Why today is important - and shameful
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The pay gap in this country means that women might as well stop getting paid for the year on 30 October. Men, of course, go on getting paid for the rest of the year. Today is the first Women’s No Pay Day, called by Fawcett and Unison.
Here’s what needs to happen to get closer to equal pay:
Transparency: Mandatory pay checks for all organisations or require organisations to publish pay information in annual reports.
Level playing fields: Tackling long hours and increasing flexibility at work, including at senior positions would enable women and men to compete on a level playing field.
Let women stand together: Allow group actions supported by unions so that the burden is not on individual women to speak out.
Funding: The Government should clear up its own backyard and fund equal pay deals for women in the public sector.
Simplify the law: Equal pay cases are harder to take than other discrimination cases, meaning women can’t get justice. The Government must end these unfair anomalies.
And here’s where you should sign up to show your support.
Great post.
I’ve sent the details to all my contacts and already have feedback from some of them as to how many they’ve posted on to. If they all sign it would be nearly 1,000 additional signatures so far.
This is based on the calendar year, right? not the pay year?
Yes, Pickles. The pay gap between women and men means that, in effect, women don’t get paid from 30 October until 31 December.
The ‘pay gap’ is in fact between working mothers and everybody else. Which is, as I have said before, easily fixed.
All you have to do is increase child benefit, make it non-means tested and pay it to the mother.
Mark’s solution is exactly the right one (assuming that his claim that it is mothers, rather than all women, who are disadvantaged is correct. Perhaps Mark could point us at the data on which he makes this claim.)
Mothers are disadvantaged with respect to non-mothers for all the obvious reasons - they take career breaks to have children, aren’t as flexible on working hours as non-mothers as the primary childcare responsibility tends to fall on them, have a greater need to take days off work because a child is sick, etc.
These are all perfectly reasonable reasons why “mothers” on average have less economic value to an employer than non-mothers.
It is entirely reasonable for us as a society to decide that we don’t want women to face economic disadvantage due to motherhood.
It is neither reasonable nor sensible to require employers to subsidise their less-productive employees by paying them the same as more productive ones. Such action will inevitably result in fewer women being employed.
The right way to “fix” this is for the taxpayer to give some money to women who are mothers. A vehicle already exists for doing this - child benefit.
(All that nonsense about “mechanics get paid more than childminders” is exactly that - nonsense. If it suggests anything, it’s that childminders who want to make more money should retrain as mechanics. Even if one were to accept that a car mechanic requires “equal” skills to a childminder [the skills required for the two occupations are very different. "Equality" between them inevitably contains a subjective value judgement.] that’s not a justification for equal pay. Supply and demand must enter into it somewhere.)
Sam, thanks for support.
Off the cuff, I can only offer this, which are stats from the USA, but as I am married and we have kids, and my wife took time off etc etc, the basic premise seems to stack up to me.
Mark’s solution can’t be right. Are we really saying that mothers should be forced to rely on handouts rather than having the dignity of work and contributing to society?
And it IS reasonable for employers to subsidise their less-productive employees by paying them the same as more productive ones. Otherwise we end up in a situation where everyone is competing against fellow workers in the same workplace to be the most productive, and everyone who can’t for whatever reason - perhaps because they have children, perhaps because they have a physical disability, perhaps because they have depression, perhaps simply because they want to maintain a healthy work-life balance - is paid a lower rate. Paying “less productive employees” the same will not result in fewer women being employed - that’s why we have discrimination laws, to stop people from acting on those kinds of assumptions.
What’s more, Mark’s solution would surely exacerbate gender inequality. If you paid mothers child benefit and allowed employers to discriminate, couples who need one person to stay at home/do part time work and one person to do full time work are even more likely to decide that the woman should stay at home, because that will result in a more optimal situation for them financially. We would be skewing the choice that individuals make towards a regressive, traditional-type outcome.
I’m all for increasing child benefit, but this is not all that has to be done.
Or this, again, it’s from the USA, but I am pretty sure that the same applies here.
Tim F, obviously, there is nothing to stop Mum going to work and Dad staying at home and the enhanced child benefit being paid to Dad. I think that it is best to leave these sorts of decision to each couple. Who may indeed be two women or two men or any other combination.
As to “dignity of work and contributing to society”, doesn’t looking after kids, which is incredibly hard and does contribute to society not deserve some payment from ’society’, i.e. the taxpayer?
