A question about the gender pay gap

e.g. grumbling about not getting a rise this year despite good performance = top of band.

Or grumbling about higher rate tax. Quite a few of us have never had to worry about higher rate tax bands.

Publishing payscales doesn't prevent dirty dealing (conscious or unconscious) by employers, but it does make it a little easier to figure out that you're underpaid - like the female managers in my first job, who were actually below the minimum for their band. Because the bands were public, they could put pressure on for this to be corrected.

Similarly, once I realised the men in the dept didn't do anything more complex or technical than I did, because I knew everyone's grades, I could work out from gossip & grumbling what they were paid - e.g. grumbling about not getting a rise this year despite good performance = top of band. Then I complained, realised after a few months that they were just going to carry on inventing reasons to underpay me, so went elsewhere for a fairly hefty payrise.

There is a great deal of commercial sensitivity about pay in particular industries between employers.

The public sector pay gap is significantly lower than the private sector which must be due to the use of job evaluation as a basis of pay and grading.

But IT is mostly better paid than nursing, mostly because men do it.

(referring to why IT pros get paid more than nursing pros)

there could be a lot of different factors for why two very different fields have different pay rates.

MuchasSmoochas - "However this approach works well in the public sector."

Publishing payscales only gives the illusion of fairness.

The way that discrimination occurs in the public sector is either men are at the top of each pay grade and women at the bottom, or women are held back and move slower through the grades than men. As described in posts above.

The only way to eradicate pay discrimination is total pay transparency. All pay published.

It is already published for directors on boards and I therefore see no reason why it cant be done for lower level workers.

Commercial sensitivity is a fig leaf. Every employer recruiting a worker asks what the worker was paid at their previous employer. There is no secrecy between employers about pay - its only secrecy between workers that employers like to protect and maintain by arguing 'commercial sensitivity'.

However, I agree that basing a woman's pay on what she was paid at her former employer perpetuates pay discrimination.

One big step to address it would be forcing employers to publish their grades/scales. There's too much secrecy about this. All this using existing salaries as a basis for working out what to pay you in a new job perpetuates the discrimination, because the woman may be getting less and won't know what her counterparts are on. Problem is of course that the salaries will be commercially sensitive. However this approach works well in the public sector.

That is the other side of the coin freeworker men should consider embracing the idea that valuing family life and the work that goes along with that holds equal value to what is your earning potential. You are obviously well ahead in that game.

The gap is calculated on a full time equivalent basis so the part time element does not have such a marked effect. There still will be an impact though because part timers tend to get paid less when proportionately compared with full time.

The national pay gap is a very rough and ready calculation and can't compare like for like. An accurate pay gap for the UK could only be done by all jobs being analytically evaluated and assigned a job size, which could then be used as the basis for the calculation. Which isn't going to happen!

I'm not denying there is gender bias in pay, I'm just saying that we can't be sure of the scale.

anothernumber - so I think what you are saying is work needs to be more flexible AND men need to share more of the work at home and childcare.

Yes I agree. I am a man and gave up full-time work for the last 13 years and shared home and childcare with my wife. However, attitudes to me changed overnight when I did so - but that's another thread.

There are two questions here that are being conflated.

a) ensuring equal pay for like-for-like work which I normally understand to be what the 'the pay gap' is about; and

b) ensuring the total lifetime earning power of women compared to men is not compromised by the traditional social structure of 'men at work' and women being forced to be in the home looking after children.

Yes freeworker that is what I meant by

Yes there is a huge problem if women are paid less in like for like roles a huge problem

But that does not account for all of the gender pay divide. I personally believe that as feminists we need to challenge capitalist labour policies which to my mind were suited to traditional patriachrachial societies with men providing and women keeping house and child rearing. Without employment flexibility child rearing and family time is incredibly difficult in 2 parent working households. These flexible jobs are largely being persued by women and to be honest valuing your family and having time with them and valuing a career is better IMHO than saying we want to keep up with men in a world designed by men for men.

