Quality | 2010.08.19
Equal pay: is this just about sexism? | Michael White
Forty-odd years after Barbara Castle\'s 1976 Equal Pay Act, women still earn, on average, something between 79% and 85% of what men earn
I realise it\'s unforgivable, but I never quite feel the way I\'m supposed to about the equal pay issue, which surfaces in the papers again today.
At the present rate of progress, women face a 57-year wait, says the Chartered Management Institute.
The Mail – which has a complex, sometimes abusive relationship with its women readers – predicts that the findings "will outrage millions of women executives who say they work as hard or harder than men", its stock prediction in most circumstances.
The Guardian\'s account is calmer and more nuanced, as you would expect. But it shares the Mail\'s, and the CMI research team\'s, dismay.
Forty-odd years after Barbara Castle\'s 1976 Equal Pay Act, women still earn, on average, something between 79% and 85% (figures seem to vary) of what men earn. It was around 60% in Castle\'s heyday.
So there is progress. And if you want to be more positive – are we sure we do? – we might note that the gap has narrowed slightly in Britain in the past year since women\'s salaries increased by an average 2.8% against 2.3% for blokes.
Oddly enough, the CMI report also suggests that the pay gap is lowest in the north-east – exactly the opposite of what women friends from the north would expect.
Such data usually provides a less than clear picture. Different sectors have different habits. The CMI says IT and pharmaceuticals are particularly bad for women, though presumably not as bad as coalmining.
The Mail\'s report notes that Cranfield University\'s annual Female FTSE report suggests 25% of major firms still have all-male boards, compared with 36% a decade ago. Just 12.2% of FTSE board directors are women. And so on.
The eternal question is whether this is just about sexism. I\'m sure it\'s partly so, though even that point is not straightforward. For example, from what we constantly hear from the financial sector investment banking – the crowd who got us all into economic trouble – is very male in its attitudes and pay structures.
Women bankers win employment cases on pay and harassment. But then investment banking must be a very testosterone-driven activity which requires relaxation in lap-dancing clubs, expensive motors and other toys for boys – a lifestyle that can\'t have much appeal for sensible women.
So the nature of the work – banking or coalmining – may be a factor. Even a cursory glance at Google suggests that hours worked are also a likely factor. Men tend to put in more hours at work, a detail that leads to the old familiar core issue – women are both inclined and/or obliged to make their families a greater priority in the work/life balance equation.
Why should this prompt the Mail to demand that its executive readers feel outraged? Women aren\'t obliged to make that choice any more, either by society\'s dictates (women teachers and civil servants were obliged to resign when they got married/pregnant well within living memory) or by lack of control over their own fertility.
They can work and use childminders (parent minders too?), and they can let their partner stay at home while they become the No 1 breadwinner – an increasingly visible choice.
They can choose not to have children and/or family, a choice giving Australia\'s Welsh-born PM, Julia Gillard, problems in her election campaign this week, though it is not Oz Labor\'s only problem. Good luck, Julia.
All of which strikes me as progress to be welcomed along with job-sharing (it seems to work well), flexi-time and all the other improvements made in women\'s working lives – largely the achievement of Labour governments, incidentally. It\'s good to see the Tory-led coalition finally catching up after the laggard Thatcher-Major years.
But we can\'t duck the fact that many women choose to put kids or, less easily, elderly parents first. I read, in Sunday\'s Observer, another article that behavioural differences between the sexes are "not hard-wired at birth, but are the results of pervasive cultural forces, say scientists".
OK – if you say so, scientists. But I look forward to next Sunday\'s edition, where other scientists may disagree. A woman doctor with whom I discussed it this week reckons it\'s 80:20 nature over nurture, which is certainly consistent with my observations over the years.
And why not? Of course a lot of things are tough on women who still, despite all that progress, do more than their share of housework despite – in many cases – working for a living, too.
But they still live significantly longer than their menfolk, a fact that would cause a lot more media outrage if the high-heeled boot were on the other foot.
Of course, education makes these sort of choices easier, too. More good news on this front as well. Women\'s share of university places has shot up dramatically as such places have expanded in the decades since the Castle legislation.
They\'re a majority in many places now, yes? It\'s the unskilled working class – those failing boys we read about – who have lost out to middle class girls as a result, though it\'s rarely expressed quite that way.
Interestingly enough, the CMI\'s current remedy, like that of the Fawcett Society and similar lobbies, is greater transparency in the publication of pay data. It\'s something Harriet Harman was keen to promote and the coalition is thinking about, having already shown itself keen to expose public sector "fat cats" on non-gender grounds for reasons of its own.
I was initially hostile to that campaign, since it seemed likely to foment jealousy – a fairly useless emotion. But it\'s revealed so many extraordinary salaries, many (not all) pretty hard to explain, that I\'ve changed my mind.
Even the coalition\'s new low pay guru, Will Hutton, turned out to be taking home £180,000 gross from the Work Foundation charity, which seemed a bit steep for a chap with other jobs.
If we\'re heading that way, it would be nice to see transparency extended into corners of the private sector where the realities of pay and perks often remain quite well hidden inside annual reports.
So gender comparisons might as well be in the mix – even if they cost time and money to ascertain, as they will.
But don\'t assume the results will all delight the Fawcett Society. After all, economic rationalists – who are not always wrong – argue that firms would be insane to employ so many men when they could get equally well-qualified women at a 20% discount.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/blog/2010/aug/19/equal-pay-michael-white
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