Roderic O'Gorman (Dublin West, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I am pleased to engage with Deputies on this significant legislation. I acknowledge the work done by the former Minister of State, Deputy Stanton, in bringing the Bill this far.

I thank Deputy Funchion for her amendments, which seek to provide for a gender breakdown of information on various categories of employees. However, I have real concerns that providing that type of breakdown may lead to individual employees being easily identifiable within workplaces, particularly smaller workplaces. The amendments would potentially be at odds with section 20A(8) of the Employment Equality Act 1998, as set out in section 2 of the Bill, which provides that regulations may prescribe measures to be taken by the employer or the person who has access to the information to ensure personal data have undergone pseudonymisation before or when they are released. Pseudonymisation has the meaning assigned to it by Article 4 of the general data protection regulation, GDPR. It refers to the processing of personal data in such a manner that the data can no longer be attributed to a specific data subject without the use of additional information, provided that such additional information is kept separately and is subject to technical and organisational measures to ensure the personal data are not attributed to an identified or identifiable natural person. In a situation where there is a small number of one category of persons in a workplace, it is very likely that the publication of the information proposed in the Deputy's amendments would make those people individually identifiable.

I acknowledge that the Deputy is concerned that women may make up the majority of part-time workers, which could be a contributory factor in their being lower paid. However, there are measures proposed in the legislation that allow us to delve into the information that is provided by each company about the gender pay gap, which is the basis of this Bill. I draw the Deputy's attention to section 20A(9) of the 1998 Act, as inserted by section 2 of the Bill, which provides that regulations may be made requiring publication of the percentage of each pay quartile who are men and women. For example, information may be provided on what percentage of the highest hourly paid 25% of employees are men or women. That sort of information is less likely to identify individuals and provides a more detailed and texturised level of background information regarding the origin of a gender pay gap within a particular employer. This is the better way to go because it avoids the potential, in a small workplace, that the categorisation the Deputy proposes in these amendments could give rise to the singling out and identification of certain individuals, which would mean their pay information could become known.

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