Education Secretary and Minister for Women and Equalities Nicky Morgan addresses the Conservative Party conference in Manchester in October 2015. Morgan is behind government plans to force firms to publish their “gender pay gap”. ©Stefan Rousseau/PA Wire/Press Association Images

The Equal Pay Act 1970 made it illegal to pay men and women differently for equivalent work. Four decades later, men still earn an average of almost 20 per cent more than women in the UK.

The regulations put forward for public consultation last week, which would make it mandatory for companies to report on their gender pay gap, are an attempt to tackle this. It’s a simple way to force organisations to pay attention to an issue they might otherwise ignore, and it’s a necessary step: when the government introduced voluntary reporting in 2011, an embarrasing five companies chose to take part.

No legal mechanism is being proposed to force companies to close the gap; there is no requirement for them to explain themselves if the gap is shown to be large or to take steps to reduce it, as exists in some European countries. Instead, the UK’s proposed regulation will allow the public to turn jury. The penalty for companies that fail to improve is a PR headache, which will likely have a varied impact—consumer brands need to be more careful about their public image, for example, than others.

Nobody can complain that the regulation would impose an unreasonable burden on sm…

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