The gender pay gap

February 14, 2008

The pay gap between women and men is still very wide – and according to a Select Committee of the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR), the government is not doing enough to tackle it. In 2004 the Women and Work Commission was set up to try to reduce the pay gap, which was then 18% for full time workers and an enormous 40% for part timers.

The report by the Select Committee said the Commission had made several good proposals to deal with this problem, but had not done enough to implement them. It pointed out that one of the reasons for the continuation of the pay gap is that women tend to work in a small number of occupations, which tend to be low paid, and that many women work part time.Many women experience gaps in their careers, or end it completely as a result of starting a family. The need for flexible or part time working due to childcare arrangements can be very limiting on career prospects. The Select Committee recommends the Government extending the right to request flexible working as a measure to help improve women’s chances of increasing their salaries. Allowing women to work flexibly helps them to balance work and family commitments and retain the higher paid positions they have previously worked in, rather than having to give up their career and take jobs that fit around their lifestyle better, but are lower paid.One measure the report proposed was to introduce mandatory auditing of companies’ pay by gender; which is already done in the public sector. Would this lead to more “quota” issues, with companies making poor recruitment decisions in order to comply with required levels of female employees? Possibly in some companies, although for many it may force them to create workplaces where a diverse range of employees are able to contribute at every level.

Posted by hrgirl | Filed Under Employment Law, Equality and Diversity 

Comments

2 Responses to “The gender pay gap”

  1. Tim Worstall on February 16th, 2008 6:08 pm

    “In 2004 the Women and Work Commission was set up to try to reduce the pay gap, which was then 18% for full time workers and an enormous 40% for part timers.”

    Grr. No it isn’t. That is the pay gap between women working part time and men working full time.
    When you compare men working part time with women working part time the gap is 11% in the private sector.
    Also, from those figures, it isn’t too difficult to work out that the pay gap between women who work full time and women who work part time is 22% or so.

  2. hrgirl on February 18th, 2008 2:53 pm

    Thanks for your comment Tim. If you look closer into this subject you can find many different sets of statistics that represent the gap - it all depends how it is seggregated and presented. The fact is that there is still a gap, that part time working is a major contributor and that hourly rates are wildly different in most sectors.

    If people do the same job to the same standard they should be paid equally - these statistics don’t split jobs down by sector so when you are looking across the range of jobs the numbers look very low for women, as there are more part time jobs in low paid industries. Hence the need to encourage employers to allow flexible working across the whole workfoce.

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