New research shows that the gender pay gap is still shockingly wide.
My wife is coming to the end of her maternity leave, so we’ve spent a fair bit of time over the last year or so talking about the differences men and women face in the world of work.
After all, while I got to enjoy two weeks off when my son was born, my wife will have been off work for a full year by the time she goes back. And while she hasn’t been on full or even half pay for the majority of that time, she has been entitled to maternity pay and a statutory right to return to a job with her employer, which has helped keep us in nappies and baby milk.
Of course, time off when having a baby is just one area where there is a clear difference for men and women. But the biggest difference remains pay.
Paying for your gender
According to a new report by the Chartered Management Institute, female managers are being paid more than £10,000 a year less for doing the same jobs as their male counterparts, at £31,895 on average compared to £42,441 for men.
What’s more, as the rate of pay increases for women is only a fraction above that for men (just 0.3%), the CMI suggests it will be 2109 before male and female executives enjoy the same pay.
Just the 98 years to wait then.
So why is there such a pronounced gap at management level? After all, according to the same report, female junior executives actually enjoy higher salaries than their male counterparts (an average salary of £21,969 compared to £21,367).
The glass ceiling
The fact that women are paid roughly the same as men at junior levels is something that should be celebrated. After all, most people work in junior roles – we can’t all be managers. As a result, for the majority of female workers, there is no pay gap. They get the same as their male colleagues.
[SPOTLIGHT]The issues develop when the female employee wants to move beyond that junior level, and up the career ladder. There are a few things here which experts suggest damage their chances.
Babies are one. Having a child can play havoc with a woman’s career – months on end where she isn’t even at work, most likely followed by a period of only working part-time. By contrast, men get to enjoy a virtually uninterrupted working life.
Then there’s plain old discrimination, whether outright or more subtle. If a company’s board is made up entirely of men, it’s suggested that they are more likely to then want to appoint other men.
So what’s the answer? Do we need government intervention in some form to ensure that the female workforce is valued the same as their male counterparts?
Quotas
One potential answer to the gender gap is to introduce quotas, so that a certain percentage of management boards in the UK’s top firms must be made up of women. A report for the Government this year declined to recommend a compulsory quota system to improve female representation at the highest level, but did implement a ‘voluntary’ target of 25% for FTSE 100 companies that firms would need to match, and explain the steps they had taken to do so.
And it’s working – the number of women recruited to FTSE 100 boards has doubled in the last six months.
However, I’m not a big fan of quota systems for the simple reason that they belittle the beneficiaries. For example, for many years the South African cricket team has employed a quota system, where a number of players selected must be black. But rather than empower the black players, it’s simply led to many of those selected being viewed as token selections, even if they are there on merit.
Their contributions and value to the team are fatally undermined by the perception that they are selected based on their colour, and nothing else.
I fear the same would happen with female executives – no matter how capable they are, they would simply be viewed as a token presence, a tick in the box, there to be patronised rather than embraced as part of the team.
Open salaries
Who wouldn’t like to know what the colleague sitting next to them is paid? But who would like that same colleague to know what they were being paid?
It may be a British thing, that talking about money is vulgar, that puts us off the idea of being open about salaries. According to a study by Scottish Widows, 15% of us don’t even tell our family what we earn.
But open salaries would go some way towards tackling the gender pay divide. If you could see that you were earning substantially less than a colleague doing the same job, of course you would want to find out why. Firms would need to be able to explain their salary decisions, and be transparent.
Of course, it’s not perfect. Having such an emotive subject as your salary made public could damage relations within the company, and potentially lead to all sorts of unpleasantness. It’s far from perfect, but I certainly prefer it to imposing some arbitrary quota system.
What do you think? How would you solve the gender pay divide?