As of March 31 2025 women earned £1.27 for every £1 that men earned
Stock image of Belfast City Hall(Image: Belfast Live)
Women are being paid more than men at Belfast City Council, an internal study at City Hall has revealed.
Council officials gave the findings of the council’s first gender pay gap report to elected representatives at a committee meeting at City Hall on Friday (April 24), in which it was shown that women were ahead of men in the earning stakes. An official caveated that by saying she believed the picture would be different if overtime had been considered in the audit.
In a report for the council’s Strategic Policy and Resources Committee, officers stated that the survey resulted from a 2024 motion stating Belfast Council would “lead the way in Northern Ireland, adopting robust, transparent and accountable processes for gender pay gap recording and reporting.”
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There is no legal obligation to record and report gender pay gap data in Northern Ireland. The council motion however obligated Belfast Council to record and report its mean and median gender pay gap in hourly pay, the proportion of males and females in each pay quartile and give a statistical overview of promotion rates for male and female staff.
As of March 31 2025 women earned £1.27 for every £1 that men earned, comparing median hourly pay. Women made up 51.04 percent of employees in the highest paid quarter, and 21.93 percent of employees in the lowest paid quarter. Women’s mean, or average, hourly pay was 16.3 percent higher than men’s.
A council report states: “The gender pay gap results for this reporting period shows a pay gap in favour of women, both at the median and mean levels. This outcome is closely linked to the structure of the workforce and the distribution of roles across the organisation.”
At the S,P and R meeting on Friday, a council officer told elected representatives: “I would also say that, in terms of gender pay gap reporting, ordinary pay does not include overtime, and therefore I do think results would be different if you factored in overtime.
“When you look at the distribution across the structure in our organisation, it is very male-dominated in front line roles, and those roles tend to attract more overtime than office-based roles. So I do think if we were looking at a report with overtime and allowances, that might actually show a different picture.”
She added: “We weren’t surprised by the results, is what I would say, whenever you look at ordinary pay, and the structure across our organisation, with office roles primarily female, and frontline services primarily male.”
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