workforce.
The sectoral variation identified is consistent with the influence of the employer and highlights the importance of future investigation of the role of differences in equality and pay practices across organisations, something DPG transparency is likely to promote. It’s also important to explore the extent to which these findings are generalisable to other country contexts or relate to UK specific structures and legislation, including the PSED.
Material from the Quarterly Labour Force Survey is Crown Copyright, has been made available from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) and accessed through the UK Data Archive. This project is based on research supported by the Wales Institute of Social and Economic Research and Data (WISERD). WISERD is a collaborative venture between the Universities of Aberystwyth, Bangor, Cardiff, South Wales and Swansea. The research that this publication relates to was undertaken through WISERD Civil Society – Civic Stratification and Civil Repair Centre funded by the ESRC (grant number: ES/S012435/1).
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