Figures show that male staff working for oil giant Shell earn on average 22 percent more than their female colleagues in the UK.
The company is confident, however, that it pays equally for equal work and insists the difference in pay rates is because of a skills gap rather than sex discrimination.
The oil giant is the latest company to reveal its gender pay gap after the British government instructed firms employing more than 250 employees to publish gender pay gap figures every year. This data is added to a government database in an attempt to tackle gender pay gap.
Sinead Lynch, Shell UK's chairman, said there were two main reasons behind the gender pay gap. There were "fewer women in senior leadership positions, and fewer women working in technical or trading roles that attract higher pay levels."
Shell, the largest firm on Britain's FTSE 100 index, admitted it struggles to attract as many women as men into technical roles that normally pay more. It claims it cannot recruit enough highly-skilled female staff because of an industry-wide shortage. Only 16 percent of engineering graduates in the UK are women.
Insisting it was making progress to bridge the gap, the company said the percentage of women in senior management roles had risen from 12 percent in 2005 to 27 percent in 2017.
Similarly, the Bank of England claimed a traditional skills imbalance was the reason its male staff were paid almost a quarter more than female employees.
Large UK companies have until April next year to publish their gender pay gaps with the vast majority yet to report them.
