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

I take on board the points on the success of Athena Swan. I know from my previous job in DCU the efforts made and the drive to achieve success there. It is undertaken in many third level institutions. A voluntary charter of this nature is significant and we can learn from it, particularly in the public service. In the context of trying to get the balance between ensuring the data and information about salaries, which is obviously very personal to individuals, remain anonymised, particularly in those smaller employers, versus the idea, as Senator Higgins spoke about, of getting sectoral information, we can ask particularly large-scale public employers to undertake some of this voluntarily in the same way they undertake Athena Swan voluntarily. There is nothing stopping bodies going further than this particular legislation and this is significant, particularly in a situation where we have a risk of smaller employers breaching the anonymity of the information versus what we are trying to achieve.Whereas I do not necessarily feel that the Bill or statute needs to be amended in order to reflect those particular changes, there are wider changes that can be achieved through the process and engagement we will create once the information has been published on an annual basis. There will also be a website where people seeking employment can look up an employer to see what its record is in the context of the pay between genders in a particular wage or salary cohort that a particular individual is seeking to enter into.