The Gender Pay Gap Talk at State-Funded Schools in England

This week, I am looking at teacher pay across state-funded schools in England. The data for this week’s viz is taken from schools and local authorities in November 2019 as part of the school workforce census. The census collects detailed information on teachers, teaching assistants and other classroom and non-classroom-based school support staff.

Independent schools, non-maintained special schools, sixth form colleges and further education establishments are not in scope.

Before we get into the analysis bit, let us understand the data a bit more.

The time for the data consists of years 2010–11 to 2019–20.

Both male and female teachers are taken into consideration.

The teachers have been classified under the following categories: classroom teachers, head teachers, other leadership teachers and total.

We are looking at state funded schools in the UK in England.

Average mean consists of the mean pay of teacher salaries.

What worked for the visualization:

1. A simple bar chart showing the mean pay of teachers by type for the year 2019 when the census was undertaken, arranged in ascending order is one of the best ways to visualize data that consists of one measure and one dimension. This is great for comparison of metric values specifically, mean pay across sub-groups of the data.
2. The title is clear and provides context to the visualization.

What did not work for the visualization:

1. The use of varied colors to show different bars that represent categories is redundant. When people look at a data display and see visual differences, they try to determine the meaning to those differences. Here the title of the bar chart mentions clearly that we are looking at mean pay of teacher salaries broken down by type for the year 2019. Again, when trying to use color, ask yourself these questions: what purpose will this color serve? And will it serve the purpose effectively?
2. The axis consists of unlabeled numbers.
3. The use of gridlines in the chart is unnecessary and adds to visual clutter.
4. The tool-tip highlights information that does not change dynamically as you hover over various bars. This could have been avoided by using text markers at the end of every bar to show mean salary of teachers.

My interpretation:

1. I wanted to understand how the mean pay of teachers broken down by type and gender compared over the periods 2010–11 to 2019–20.
2. For this purpose, I used the metric, difference in pay, in absolute and % terms to highlight the variation in mean pay of female and male teacher salaries over the years.
3. The variation in mean pay for male and female teachers exists. The highlight point here is that the variation is higher for female teachers than male teachers. This points to the fact that male teachers have had consistent pay over the years while female teachers have succumbed to highs and lows of salaries over the years. The only exception here is that of head teachers. Even though head teachers (both genders) have a higher mean pay than other categories of teachers, the variation is 1.16 times higher for male head-teachers than female head teachers over the period 2010–2020.
4. Also, what is universally noted is that male teachers across all categories have a higher mean pay than female teachers.
5. Female classroom teachers have the lowest mean salary of 36,985.4 pounds. This was 0.92 times lower than their male counter parts. Also, this is to be considered the highest pay gap between male and female teachers at base level.

The Equal Pay Act 1970 was an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom that prohibited any less favorable treatment between men and women in terms of pay and conditions of employment.

Yet in 2019 the gender pay gap persists — standing at 4.1% for UK full-time and part-time employees. Based on the data analyzed in this week’s viz, what is found is that women are paid on average 7% less than men. The Institute for Fiscal Studies reports that the gap for women educated to A-level and degree level is approximately the same as it was 20 years ago.

The data just validated this. What are your thoughts on this?

Click here to view my visualization