You don't need to be an 'investor' to invest in Singletrack: 6 days left: 95% of target - Find out more
Lots of stuff in the news about this at the minute, and not surprisingly (in my opinion) lots of companies showing a discrepancy. Yes sexism comes in to it, but I am not convinced that it is the only reason behind women on average getting less pay than men.
In our house, I am the parent who does most of the childcare. We made a conscious decision way back when that Mrs FD would do the big career thing, and I would have the 'sensible' job to do childcare/maintain the home.
At the moment I am looking for a new job and it is near on impossible to find part time posts that pay more than not far off the minimum wage.
In my organisation there are a number of 'middle management' women who had to start full time and have now negotiated down to part time hours, but they agree that they would have not been able to get jobs in middle management part time, and would have ended up looking at more admin type roles.
I just don't know how you go about changing companies to advertise more senior roles part time? In reality which organisation only wants a key role part time? It takes a lot more of a shift in culture (not sexism)
Oh and as for sexism. When Mrs FD was pregnant, quite a few of her colleagues directly had conversations with her suggesting it was time to give up her chosen career as you couldn't possibly have a child and do her job.
So yes my view is possibly narrowed because of my current situation, but it does certainly suggest its more than the fact that people think men are more capable than women.
My wife and I are both Civil Engineers (oh the fun we have discussing our days....) we both work 4 days a week and look after the kids on our day off and are both the same age.
She went straight from uni whereas I started later and did part time uni, she's chartered and I can't be bothered.
She earns more than me. Which is how it should be.
I would expect that role for role my industry doesn't have a massive problem with gender pay gap, Civil Engineering is still a very male dominated industry though. Even Consulting Engineering which is what we do.
I don't know a lot about the way it was calculated, but it seems to me that the sums are duff. I work in the social care industry - heavily dominated by women - in my organization a female CEO and two of the top 3 managers are women, but we still come out as unequal payers. Doesn't make sense to me - every job is offered on merit and nothing to do with gender, and the pay scale is the same regardless of gender, so how do we come out with that result?
Seems to me it's a loaded political calculation, fixed to give the answer it did. Or I'm a cynic...
Highly complex subject that's been over simplified and boiled down into one headline grabbing number that tells you very little about why men and women end up in different roles earning different salaries.
The figures in the press are too simplistic for my liking. In doing so their paint a confusing picture.
One of the companies right up at the top of the list of gender inequality was Phase 8 - the female clothing brand. Knowing a tiny bit about the brand as we have a friend that works there I can see how the figures stack up to the headline figure. They have a hugely female dominated store staff, most earning sensible money for a store but in truth not much above minimum wage. Do they discriminate and only employ women, or do only women apply to work in a women's only clothing store - who knows. In head office there are a lot of female staff who have come up through the ranks in the stores but some male staff too. The friend, a female member of staff who works for the brand in head office is perfectly happy that her male counterparts in equivalent jobs are paid equally. But as the male staff are grouped into better paid head office skilled or management jobs their average wage in comparison to the female average that includes huge numbers of store workers makes the headline reported inequality figure look dreadful.
As such I struggle to take the figures reported at face value without knowing the stories behind them. Yes, there is still a problem with gender inequality but the way it was reported massively oversimplifies the issue.
To sign off, when young and athletic I prioritised my competitive career over my professional career. My priorities were elsewhere and I went through the motions at work. Consequently my career progression and therefore my pay was stunted. I was happy with that - they were only getting half my brain much of the time and I was often last in the que to take on responsibility and extra workload as I knew I didn't have the capacity. It was a lifestyle choice that I was happy to make. Once my competitive career was over I focussed more on work and reaped the reward. I’ll never catch my peers up who made more of themselves professionally from earlier and I don’t begrudge them that. Not convinced other lifestyle choices should be treated any differently.
Some nice graphics in the Grauniad...
I work in Engineering..
There was one woman on my degree course who dropped out, leaving a 100% male contingent. Unsurprisingly in my company 100% of well paid engineers are male and 100% of lower paid admin staff are female. We're too small to have to report the wage difference, but it's pretty obvious it will be a big swing to one side....