I think a lot of the like-for-like problem is that it's only such a very small view of the problem - just look at jobs like primary school teaching, nursing, hell, checkout staff - in each case, men advance faster, and are more likely to be found in management roles, while women spend years doing the rest of the roles

I agree with this - even in female-dominated sectors, the few men are often still the managers. I don't think this is because there are no competent women.

anothernumber - I assume you still think that men and women in the same job performing at the same level of output should be paid the same amount per hour of work though.

If a woman is working genuinely 30 hours (e.g because she wants more time to look after her children) and a man 40 hours in the same job then yes she should get paid 25% less in total but the same amount per hour - surely?

I'm not understanding either WMittens - you brought the Asian men up? Was your 20% for like-for-like or as I had assumed, just in general (which could be entirely explained what Free said)?

I think a lot of the like-for-like problem is that it's only such a very small view of the problem - just look at jobs like primary school teaching, nursing, hell, checkout staff - in each case, men advance faster, and are more likely to be found in management roles, while women spend years doing the rest of the roles (1 man at DS1's school. The headmaster. He's been in teaching less than 5 years, vs. many, many years of experience for some of the female staff).

It seems trivial, but for example, when I applied for a job at Asda (new store, just put in a general CV for a job) I was straight away shuffled to a checkout/customer service role. The men were shuffled towards grocery and shelf stacking. The shelf-stacking roles had greater scope for overtime, a higher starting wage, and because they were also performed outside of opening hours, a bigger chance to get salary multiples for unsocial hours.

My previous job had been at a PC World, where I was the only female member of sales/technical staff. The only other women working in the store were, yup, all on the tills - I significantly out-earned the other women for the same hours because I got commission.

Like for like would only give you a good picture if everyone had the same shot at the jobs.

I will absolutely get slated for this but I think way too much is made of the gender pay divide. Yes there is a huge problem if women are paid less in like for like roles a huge problem. However the current patriarchal system of 40+ hour working weeks with 10 hours of commuting for 2 parents in simply not conducive to raising children. The fact that women are sticking 2 fingers up to the world of work and looking for accommodations to be made is a good thing. It will be better when more men can partake in more flexible working too. Money is not the be all and end all of success, a happy work life balance is far better. Less hours, and so be it, less pay and more family time for both working parents is a far better change IMHO.

WM - I don't understand your post. Can you explain a bit more?

However, it is a well known long term trend that in the USA white male worker pay in middle and low income jobs such as the typical manufacturing blue collar worker has stagnated in nominal terms and fallen in real terms for the last 30 years. New economy IT workers and white collar jobs have tended to increase pay in real terms.

That accounts for the relative difference in pay of white men versus Asian men. Simply because Asian men are less represented in the blue collar traditional US jobs that were the mainstay breadwinner jobs in the USA in the 1950 - 1980 period.

Asian men tend to be clustered in relatively high paying jobs because of immigration policy that requires immigrants to have a certain minimum qualification, salary to gain immigration status.

White men are unlikely to be being discriminated against once educational qualifications are taken into account.

My my. There's a revelation. Asian men on average get more than white men because they tend to be in skilled, higher paying jobs. So I assume what you're saying is that it's not for, if you'll pardon me quoting gender pay gap presentations, the exact same work?

It's quite a revolutionary idea you're proposing, to compare like for like rather than an across-the-board mean.

WMittens - is it likely to be always a man that hauls that bin out front to be collected? Dustbin collecting, like cleaning, is dull and repetitive work. Like many other jobs which are low in "skill". I really don't get why one job is worthy of more money than another.

Wmittens - the reason white men on average get paid less than Asian men is because the category 'White Men'' includes all categories of employee from top to bottom of the income scale.

Asian men tend to be clustered in relatively high paying jobs because of immigration policy that requires immigrants to have a certain minimum qualification, salary to gain immigration status.