Mark’s solution can’t be right. Are we really saying that mothers should be forced to rely on handouts rather than having the dignity of work and contributing to society?
No. Mark isn’t talking about some kind of welfare-trap handout that forces mothers to stay at home. He’s suggesting that motherhood tends to render mothers less economically valuable in the workplace, and that if society wants to rectify that, they can do so by giving money to mothers (irrespective of whether they choose to work or not).
And it IS reasonable for employers to subsidise their less-productive employees by paying them the same as more productive ones. Otherwise we end up in a situation where everyone is competing against fellow workers in the same workplace to be the most productive, and everyone who can’t for whatever reason - perhaps because they have children, perhaps because they have a physical disability, perhaps because they have depression, perhaps simply because they want to maintain a healthy work-life balance - is paid a lower rate.
Which is exactly what happens in the real world. People who do more work get paid more money - either because they work more overtime, or because they get performance bonuses for doing a better job, or they get promoted faster.
It is entirely reasonable to want to “maintain a better work-life balance”, but it’s not reasonable for you to inflict your idea of the ideal work-life balance on me.
Paying “less productive employees” the same will not result in fewer women being employed - that’s why we have discrimination laws, to stop people from acting on those kinds of assumptions.
It is reasonably easy for an employee member of a protected class (women, say) to prove discrimination if he is fired, or otherwise treated poorly with respect to other employees (for values of “reasonably easy” that mean “actually quite hard, but possible”). It is very much harder for a woman who doesn’t get hired in the first place to prove that she wasn’t hired because of her sex. It’s not completely impossible, but it’s rather hard.
The practical consequence of this is that fewer women will be hired in the first place. This doesn’t apply to “traditionally female” jobs, but does apply to the higher-paying jobs in which women are poorly represented.
What’s more, Mark’s solution would surely exacerbate gender inequality. If you paid mothers child benefit and allowed employers to discriminate, couples who need one person to stay at home/do part time work and one person to do full time work are even more likely to decide that the woman should stay at home, because that will result in a more optimal situation for them financially.
[Everything here will assume a heterosexual couple. Gay and lesbian parents aren't relevant for this discussion.]
OK, here’s a little biology lesson. Women can lactate, but men can’t. This simple biological fact strongly skews the choice of which parent stays home with an infant or toddler. Let’s suppose that the mother and father have equal skills, and get equal pay. A rational, dispassionate choice will place the mother at home with the child because she is equipped to feed it, whereas the father isn’t.
Yes, this isn’t equal. That’s because this particular biological difference between men and women has a consequence - women are, on average, better suited to having the primary care of their infants than men. That means that rational couples are going to choose to have the woman stay at home with the children more often than the man.
The consequence of this is that the woman will be disadvantaged in her career - through having less experience, and at the point where she returns to work, a lack of up-to-date experience, which will place her at a disadvantage for promotion etc.
The bottom line is that if you take two equally-skilled equally-able people, and one of them takes a break for a few years to do something
that doesn’t use or enhance those skills, the one that stayed at work is going to be more useful, and so more valuable to an employer.
The question, then, is what do you want to do about it. Pretending that it isn’t true is not the path of wisdom. Trying to force employers to treat less useful employees the same as more useful employees has fairness issues (and I claim is unlikely to improve the employment prospects of women), and trying to prevent non-mothers from doing more than 35 hours work a week in order to allow mothers to “compete on an equal footing” is just too French for words. What’s left?
Mark’s solution doesn’t help the career prospects of mothers who take a break to have children, but I don’t think that “problem” is solvable. Someone with more experience will, all other things being equal, be better at a job than someone with less experience. Wishing it weren’t so doesn’t actually help you.
His solution does, at least on average, level the financial playing field, and does so in a way that creates no extra red tape, and no extra deadweight cost.
Surely either Mark is right when he says:
“Tim F, obviously, there is nothing to stop Mum going to work and Dad staying at home and the enhanced child benefit being paid to Dad. I think that it is best to leave these sorts of decision to each couple. Who may indeed be two women or two men or any other combination.”
OR
Sam is right when he says
“OK, here’s a little biology lesson. Women can lactate, but men can’t. This simple biological fact strongly skews the choice of which parent stays home with an infant or toddler. Let’s suppose that the mother and father have equal skills, and get equal pay. A rational, dispassionate choice will place the mother at home with the child because she is equipped to feed it, whereas the father isn’t.
