can anyone educate me on a few womans issues? do woman actually get equal pay?

[whiteandyellowiris]

i used to think this country was pretty equal, but now im starting to realise it is not

i don't know alot about feminism but wouuld liek to be enlightened

[LurcioLovesFrankie]

No they don't.

ONS data for 2012 is here:
www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/mro/news-release/gender-pay-gap-falls-to-9-6--in-2012/ashe1112.html

In many sectors including universities and parts of the public sector, women are often paid less for the same job (e.g. university salaries - it's not just that there are a greater proportion of male professors, it's that male lecturers are paid more than female ones, ditto senior lecturers, readers, and so on). Part of this is structural - if you have long pay scales, the discrepancy builds up while women are on maternity leave.

[whiteandyellowiris]

oh thanks for the info.

may i aska nother question

when women go tthe vote was it more because of what women did in the war, wwII rather than the suragettes

[whiteandyellowiris]

because it seems to me, that women really came into their own during wwII doing allsorts of things manufacturing driving tractors etc
all jobs

then the 1950's were really about getting women out of the workplace so that there was enoguh work for men

[Andro]

There are vast areas where pay is not yet equal, I am glad to be able to say I work for a company where 2 people, doing the same job, with the same qualifications and experience level would receive the same basic salary. Final salary, when performance related pay and contract delivery bonuses are taken into account...that's a very individual matter.

[LurcioLovesFrankie]

I guess that's a typo above, and you meant WW1 - women got the vote in 1918 (albeit only those over 30 who met certain criteria in terms of property ownership).

[whiteandyellowiris]

well i ment women in generla not just home owning ones, when did they get the vote then?

see i need educating

[luanmahi]

There is legislation which means a company can NOT offer a man more for doing the same job as a woman, however there are a number of reasons why men end up with more than women.

1 Jobs for the boys. A man's salary will often be enhanced with things like cars, overnight stays on golfing trips, etc so that on paper, while the salary is the same, the overall package is worth more.
2 More women take career breaks than men. It's women who take the lion's share of parental leave when they have children and as the law was only changed recently to allow men to do this, it will be a while before it is seen as the norm.
3 Women do the majority of child care. Even once a woman goes back to work after maternity leave, it is more likely to be her that goes part time to accommodate childcare. If she goes back to the same job, that's fine as it means her original salary will simply be reduced pro-rata according to the hours she does. But if her employers don't allow part time, rather than the father requesting part time, it's more likely that the woman will look for alternative employment which leads on to number 3.
4 Women are over-represented in lower paid areas of work. They make up roughly 50% of the work force (not exactly but near as damn it) however 75% of working women work in some of the lowest paid occupations termed as "the 5 Cs": catering, cleaning, caring, cashiering, clerical. These are often taken up as the location is more convenient to schools, swapping shifts, etc.
5 "Women's work" is under-valued. There is evidence that could suggest that over the years, since women joined the workforce, jobs that have become associated with women have been devalued. For example, 50 years ago, Personnel Managers were probably men and would have commanded a similar salary to any other manager in a company. Nowadays, HR tends to attract a higher proportion of women than men and you could argue that salaries have, comparably speaking, reduced.

A lot of the reasons for the discrepancies are cultural. You've got books such as "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus" and "Why Men don't listen and women can't read maps" reinforcing gender stereotypes and even advising what kind of job to do. If you follow the theories peddled in these, men are "better" at spatial awareness, concentrating on single projects, more aggressive; women are better at doing lots of little things all at the same time, doing jobs that involve talking to people and nurturing roles. Women in general are less likely to become engineers, architects, scientists and more likely to become nurses, nursery teachers, customer service reps, etc.

It's not all bad though a lot of these issues were much worse 10 years ago before the introduction of the new paternity rights so we're heading in the right direction.

[LurcioLovesFrankie]

All women over 21 got the vote in 1928. (My source for this is wikipedia! Not an exalted historical text, I'm afraid.)

[LurcioLovesFrankie]

Luhi's point 2 ties up with my comment about pay scales. It's not unusual for organisations to have a pay scale which takes you about 7 years to reach the top of the scale. However, most jobs are such that within about 2 years of starting you should be performing well, and you should have mastered the job by about 3 years in. Thus, you can get a situation where a man and a woman started, say, 5 years ago. The woman's had 2 maternity leaves, so has missed out on 2 increments on the pay scale. So she's now being paid less. But (if the 3 years to get good at the job rule of thumb holds in this case), she'll be just as good at doing the job as the man.

Long pay scales are pretty widely acknowledged, both by trade unions and by HR professionals, to be discriminatory in this way.

[slug]

Women were getting the vote in more and more places by the time the UK got around to it.

