Taking a health cheque on pay

Doctors and other health professionals topped the pay league last year, according to official data this week which showed average pay rates jumped by 4.7% in April 2004.

Senior employees in the health sector were paid on average £993 a week compared to company managers who earned £643 a week on average and "science and technology professionals" who claimed £605 a week.

Median weekly pay for full-time employees in the UK grew to reach £422. Median earnings of full-time male employees were £462 per week in April 2004; for women the median was £358.

The figures are based on a new annual survey of hours and earnings by the Office for National Statistics, which replaces the New Earnings Survey.

The old survey used the mean average to calculate average earnings. The uneven spread of wages in the economy meant that two thirds of workers earned less than the average. Many economists claimed the ONS figures gave an increasingly distorted picture of average wages as rampant wage inflation among senior executives drove up the average figures.

The ONS faced the prospect of three quarters of workers earning wages below the average in a few years if the system remained unchanged.

The use of the median average will bring the proportion of workers below the average down to half. But critics are expected to argue that the average remains artificially high until figures showing the mode average - which picks an average figure from the salary most people are paid.

While the annual pay figure for women remains well below the rate for men, women won pay rises averaging 5.3% in 2004 to £18,531.

The result is a gender pay gap that has narrowed to 85.7% of men's last April, compared with 85.4% the previous year. The largest pay difference was in the East Midlands where women's median pay was 82.6% of men's. The smallest gap was in Northern Ireland, at 94.8%.

The gender pay gap is measured by the median hourly pay of full-time employees, excluding overtime, and is now at its lowest since it was first recorded 33 years ago. In 1971 women's mean hourly pay was 63.5% of men's but in 2004 their mean pay is 81.8% of men's.

An ONS spokesman says: "Owing to methodology changes these figures are not strictly comparable, but they do show the scale of the movement there has been. In 30 years the gap has closed considerably."

Women's weekly earnings were lower than men's "partly because they worked around two hours fewer per week", the spokesman adds.

Amicus, the UK's largest manufacturing, technical & skilled workers union, said it believed more must be done to close the gender pay divide.

The union is calling for compulsory pay audits, to press employers to prove their salaries are fair. General secretary Derek Simpson says: "The pay gap between men and women is too wide. Women still face discrimination in the workplace. Progress will only be made once the burden of proof is removed from the shoulders of women and employers take responsibility for demonstrating that they do not discriminate."

Trade and Industry Secretary Patricia Hewitt says: "I'm pleased that the gender pay gap continues to narrow. But the gap persists despite our efforts to improve the deal women get at work."

The survey also found the number of jobs paid below the national minimum wage in the UK was 272,000 last spring - 1.1 per cent of all jobs in the market.