Yes, this isn’t equal. That’s because this particular biological difference between men and women has a consequence - women are, on average, better suited to having the primary care of their infants than men. That means that rational couples are going to choose to have the woman stay at home with the children more often than the man.”
They can’t both be right (although they could both be wrong). Either there is nothing to stop Mum going to work and Dad staying at home or rational couples are going to choose to have the woman stay at home more often.
As for the rest, looking after kids is a very hard job and does deserve recompense. I don’t think child benefit goes far enough in this direction. There is dignity in all jobs, but people who survive off benefits are generally looked down on and this can’t be changed overnight. Often people gain more self-respect through work and I think embedding gendered roles, as raising child benefit as a sole solution to the pay-gap would do, would deny this possibility to women.
And Sam, it might be the way the world is that someone working more overtime etc gets rewarded more than someone who wants to maintain a healthy work-life balance, the way the world is results in unhealthy pressures on everyone to do overtime even if they don’t want to because there is a serious worry that you’re going to lose your job otherwise. That is not a good thing. Personally I would like to see the maximum number of hours reduced and no opt-outs allowed. (I’m talking more about working-class jobs and particularly those which don’t pay well, but imagine it’s true of some other jobs too.)
Sorry, it’s late and I’m not sure if my wording of that last paragraph makes sense to anyone but me! I can retype it another time if not.
Surely either Mark is right when he says:
“Tim F, obviously, there is nothing to stop Mum going to work and Dad staying at home [...]
OR
Sam is right when he says
“OK, here’s a little biology lesson. Women can lactate, but men can’t.
No, both are right. It is true that there is a biological bias in favour of the woman staying at home, and it’s also true that couples are, and should be, free to make their own choices about who cares for their children.
The majority of couples will decide that the woman should stay at home, but some couples will have reasons to chose to have the man stay at home (maybe the woman is the family’s major breadwinner, or she has a less flexible career than the man.)
And Sam, it might be the way the world is that someone working more overtime etc gets rewarded more than someone who wants to maintain a healthy work-life balance, the way the world is results in unhealthy pressures on everyone to do overtime even if they don’t want to because there is a serious worry that you’re going to lose your job otherwise. That is not a good thing.
Are you trying to argue that employers shouldn’t be allowed to discriminate amongst their employees on the grounds of ability and effort, or just that you don’t want people to be able to choose to work longer-than-average hours? Would you allow me to work 30 hours a week for each of two employers - is that OK, because each employer will think I’m a bit of a slacker for not wanting to work more than 30 hours in a week when there’s a rush on? Do you want to force me to have more spare time for my benefit, or for yours?
I don’t think that it is a good thing if the majority of couples will decide that the woman stays at home, as I think it creates an impression which is self-reinforcing. I’m therefore more keen to look for measures which help mothers out to work, such as ensuring equal pay in the workplace.
And yes, I don’t think employers should be able to discriminate between their employees on the grounds of ability and effort, providing the ability and effort from each employee is adequate to do the job, of course. Clearly I would not condone routine lateness, being drunk at work etc or any other kind of behaviour which is unfair on other employees. I do want you to have more spare time for my benefit, because if you work lots of overtime you create an expectation that I should do the same. This is just as unfair as not allowing employees to do more than a certain amount of overtime, and I think protecting the rights of people who want to be less overworked and spend more time with their families is more important than protecting the rights of people who want to do lots of overtime to earn more money.
Too right
How about some recognition that some of us WANT to work part time and would like to have the chance of decent jobs to do so .
Both Sam and I are right because we are stating simple, basic verifiable facts.
Neither of us have attempted to justify that this is the way things should be: we have just explained the way things are and have suggested a simple way to ameliorate the worst aspects.
FFS, my wife is a married Mum (surprise, surprise) we are affected by this! Which is why I put on my thinking cap.
What is shameful is the dishonesty of feminists complaining about the gender pay gap. When women choose more difficult degrees, are prepared to persue careers with more dedication (they work less hours on average, and are more likely to drop out of a profession than men), and when they choose jobs that pay more (such as jobs that pose a risk - physical or otherwise), they might just earn more.
The point is though that these things won’t happen, because women don’t want to, so why should we be fretting about the so-called gender pay gap, when its down to women’s choices? Or are you saying that women are making the “wrong” choices according to some ideology? In which case, keep it to your self.