The deadline has now passed for companies in the UK to publish statistics on the gender pay gaps in their businesses. Of the 10,019 firms that submitted gender pay gap data by the morning of April 5, 2018, only 2,255 (22.5 per cent) have a median women's hourly wage that is equal to or higher than that of men.
The remaining 7,764 (77.5 per cent) pay women less than men, on average. Significantly less in the case of companies such as Ryanair, which pays women 28p for every £1 that men earn – due to a preponderance of male pilots, the company says – and IT infrastructure group Dimension Data, where women earn a median of 50p an hour for men's £1.
It's the first time the information has been published in the UK and the exercise is useful. But the data is limited, and not necessarily all that illuminating.
The amount of women at different levels of an organisation is helpfully illustrated thanks to the requirement for companies to provide quartile breakdowns, showing how what percents of women are in each of four, evenly-divided pay brackets. However, this general classification still doesn't allow for direct comparison between the wages and bonuses of men and women in comparable roles.
The requirement to publish pay gap data only covers companies with more than 250 employees, which means that a significant number of women working the UK will still have no idea how their employer measures up.
Gender equality charity the Fawcett Society says the following key factors have an impact on the average earnings of women at any given company:
- The employer having more men at the top, which represents a failure to properly recruit or promote women, and a problem for that organisation’s effectiveness
- The employer having mostly women in lower-paid roles, such as we often see in the social care sector, which raises questions about why those women’s work is not better paid and why they are not being promoted
- The employer recruiting fewer women into better-paid roles at all levels – for example, having women in HR and Administration, even if they are at the top of those sectors, and men in better-paid Finance roles
- The employer having discriminatory practices in relation to pay, which could be a legal equal pay issue
There's a fine line between structural inequality and outright discrimination, with issues that range from women being more likely to be hired for lower-paid positions to being overlooked for promotion or employment for factors ranging from presumptions about their present or future family lives to the Silicon Valley favourite of hiring managers defining a "good fit for the company" as someone they'd feel comfortable going for drinks with.
Social and systemic factors also play a part in the pay and opportunities available to women. Work that's typically associated with women, such as social care, pays significantly less than male-coded work. Women are also more likely than men to be thrust into caring roles for children or relatives, forcing them to leave the workplace or work part-time.
Women, in general, are almost twice as likely to earn the lowest pay available from their employer and even women with degrees face pay inequality, with a total gender pay gap of 23 per cent 10 years after graduation.
Dr Charlotte Gascoigne of flexible working job search website Timewise writes that a key factor is "an assumption that senior jobs 'naturally' require long hours and constant availability, and so cannot be done flexibly or part-time" and that "part-time jobs are 'naturally' less senior, and so are automatically downgraded. And positioning part-time work as women’s ‘choice’ not only suggests that women are responsible for their lower earnings, but also takes the pressure off employers to do anything about it."
To counter this, she encourages employers to create flexible jobs to allow employees of all sexes to balance their career and caring responsibilities, and to develop career progression paths accordingly.
Across all industries, women in marginalised and minority groups are most likely to receive low pay. Compared to a 14.1 per cent mean gender pay gap for full time workers, based on the ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings 2017, Fawcett Society research has found that women from Bangladeshi and Pakistani backgrounds have a 26.2 per cent pay gap compared to White British men and that Black African women have a 19.6 per cent full-time pay gap with White British Men.
Older women are also disproportionately affected, with those in their 50s experiencing an 18.6 per cent pay gap, compared to 5.5 per cent for women in their twenties.
The attention being drawn to pay inequality by the legal requirement to publish pay gap data is significant. However, its usefulness will be limited if attention isn't paid to the underlying causes of the gap in wages between men and women.
Companies were presumably aware of their gender pay gaps before they were required to publish this data, and many of them say they have active measures in place to improve pay, conditions and numbers of women employed.
The Fawcett Society has argued that businesses that do not have wage parity between men and women should be required to publish an action plan to tackle the problem, but this doesn't currently appear to be on the legislative horizon. Neither do the mandatory equal pay audits suggested by the charity.
Government measures to tackle the pay gap, backed by a £1.5 million fund "to support people, particularly women, back into work after time out looking after children and other relatives" seem woefully inadequate.
Enforcement of existing legislation – in the form of the Equal Pay Act 1970 – ensuring that women and men are paid the same wage for the same work may also be necessary. Speaking to The Guardian, Sucheta Nadkarni, professor and director of the University of Cambridge's the Wo+Men’s Leadership Centre says: "Whether it is because women are getting paid less for the work that they are doing or because women are not getting equal opportunities to get into positions where the pay level is high – it doesn’t matter what the reason is, but there is a gender pay gap and in most cases it’s an issue of equality and justice. In both cases it’s an issue of an imbalance of some sort."
The science and technology sectors have a reputation for when it comes to both low numbers of women on staff, particularly in senior and technical positions, and for harbouring workplace environments that can be actively hostile to women.
Although some of the biggest names in tech weren't among the worst companies in the UK for gender pay gaps, most of them still have significant work to do.
Intel, which had a median women's pay of just 68p for every pound earned by a man, said its "deep analysis" showed there was "zero statistically significant pay difference by gender in the UK". In fact, the company confirmed there is a lack of women in senior roles.
"What we disclosed today reflects a lower representation of women in senior roles. This is a gap we – and the entire technology industry – are working hard to address," the company said. "We continue to improve representation and progression opportunities for woman at Intel, in all countries in which we do business."
However, despite years of such efforts by the industry as a whole and proven benefits to workplace diversity, the tech sector continues to be a hostile place for women.
Meanwhile in academia, studies have shown that – presumably unconscious – biases come into play when science faculty members receive applications from students with feminine names, judging women to be less competent and less hireable than a man with an identical CV.
The Fawcett Society says that companies in STEM-related fields "need to do their bit to change the picture at all levels from education upwards" and points out that "even if an organisation has few women employees, a large gap is not inevitable but means that those women are paid less on average than men."
People working for companies where a gender pay gap has been identified have a number of options:
- Talk about your pay with your colleagues and industry peers. The social taboo about discussing your earnings exists to benefit employers. Moreover, employers are not allowed to prevent you from doing so
- Work together. Both unions and in-company support networks can aid in collective bargaining to improve pay
- Speak to your managers and ask for information on how the company plans to close its gender pay gap. Don't let it lie, and – if you can do so without risking your job – don't let it be forgotten
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