White men are unlikely to be being discriminated against once educational qualifications are taken into account.

Hi all. I started the 'Justine Roberts' thread that has been linked,

On that thread there wasn't much discussion of the statistics and it would be good to tease this out. 'What is the real pay gap on a like-for-like basis?'.

One statistic that was quoted on that thread is that the pay gap gets much wider higher up the pay scale. Not just in terms of money but in percentage.

If I recall correctly the like-for-like pay gap among the top decile of earners is 20%.

So typically very senior women executive level employees get paid 20% less than similar level men on average.

At the bottom of the pay scale I believe men may be getting paid slightly less than women. Men trapped in the so called glass basement.

The thing that one has to be careful of though is that the absolute numbers of women in high paying jobs is much lower than men. The numbers of women on the boards of FTSE 100 companies is very small indeed. Likewise very highly paid jobs in the City are dominated by men. I worked in the City and barely ever saw a woman in any senior trading or management role.

So even if women were getting paid the same as men at all levels, the numbers who reach the highest levels of the pay scale is pitifully small. The discrimination occurs not just in pay at any given level but also in the chances of promotion to a higher grade.

This is borne out in the post by slightlyglitter about women trapped in a grade unable to progress compared to men. Also the post by treaclesoda where women are set harder performance targets than men.

Cleaners don't just empty bins weighing less than 2kg. Cop onto yourself.

But do they ever haul around bins weighing up to a tonne in wind, rain, sleet and snow? Cop onto the rest of my post.

The guardian recently published a piece based on a study where women in their 20s are out earning men, however once you get over 30 that changes. Which could be down to a couple of reasons I guess. First by 30 most of us who want children would have stopped work or started to work part time. Alternatively we are seeing the changes that the pay acts are enforcing are actually working and in 10 years we will see a greater reflection of that change.

Guardian report here

Good question - why don't women negotiate as much as men, in general?

That's covered quite a bit in the thread about "should Justine have written this?" Women are good at negotiating on behalf of other people, but not so much for themselves (as a rule; obviously there are exceptions.) This has a lot to do with socialisation, and good girls shouldn't be pushy or demanding. But also, when women do negotiate, it can work against them; they're not seen as asking for their due (as men will be), but they are viewed negatively for it, and are less likely to get a payrise or bonus as a result.

I think there's also lack of education - no one ever told me I would have to push for payrises and bonuses, and early on in my career, I assumed I didn't have to, because I was told it's all performance-related, so I assumed as long as I was performing well, then I should get payrises and bonuses based on that. And I did get them, but I wasn't getting them at the same levels as my male colleagues - when a pay audit was run on the department I was working in then, I got a 26% rise to level me up. Mind you, when I had questioned my pay a year or so earlier, as a colleague had let slip what he was earning, and I was asking, "if my performance isn't as good as his, why has no one told me?" The response I had was, "It's a sackable offence to discuss pay." Had I had a mentor to explain these things along the way, then I would have dealt with it differently, but it's really only been in the last 5 years or so (in my 30s) that it's been made clear to me. I suspect there are lots and lots more women in that position. (It's got bog all to do with performance in any case, else I'd be on masses more than some of my colleagues. It has a lot to do with who you know, who knows about the work you do, and telling people about it - no point producing the most fantastic work ever if no one's aware of it, when it comes to pay. And satisfaction in a job well done isn't enough to pay the bills.)

Men don't always bother negotiating much either, but if you've got a woman and a man working in the same role, and neither negotiates, there's a chance the man will still do better financially - there's a whole load of unconscious biases around things like men showing managerial talent and assertiveness, but women being bossy, men being promoted for their potential, whereas women are promoted for what they've achieved. That's part of the thing mentioned above, women being given harder goals than men.

I know someone who spent a couple of years fighting for their pay to be made equal - they got it in the end, but said it was such hard work, they wouldn't bother in future. (I'm more stubborn than that.)