Can't really blame the employer for the lack of female engineers though, will take a big societal change to get more women on STEM degrees.
Strangely our customer with the most female technical / engineering staff is Moroccan.
Doc came out from my company - we've compared male and female salaries, but NOT those doing equal roles. Well, surely that's the only place the comparison can be useful!
"The Gender Pay Gap does not show differences in pay for comparable jobs"
So they have to find out why there are more men in senior roles. That's not a "pay gap" - that's a senior position gap. (Or whatever clever words one writing these reports would use).
I'm sure many of you saw this video that did the rounds on social media a week of two ago.
I think it completely missed the point. It should have maybe have automatically given the lead role to the boy or told the boy and the girl they had different jobs to do and rewarded them differently. I don't preceive the issue is with men and women doing exactly the same job and being paid differently, in this country in any case. Happy (actually I'd be sad) to be proved wrong.
Isn't the reported figure the median wage too just to really skew the figures? Also no accounting for age etc.
Admittedly a distant recollection but I'm sure i read several accounts over the last few years stating the gender pay gap at a national level largely vanishes below the age of 40ish and it's actually in favour of women below about 30, the cause being women over 40 are much much more likely to have had to choose between work and family than more recent generations. Now women are more likely to be better qualified and able to make conscious decisions about there career path and as a result tend to earn as much or more than less qualified male colleagues.
There's a long way to go to equality but if you want to improve things look at how they are now then improve that, not how they've been at some aggregated point in the last 40 years and say it's not good enough that we've not fixed history and that things don't just change overnight.
The best way to solve the gap (symptom) is wait for a bunch of old folk in disproportionately weighted roles to retire but it doesn't do anything to address the root cause.
There are of course industries where a complete step change is needed but the published data does nothing to suggest what the causes in a company or industry are making it impossible to distinguish between the phase 8 example above or a premier league football team and a broker* with an established and continuing culture of sexism and discrimination.
*it seems like a good example but may be completely unfair.
the measure used is largely irrelevant, what is important is what it is making companies do and that is to look inwardly at why their senior staff are largely male and what to do about it through removing conscious and unconscious bias in recruitment, promotion and succession planning.
time will most probably close a lot of the gap, but favouring women in senior roles is another.
but favouring women in senior roles is another.
I dont think that will work because that’s the current Status Quo ie a woman can apply for a senior role but she has to be prepared to work full time + hours.
Historically the man goes out and earns the money while the wife stays home looking after the baby
For true gender parity both parents need to be able to access the same work but currently ‘high end’ jobs are all full time, so either one of you earns less or you get a full time child carer
Would your company accept 2 part time CEO/MD or do they feel one full time person is more effective?
Isn’t the reported figure the median wage too just to really skew the figures? Also no accounting for age etc.
No, reporting the median rather than the mean will be more representative as it mitigates against a small number of outliers skewing the results.
My company has a gap of around 40% in favour of men and speaking to a few people the only surprise is that it isn't higher. I work for an oil producing company and there is no distinction between onshore and offshore employees; for the year in question the women made up less than 1% of the offshore employees. Given the relatively high wages paid to people offshore combined with most promoted staff in the company coming from an engineering background it is little wonder that we have such a gap. Reducing that gap, if that is what is really required, will take at least a generation given the barrier to entry that exists for STEM jobs. That's before we even start to think about the impact of having a family.
Would your company accept 2 part time CEO/MD or do they feel one full time person is more effective?
For me that's a good place to start thinking about it as it's a no brainer that you would not want a job share MD. So how far down the food chain can you go before it could make sense? I've got to say in my experience from purely the employers perspective two part timers that make up 1.0 FTE rarely works to the company's advantage and is often a positive disadvantage. I have only worked for a part time line manager once and it was a nightmare. The stress it put on the rest of the staff was unreasonable and it didn't look a lot of fun to do either.
Tough one. The military comes out at 0.9%, which is very good. Complete equality in pay, no loss of seniority on maternity, most of the gap comes from very senior officers who started their careers when women weren’t able to reach those heights, so time should correct it. But it masks only about 14% of personnel being female. I think we’re actually less equal than the headline figure suggests.