[camilamoran]

I used to have a job supporting the company's personnel system, so I knew what everyone in our department earned.

Basically everyone, men and women, earned the same, but there were about 3 or 4 people who earned more than anyone else. Only 1 was a woman. I knew one of these people quite well, and the reason he earned more was basically that he always asked for more. He was good at his job, aggressive, cheeky, and valued himself by the amount of money he was getting.

I wonder how general this picture is. The average wage is distorted by a small number of disproportionately well paid people. They tend to be a certain type of personality and that personality is commoner in men than women.

I've got to say hanging around with this guy made me more relaxed about asking for more money myself. Women still tend to sell themselves short, I think.

[WilsonFrickett]

This is a few years ago mind you, but I remember doing some HR training on a new payroll system and we looked up the top earners in the (very big) HR dept when the trainer left the room (very naughty of us, but there you go).

The top 7 earners in the department were men, there was a gap of around 50k, then there was a woman - call her X - then there were a few more men. The difference between the top man and X was around 100k, and the difference between the X and the next 'cluster' of women was around 50 - 75k.

Every single person in the session (all women) gasped out loud and said variations of 'bloody hell, look how much X earns.' No-one noticed the men's earnings, it was her's that took all the attention. Even in the 'feminised' department (and HR was pretty much a female ghetto in the organisation) there was massive pay disparity.

[Trekkie]

Re the pay scales points they sound like how they get around paying differently in the public sector

In private sector they do it by performance related pay and people not being allowed to discuss their salaries (although don't think they can put this in your contract any more, the culture is in place and i can't see it changing any time soon).

bbc the other day about graduate pay gap - across most sectors and roles.

[whiteandyellowiris]

thanks for informing me, i was previously thinking it was equal pay, but i can now see theres still a way to go

thanks

anything else you would liek to enlighten me about im getting interested in this topic, but i dont knwo much

[Trekkie]

This topic is a good place to hang around and chat about things and learn stuff

There used to be a book club as well I'm not sure if that's still going.

[luanmahi]

Trekkie that is interesting. I wonder if this is again something to do with the types of jobs women are more likely to go into. Women are generally more likely to go into roles which are lower paid. If you compare it job for job, they'll be earning the same as men but they're just not going to apply for the same types of roles. Sad.

[Trekkie]

The BBC article attached about graduates says it's not to do with women going into lower paid jobs. It is women and men in the same jobs with the same qualifications etc and the men simply get paid more. In roles where men predominate, where there is an even split and in roles where there are more women.

[Trekkie]

Or at least it did when I read it the other day, it seems longer now and isn't quite the same as the one I read

Still it is all there!

[Trekkie]

I think you likely get screwed whichever way.
Re the negotiating skills - on here ages ago someone linked to studies which said that women who did ask for more - who negotiated and pushed like the pushier men - were thought of as difficult and aggressive and thus it didn't work out for them anyway.

PLUS as DH points out, many men are not good at negotiating etc and yet the pay gap persists. Could it be that employers just feel that men need to be rewarded better? Not consciously but subconsciously. I think that has a lot to do with it. That at a very fundamental level in an awful huge amount of people there is a feeling that men are simply "worth" more than women, in a renumeration situation.

[WilsonFrickett]

Yy Trekkie, I think it's a subconscious hangover from the days when men were seen as 'providers' while women earned 'pin money'. And while the stereotype of the non-working, stay at home child rearing and housekeeping woman is predominantly a middle class one, there was often an artificial pay gap in working class men and women, built round perceived skills gaps.

And I suspect when the majority of people in an organisation who are working part time or taking jobs to fit round the family are women, it's easy for that stereotype to continue at a subconscious level.

When I worked in banking (feminised department) I don't recall ever knowing a man who worked part time. I was there for 10 years.

[javabean]

I posted similar on another thread, but this article from Nature talks about many reasons why women don't succeed in academic science. Some of the analysis only really applies to academia, but I think a large amount applies to other sectors too if you look past the specific references to university.

I think the key point of the article is that it's a combination of factors that lead to inequality, not just one or two things that can easily be fixed.

[Lessthanaballpark]

"when women go tthe vote was it more because of what women did in the war, wwII rather than the suragettes"

Assuming you mean WW1, the gaining of the vote was down mostly to the efforts of the suffragettes, the non-violent suffragists and the general feminist activism of the 19th century.

I think that the war work women did made it harder for them to say no as well as allowing them to save face by pointing to that as the reason. But if you look at France, you'll see that the women there made a massive wartime contribution but didn't get the vote post war, the difference being that they didn't have a pre-war suffrage movement.

Also I think the government feared a return of the chaos created by the suffragettes so I would definitely say they had an effect.

[luvlyb]

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