A SCOTTISH sun bed firm has one of the largest gender pay gaps in the country, despite most employees being women.

Indigo Sun Retail, which reported an £11 million turnover in 2016, paid the average female employee 39.7 per cent less than the average male – despite women making up 94.1 per cent of the business’s higher-paid jobs.

In a statement on its website, the Stirling based high street tanning chain, who have shops across the UK, said the figures were skewed: “This shows that in common with other retail businesses, the company has a larger proportion of female to male employees due to the nature of the business.”

The company insisted: “Males and females doing the same job are paid equally. We employ more female than male staff in front line operations which distorts the hourly rate as the majority of males included in the calculations are in management roles.”

Indigo’s pay gap was the 15th largest in Scotland, but the biggest discrepancies were, perhaps unsurprisingly, in construction and oil and gas; industries with few female workers, and even fewer women at top levels.

James Frew, which describes itself as one of the largest “building services companies” in Scotland had the country’s biggest gap, with the average woman paid 55.5 per cent less than the average man

The North Ayrshire company also disclosed it has no women in any of the higher paid positions.

Scots airline Loganair saw the average women paid 39.4 less less than the average man, though that was far better than Ryanair, which reported a 67 per cent pay gap.

Loganair’s managing director Jonathan Hinkles said: “Our gender pay gap is influenced by the salaries and profile of our pilot and engineering teams, who are predominantly male, and make up more than half our employees. Our figures are better than many other airlines, due to 12.4 per cent of our pilots being female – more than double the UK airline average – and we are continuing to do what we can to encourage more females into this area.”

At the other end of the chart was United Wholesale (Scotland), the cash and carry owned by the family of Labour MSP Anas Sarwar. The average man at UWS was paid 76 per cent less than the average woman.

The firm has women in 16 per cent of the higher-paid jobs and in 10 per cent of lower-paid jobs

Legislation first passed eight years ago saw all companies with more than 250 staff compelled to declare their gender pay gap to the Government by midnight yesterday. To work out their gap, firms had to file data based on a “snapshot” of their payroll taken on 5 April 2017.

This was the first year of reporting, in what will now be an annual event.

The data showed that, on average, across the UK, women were being paid a median hourly rate that was 9.7 per cent less than their male colleagues.

Details of 10,060 companies were filed, with more than 1100 companies waiting until the last possible moment.

It’s the biggest data gathering exercise of its kind in the world, but there was some criticism of the figures.

Kate Andrews from economic thinktank, the IEA, said the data was “unusable when trying to assess pay, fairness, and opportunity for men and women in the workplace”.

She said: “There are a host of problems with the pay gap measurements, including the failure to separate part-time from full-time workers and the omission of key data that would be needed to make any genuine assessments around bonuses and pay quartiles.

“Most crucially, these measurements do not take into account key differentials, such as job, background, education level, age, or years of experience. Gender pay gap statistics are more or less meaningful depending on the extent to which they compare pay in like-for-like circumstances; the failure of this new data to do so renders most of the findings meaningless.

But campaigners Close the Gap, said the figures showed evidence of “women’s systemic inequality in the workplace”.

The organisation said: “The under-utilisation of women’s skills is a drag on growth, contributing to sector-wide skills shortages. Research by Close the Gap established that equalising the gender gap in employment could add up to £17bn to Scotland’s economy.”

Scotland’s biggest company, power firm SSE, paid women 19.3 per cent less on average.

On average Abellio ScotRail, paid men 27.2 per cent more, while Tennents Caledonian gap was at 21.3 per cent, and Wood Group’s was at 23.1 per cent. Rangers paid men, on average 20 per cent more than women.