30th anniversary of the SDA
Once again we’re debating the pay gap today, folks. Start here (and by the way, go Margaret Prosser!) and make sure that you pootle over to Harry’s Place where the commenters are discussing the issue in a notably ill-informed way (poor dears, they get a bit confused when the issue’s not Iraq). I love the EOC for the way they keep on going on this issue: now we have to make sure our government gets some backbone and actually delivers for women.
From the article in the Graun:
The commission has identified three key factors sustaining the gender pay gap: part-time working, occupational segregation and women’s labour market issues, such as childcare, which act as barriers to women’s chances of entering and progressing in the workplace.
Am I the only one who is entirely unsurprised that people working part time earn less per hour than people working full time at “the same job”?
Let’s start with some reasonable suppositions:
1. The group of part-time workers will tend to contain more temporary employees, students with Saturday jobs and the like, whereas the full-time employees will contain most of the people who have been doing the job for a while and are presumably good at it.
2. Assume we begin with two people with equal abilities. If one works half-time and the other works full-time, at any point in the future, the full-time employee will have twice as much experience at the job. Experience, generally speaking, is worth money.
3. Now suppose one of our two equally-able people takes a few years out of his career to do something else. When he returns to work, he will find that he has less experience, and significantly less recent experience of the job than his coaeval who remained at work, and so will be worth less to his employer. Of course, if the “something else” gave him new skills and experience that his employer values, he may now be worth more than the other guy.
All these things skew your statistics, and I don’t think the EOC accounts for them properly.
“Occupational segregation” I assume must be the claim that, say, people who sew clothes are mostly women, whereas people who assemble cars are mostly men. The EOC asserts that the work is “equivalent” and so “deserves” the same pay.
Quite apart from the obviously bogus nature of someone at a desk claiming that two different jobs are “equivalent”, this all looks like an enormous market opportunity. If women really are being paid less (10%, 40%, whatever) for the same work, we should be overrun by employers competing to hire these cheap women, reduce their cost base and make more money. If you claim that that doesn’t happen because employers are all men, and only want to hire other men who they can play squash with, it becomes a market opportunity for a new competing comany run by a woman.
If this is a real genuine difference, and equally able women are being paid significantly less than men for the same work, why hasn’t the market fixed it? Are there artificial barriers to entry? Are the bureaucratic costs of starting a business to high? Or is the premise false, and the women aren’t the equivalent of the men?
The childcare issue is certainly a real one, although the EOC never seems to actually mention the fact that the “childcare responsibilities” can’t be equally shared when you have young children, as only one of the sexes is capable of lactating. I have a couple of female colleagues who have chosen to return to work fairly soon after the birth of their children. They earn more than the average national wage, but after tax, childcare costs and the extra costs (travel, clothes…) associated with working, they end up in roughly the same financial situation as if they had stayed at home. High quality childcare for small children is by its nature expensive - it makes no economic sense to pay for this to allow women to work in low-wage jobs. There is an argument for the provision of after-school care, though - the costs are comparitively small, and it would allow women to work full-time.
Antonia,
Without any concerted effort by the government to alter women’s expectations, the medical profession will become female dominated within less than a generation. If women are choosing to not do the same thing to the financial services industry, strategy consultancy, management etc, why should anyone really care?
Antonia,
What do you think Government should actually do? It seems to me that there’s a strong case that the Equal Pay Act is simply impossible to operate (shouldn’t we let the market judge what ‘work of equal value’ actually is) and so I’m sceptical about the value of further legislation.
Why is it that my female contemporaries (I’m early 30s, university educated) routinely choose employment that is less well remunerated than the men - and why do so many accept that they should be the predominant caregiver? Do we not need to shift the attitudes of such people when they make economic decisions if we actually want to reduce the pay gap?
To be honest, they get a bit confused when the issue is Iraq.
Gordon,
I think, in the short term, the government should require all employers to perform a gender pay audit, so that where there is overt or covert discrimination, it can be identified and rooted out.
I think that the sector skills councils should be running programmes to encourage women and men into sectors where they are currently underrepresented, such as plumbing and electrical engineering for women and childcare and teaching for men - after all, we’re going to need vast numbers of childcare staff in the next few years as the children’s centres programme gears up. I’d like to see careers advisors taking more responsibility for giving young people a range of careers options too - too often young people get no careers advice at all.
I’m not as convinced as you, Gordon, of the market’s ability to right all wrongs, and I don’t think that women have the ability in our society to make unrestrained choices about whether/how they work and what they work as.
There are about 2 million service providers in the UK - there will be slightly more employers and similar. How would you design an audit tool so that it was meaningful both for large companies like Vodafone, and the corner shop/small business that employs fewer than (say) 10 people? Who would police the conduct of such audits? Who would be responsible for deciding whether variations in pay were justifiable on grounds of experience, aptitude etc?
Agree about sector skills councils and careers advisors (both of which will be under the forthcoming duty on the public sector to promote equality of opportunity for women and men).
I don’t dispute that sex discrimination is a factor in the different rates of pay enjoyed by men and women. However, I consider that we all have a responsibility to make choices for ourselves. _Some_ women do have difficulty exercising their rights to make choices - but it’s disingenuous to argue that sex discrimination and male oppression are the only factors behind the pay gap.
Gordon - the audit tool has already been designed. There are several versions in circulation, including this one here from the EOC, and another one here specially produced for small businesses. (They estimate that it takes about 2 minutes per employee to complete).
As for the policing and decisionmaking, I don’t know - but surely those are details that can be worked out by the bureaucrats to make a system that works efficiently for employees and employers?
I have never argued that “sex discrimination and male oppression are the only factors behind the pay gap” (my italics). As you know, I believe that they are a vastly significant factor alongside indirect disadvantage resulting from gendered expectations and stereotypes ranging from the idea of the “family wage”, to “women’s jobs” and the continuing responsibility of women for caring responsibilities.
Another factor I’ve seen again and again as a career coach is that women are quite often sidelined after maternity, whole chunks of responsibility removed, even when they return to work full time. That works in two ways. It makes them seem less valuable to their employer, so their pay will rise more slowly than if they were allowed to take up the challenges they had formerly, and also makes them more vulnerable to redundancy, which reduces their likelihood of getting long service pay. I refer you to current case and comments on blog: http://www.coachange.me.uk.blogware.com/blog/UnfairDiscrimination/_archives/2006/9/6/2300659.html