I think the bigger issue is that a huge number of women are forces to take part-time, zero-hours jobs in sectors like care, hospitality and retail at minimum wage whose income is then 'subsidised' with top-up benefits.
But of course, you can ask why women tend to do those jobs, and why those jobs tend to get paid less. Social conditioning? I’m in favour of everything short of positive discrimination to get more women into traditional “male” jobs.
Following the Norwegian model and publishing everyone’s salary would help alleviate some of the inequality
It's definitely more a role/position imbalance more than a pay gap. The company where I work has a lot of women in senior positions but as an IT services company there's a definite bias in men doing technical roles and women on the service desk or in junior admin roles which skews the overall relative pay figures.
It's a tricky issue to solve though, maternity/parenting is always going to be a factor (nothing wrong with fathers being the stay-at-home or career-break parent but I can't see this ever reaching parity because it's often a choice/preference for the woman to be the stay-at-home parent).
I'm sure more can be done regarding working from home but should the company being paying for an employee whilst they're on childcare duty rather than actually doing work they're employed to? Our WFH policy specifically states it's not to be done in order to facilitate childcare (this is more directed at parents of children who might be off school due to sickness though) but personally I'm flexible on this.
Other than that's it's mostly about adjusting attitudes & culture right from infancy (e.g. boy get the Star Wars Lego set, girl gets a kitchen set or doll), through school and higher education. The company I work for has a graduate recruitment programme and I think tries to have equal numbers of women and men enrolled but I expect has far less applicants from women.
I would love for the company I work for to publish everyone's salary (plus previous year's bonus/share allowance), there's definitely not equal pay within the same roles but this isn't a gender thing, it's mostly a recruitment and growth-through-acquisition thing. So you could have two people doing the same job but one has been with the company a long time and been promoted into that role (so starting at the bottom of the pay band for the role) and someone else might have joined the company 6 months ago but is on a few K more as that's now the industry average and demand exceeds supply (or TUPE in from a company that had generally better pay or perks that had to be translated to a base salary increase).
It’s a tricky issue to solve though, maternity/parenting is always going to be a factor (nothing wrong with fathers being the stay-at-home or career-break parent but I can’t see this ever reaching parity because it’s often a choice/preference for the woman to be the stay-at-home parent).
There is a certain irony in the way that the impact of maternity/paternity leave on the pay gap can be negated. If you accept that taking time off to raise children is part of the reason for the gap (and this is something that I think is partly responsible) then the best way to correct it is to get more men to take time off to raise there kids and the best think a company can do to encourage this is, in my opinion, to treat paternity and maternity leave equally with the same benefits being given to both men and women i.e. we have to improve the benefits given to men. It won't sort things overnight, but then nothing will, but it would encourage more men to take time off and over time even out the impact of having family on both men and women.
The company I work for has a graduate recruitment programme and I think tries to have equal numbers of women and men enrolled but I expect has far less applicants from women.
I don't think that this is sustainable. Companies cannot be held liable if one gender represents a disproportionate proportion of the available workforce. What they can do is to make sure that biases don't creep into hiring policies. e.g. blinding the initial screening of applications.
I was listening to a couple of women talking about this at work. They said the solution was to get more men to take on the lower paid jobs and that would free up more higher paid jobs for women. This doesn't make sense at our place. Cleaners are paid less than labourers. Nearly all our cleaners are women (90% ish) and all of our labourers are men. The higher pay for the labourer is because it's a more gruelling job working different shift patterns and being outside in all weather. We have tried before to encourage women to apply for labouring jobs but have never seen a single application from a women. Should the cleaner and labourer be paid the same? That may encourage more men to take on the cleaner role which would give them an easier life. The generalisation being that the cleaner role is as physically demanding for women as the labourer role is for men, but then the women wouldn't be paid any more for doing the more demanding labourer job. I can only see the women losing out by doing so.
