Procuring Inequality: Our Report.

Procurement / By / April 28, 2021 / 2 minutes of reading

Procuring Inequality: Our Report.

April 28, 2021
Procurement

Spend Network is pleased to release our survey on the gender pay gap data in public procurement. We linked gender pay gap reports from over 2,600 organisations across nearly 31,000 contracts won by these organisations during the 2017-2020 period. This gave us insight into what organisations public money is going to, what gender pay bias exists in those organisations, and the extent of this phenomenon across all public contracting.

Read our report in detail here

Our Top Findings

Our research clearly shows that there is a significant bias towards men both in the delivery of public services and that this bias increases once public services are outsourced to the private sector.

92.57% of the money government spent with suppliers between 2017 and 2020 went to companies with a pay bias in favour of men. Organisations with a ‘low’ bias across genders, that is to say between 1% and 10%, make up only 34.15% of contracting.

Gender bias in pay is overwhelmingly skewed towards men. 67.65% of the contract value goes to firms that pay men 10% more than women. Whilst over 45% of contracts by value go to organisations with a pay bias greater than 20%. Meanwhile suppliers with a female bias of 10% or more accounts for less than 1% (0.96%) of the value of contracts being let.

When compared with the national average for all reporting organisations (11.47%) we found that across all suppliers to the public sector there is a larger pay bias towards men (12.61%) than average. By contrast, public sector organisations do considerably better with an average median pay gap of 9.85%.

The pay ‘gap’ is calculated as the difference between average hourly earnings (excluding overtime) of men and women as a proportion of men’s average hourly earnings (excluding overtime).

Our research is currently limited to the £292bn ($404bn) spent by the UK public sector every year. However, this work should stand as an exemplar of what can be achieved when reliable open data on procurement and companies is published by governments. We would encourage any governments that would like to achieve more with their procurement data to get in touch.

If you’d like to talk to us in more detail about this or any of our other research reports, or our procurement data capabilities,contact us.

March 21, 2023

AUKUS Defence Procurement Deal

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese joined the US President Joe Biden, and the UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, in San Diego this...
Read more...
March 14, 2023

Australian Government Responds to COVID-19 Procurement Review

Many governments around the world have faced pressure regarding their procurement of COVID-19 treatments and vaccines, so it is encouraging to see...
Read more...
March 8, 2023

EU Joint Ammunition Procurement

EU ministers will meet today in Stockholm to decide whether to  jointly procure  ammunition to aid Ukraine and replenish domestic stockpiles. EU...
Read more...
March 7, 2023

Denial Of Service By Wall Of Text

Clarkesworld Magazine is a publisher of science fiction short stories. They accept and pay for submissions from anyone. As of last week,...
Read more...
March 1, 2023

Canadian Government Announces Rail Procurement Process

This week, the Canadian Government announced a major step in the procurement process for their High Frequency Rail project: the launch of...
Read more...
February 28, 2023

Deduplication Routines

Deduplication is a deceptively complex problem to handle at scale. There’s a simple, ugly and brutal way to do it, where you...
Read more...
February 23, 2023

Policy Proposal: Analysts In Place

Data is critical to the functioning of government. Policies and services live or die on the quality of data. Successes and failures...
Read more...
February 23, 2023

Hallucination As A Service

I asked Chat-GPT to find me some academic papers that highlight the usefulness of combining two different machine learning techniques. I hoped...
Read more...
February 20, 2023

Future Trends in Government Procurement

Over the years, government procurement has undergone significant changes, with new trends emerging that are reshaping the way governments buy goods and...
Read more...
February 15, 2023

Making Your Own Export Platform?

If you are building your own export platform, sourcing, organising and analysing your data has its challenges. Here are some of the...
Read more...
February 14, 2023

Tackling Modern Slavery in Supply Chains – Guidance

On 26 March 2020, the UK became the first country to publish a Government Modern Slavery Statement, setting out the steps government...
Read more...
February 8, 2023

Securing The Competitive Edge.

Are you an exporter looking for leads for your exporters? Do you want to help your in-country teams build more partnerships within...
Read more...
February 7, 2023

The Benefits of Data Tech 101

Government procurement, the process by which government entities purchase goods, services and works from private businesses, is being revolutionised by the integration...
Read more...
February 1, 2023

EU Awards New Gas Aggregation Contract

In December 2022, EU energy ministers agreed to create a platform for the collective demand aggregation and joint procurement of gas, with...
Read more...
January 25, 2023

Does Procurement Need Blockchain?

Blockchain is fundamentally a database, but rather than a database where one item is allowed to replace another, each change to the...
Read more...

Newsletter

Compelling research, insights and data directly into your inbox.

Recent media stories

Search

Recent articles