The pay gap between white and ethnic minority employees in England and Wales has narrowed to its smallest level since consistent records began in 2012, the Office for National Statistics has said. The ONS found that median hourly earnings in 2019 for white workers were £12.40 an hour – just more than 2% higher than the £12.11 an hour for ethnic minority workers. The gap is down from a peak of more than 8% in the mid-2010s. “This simple comparison between white and ethnic minority groups does, however, mask a wide variety of experiences among different ethnic minorities,” the ONS said. It said there were double-digit pay gaps for four groups of ethnic minority employees – 16% for people of Pakistani descent, 15% for white and black African, 15% for Bangladeshi and 13% for white and black Caribbean. The ONS added that some ethnic groups had consistently earned more than white workers since the series began in 2012. In 2019 median hourly earnings for employees of white Irish ethnicity were 40.5% higher than those for other white employees at £17.55, while workers of Chinese ethnicity earned 23.1% more at £15.38 an hour and workers of Indian descent earned £14.43 an hour – a negative pay gap of 15.5%. Halima Begum, director of the race equality thinktank the Runnymede Trust, expressed concern about the findings. “We are particularly worried to see the figures for Pakistani workers – paid lowest, against other counterparts despite holding higher degree level qualifications,” she said. “The government needs to ask what are the underlying causes for this inequality? We can’t explain it away by degree qualifications or socio-economic factors or ethnicity. Therefore, this suggests that invisible factors are working against South Asians.” Breaking down the data by gender, the ONS said ethnic minority men earned 6.1% less than white men while ethnic minority women earned 2.1% more than white women. The ONS added that ethnicity pay gaps differed by age group. “Among those aged 30 years and over, those in ethnic minority tend to earn less than those of white ethnicities,” it said. In contrast, those in the ethnic minority group aged 16 to 29 years tend to earn more than those of white ethnicities of the same age.” The ONS found that the pay gap of 16% for employees of Pakistani descent aged more than 30 shrank to 2% for those aged 16-29. A Chinese-ethnicity employee under the age of 30 earned 46% more than the average white employee, compared with 19% more for an employee over 30. By region, the biggest ethnic pay gap was in London (23.8%) and the smallest was in Wales (1.4%). Taking into account factors such as age, sex, marital status, children, qualifications, country of birth and location of employees narrowed the gap for many ethnic groups, the ONS found. “Adjusting for pay determining characteristics influences the pay gaps observed, with a narrowing of pay gaps for most ethnicities,” it said. “This suggests that differences in the average characteristics of different ethnic groups were influencing the unadjusted pay gap, often overstating the difference.”