Aside from all the fine points made above - I think there is a bit of a chicken/egg thing going on with this (pardon the pun), and the fact that the woman gives up her work or goes part-time for child care as that is less of a financial hit, as she is more likely to be in a low paying job. And so it continues.
Perhaps the answer is to make it more appealing for men to give up their jobs or go part time for childcare. A twenty percent pay drop across the board for all male staff should do it... problem solved....
There seems to be some kind of basic assumption going on in all of this stuff that earning more money is everyone's ultimate goal in life.
Obviously I don't think women should get paid less for doing the same job, but if they end up doing jobs with a better work-life balance, and get paid less accordingly, is that really the end of the world? I also don't think women should be unfairly burdened with housework, caring duties etc, but if they are happy with that arrangement, and it is sufficiently appreciated etc by partners, should they be made to feel like they are failing in life?
I think part of the problem is that domestic 'work' is still totally unvalued and we are all supposed to be busting a gut to work more/earn more regardless of what that actually means for quality of life.
Perhaps the answer is to make it more appealing for men to give up their jobs or go part time for childcare.
Well I did point out a way to achieve that which is for companies to give paternity leave on the same basis as maternity leave.
A twenty percent pay drop across the board for all male staff should do it… problem solved….
Likely to fall foul of the equal pay act so in many circumstances this would be illegal.
There is a real risk of positive discrimination in trying to reduce the 'gap', despite as people have said it's a pretty stupid metric and doesn't take into account a huge number of social factors.
Probably not a great time to be a middle aged, white, professional male looking for work.
Next thing will be something about fat people versus thin people, and whether thin people are paid more as a median average, take a look at your board....how many are tubby?
Obviously I don’t think women should get paid less for doing the same job, but if they end up doing jobs with a better work-life balance, and get paid less accordingly, is that really the end of the world?
That is unfortunately the situation I am in as a man. Currently I work 32hrs a week (after negotiating with my employer) . We use Grandparents to support school runs etc. Moving home I will have to do school runs / be there either side of school hours. So I will have to look for jobs that are very much part time.
Is it the end of the world, no, but its a waste of skill and talent, and why shouldn't I want to maximise my earning potential in the hours that I am available to work.
Is it the end of the world, no, but its a waste of skill and talent, and why shouldn’t I want to maximise my earning potential in the hours that I am available to work.
I think it's sad, and indicative of the point I was making, that you see it as a waste of skill and talent to be spending more time with your children not out chasing money. 'Maximising earning potential' is unlikely to be something you will care much about on your death bed.
currently ‘high end’ jobs are all full time,
Not just high end, all but a few jobs in a few industries are full time are full time if they are not minimum wage or close. The only people I know with half decent part time jobs have started full time and negotiated part time. That now means they are stuck in this job so can be given minimal pay rises etc. Moving job is the best way to get pay rises and if you go part time you are stuck.
Grum - Children are in school 9 to 3-30 or whatever it is that roughly leaves 25hrs a week for work
So no child is neglected. The whole point I’m making is that I want to spend the me with the family but to do that you have to very much compromise on money and job
The whole point I’m making is that I want to spend the me with the family but to do that you have to very much compromise on money and job
Yup and my point is that that is 1) inevitable to some degree and 2) doesn't have to be seen as a second-rate option.
Rather unsurprisingly the data shows an overall disparity of just over 9%.
Guess what, the ONS data has been showing that for years.
The ONS data also shows that there is zero gap in the population under the age of 40 - you only get 9% when you average it out over all age groups.
For anyone under 40, there's zero difference but get to 40 and it jumps up to about 14%. Also it's kind of important to acknowledge that there is no pay gap between the genders when it comes to comparing the people in the same roles.
What does this tell us? There is unquestionably a pay gap, it's unquestionably delineated along gender lines, but it's got the square root of bugger all to do with bias. OK well maybe a tiny amount of it is bias but you need to do proper multivariate analysis to account for 100% of the difference.
This latest reporting is a political charade designed to win points and drive a misleading political agenda. It's no better than fake news and Jonathan Pie nailed it in that video.
Data to back up my point if anyone cares to, you know, inform themselves of the facts.
The Jonathon Pie video really does nail it IMO.