HR needs to practice what it preaches

I read your article about HR’s gender pay gap shaming the profession (News, 21 September) with great interest. I had been having these same thoughts since my male colleagues in the personnel department received a 7 per cent pay rise this year and they don’t need to be qualified.

They now earn £9,625 a year more than I, plus they receive a further 20 per cent of their salary to attend fires (no issue with that reason).

We personnel practitioners, while readily offering plenty of professional advice to managers and other employees to make use of the policies and procedures open to them, tend not to practice what we preach.

Often, we feel that it is inappropriate for us to “make rumblings” or “rock the boat” because of our perceived status in the organisations for which we work. It is sometimes forgotten that we are human too. However, a lot of work has been done on equal pay issues in my organisation, even to the extent of publishing an Equal Pay Questionnaire and making it available online.

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Perhaps we should all begin by completing the questionnaire to assess our potential claims and advise our superiors of our intentions – maybe they will then begin to take our pay seriously.

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