Wage indicator family
LondonPayWizard is part of the international Wage Indicator project, which started in 2001 with the Dutch site Loonwijzer. Now there is a whole family on line in different countries, including a national UK site www.paywizard.co.uk.
Essentially all wage indicators share the same
concept. The identical core questionnaire and method allow for
international comparison of data. But each website has a separate
project team, providing labour market specific content unique for every
country.
How does the salary check work?
Site visitors can check their own earnings, comparing
them with users whose data have been previously gathered and stored
in LondonPayWizard. By comparison you can find out whether or not you
are being treated fairly by your employer, and paid the market rate for
your job.
In contrast with other online pay checkers the data
intake is strictly seperated from the Salary check itself. Wages
data is only fed back into the salary check after cleaning and
scientific weighting by labour market experts, thereby improving its
accuracy.
Based on continuous research into wage indicator
data, we now know that some items are more significant in determining
earnings than others. We found these were:
-
education
- work experience
- being a manager
- taking a career break
- having predominantly male colleagues in the same job
- promotion
- size of company
However these factors differ in importance between different professions. Once 50 or more individuals in the same profession have filled in the questionnaire, we can create an accounting rule for the profession.
Tip: Use the LondonPayWizard to experiment with different professions. You might be surprised about your own assumptions and prejudices.
What kind of data are gathered?
The site user chooses from a list of prepared jobs. Apart from questions directly related to your job, the questionnaire asks about:
- working hours,
- working history,
- company,
- contract of employment,
- demographic details.
Through analysing people's situations in more detail, we can draw some interesting conclusions. For example, analysis of Dutch data helped show that if your workplace has a majority of male colleagues you are all likely to be paid more. Also the salary check sheds light on the position of women re-entering the job market: in many professions there can be a clear difference in pay.