International Women's Day

The union said that although there was much enlightened rhetoric to close the gender pay gap, progress was too slow and employers needed to start considering remedial action to hasten the pace towards pay parity.

UCU general secretary, Sally Hunt, said: 'For years we have heard enlightened rhetoric about the issue of unfair pay for women. However, there are still gaps in our pay at our institutions and until everyone is prepared to really tackle the gender pay gap, we will remain some way from gender equality.

'There is not yet enough being done to root out and tackle the problem. We would like to see mandatory equal pay audits as a start to unearthing out the scale of the problem and then a concerted effort by employers to consider remedial action to close the pay gap.'

Office for National Statistics, Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings