A question about the gender pay gap

in organisations where you have to negotiate your pay, that tends to work against women - men are likely to be rewarded for asking for more pay by getting more pay - women are less likely to do so, and are less likely to negotiate in the first place. Is that cause or effect, though?

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

Even in roles that don't specifically state it, negotiation is used pretty much everywhere. In direct negotiation roles such as legal roles, sales, account management, etc. a lack of negotiation for one's own benefit potentially highlights an inadequacy (or at least, a disadvantage to other applicants) for the role.

I want to check that the pay gap is when comparing people in like for like jobs.

Me too.

From examples I have seen, when adjusted for similar job roles the pay gap reduces to about 6-8% - so it is there and there's progress to be made, but it's not the 20% claimed (or 23% claimed in the US).

Oddly enough, if you take the "throw it in the air and see what falls down" method of calculation, in the US white men (the patriarchal poster boys) are paid about 20% less than Asian men.

That's less likely to happen in most IT roles (though obviously there are a few IT roles which might affect healthcare in some way.)

Very true. I do find it amazing that, in 2015, all aircraft systems are still manually operated by the pilot and co-pilot, automated vehicle and traffic safety systems non-existent, power stations have all of those windy wheels that have to be manually wound to release pressure and prevent catastrophes, and all manner of electronic safety equipment is just completely fictional.

Oh, wait ...

There are also cases where roles which are mostly done by women are seen as worth less than roles which are mostly done by men - so there was a case not that far back where a council was found to be in the wrong for paying dustbin operatives (mostly men) more than cleaners (mostly women), because the jobs were shown to be equivalent.

It is true that a job based mostly indoors emptying bins weighing no more than about 2kg (and containing mostly paper, or at worst a banana skin or a half-full yogurt pot) is exactly equivalent to a job that is conducted almost entirely outside come rain, sleet or snow, emptying bins weighing regularly weighing over 20kg (and possibly over a tonne for trade waste) containing all manner of decomposing items.

Oh, wait ...

I think there are a lot of very subtle factors too. For example I used to work in a huge well known company. Everyone, regardless of qualifications or experience started at the bottom of the lowest pay grade and payrises were based on your annual appraisal. I did an identical job to two colleagues, one male and one female. The females were set a more demanding set of objectives than the male, and this was always explained away with things like, 'well, the women find typing easier , so they work faster' and 'objectives are based on the individual, not the role'. As a result female staff often struggled to meet their objectives whilst male staff exceeded them. So on paper it looked like the men performed better but in reality less was asked of them. Payrises were a percentage of your previous salary so as soon as you got one better payrise than a colleague, the colleague could never catch up.

Here's an example of how you could interpret some data: a while back, I read the conclusions of a study done for the union representing management and professional levels in the company I worked for. They looked at pay, qualifications, performance evaluations, etc.

Women scored higher on evaluations at every grade.

There are a number of ways you can interpret that. You could decide that the women employed by the company were simply better than the men. You could decide that incompetent men never got fired, thus pulling down the men's scores. And so on.

The study however noted that the time in grade was higher for higher performing women, so what was actually happening was that the company took much longer to promote women, so there would be a big tranche of overachieving women rammed up against the top of each grade. (The way the company worked meant they were likely to have the same responsibilities as the grade above - plenty of cases of people in "acting up" roles for years, including myself).

Oh yes, and pay. Even when they got promoted - a level 2 "outstanding" woman would only just outearn a level 1 "good" man.

The statistics are only skewed if you believe the comparison is invalid for the purpose you intend to use it for. The mean of a dataset might be very different from the median. But it depends what you want, doesn't it? What do you want?

In my old job they did a pay benchmarking exercising, which involved a lot of work looking at job descriptions, length of service, experience, qualifications etc and normalising for all those variables (and others I've probably forgotten) before calculating the pay gap.

They were trying very hard to look at like for like positions and pay.

I think what Vestal means is, if the reason for the difference was that 'women's' jobs are being poorly paid (or not paid at all) that is just as bad, and in need of correction as if women are being paid less for the exact same job.

To put it another way, even if it was just adding up all hours 'worked' and dividing (so women, who are more likely to be part time, earned less overall) then that is still a terrible, skewed statistic, because those women who aren't working aren't sitting doing nothing - they're doing childcare, housework, other unpaid roles (caring, transporting people/things, shopping etc).

You might feel inclined to say that they're giving a false picture of work done, because they're only including paid work, which, I would argue, isn't correct - after all, if you'd pay a nanny or a cleaner to do it, doesn't that make it work? In many cases it's directly taking work away from someone who would otherwise be paid (eg. Childcare) - shouldn't this also be captured in the stats rather than completely ignored?

There are also vocations that recognise the vocational nature of the job by awarding long service payments. Guess who tend to miss out on them because of career gaps in their 30s?

You do acknowledge that women being expected to do childcare and housekeeping for free as well as traditional "pink collar" jobs being paid badly is just as shitty as same job, lower pay, right?

Just as "If you don't die as a toddler then you could live to be 70" is not much better than "You are guaranteed to live to 45 and then die".

What an excellent summary EBearhug.

Great post ebear

Age also seems to be a factor - like EBear says it's probably not just one thing but a combination of factors causing this.

The gap seems to get bigger at the 30-40 bracket (and continues to get worse).
Having children probably has something to do with this. Also 30 tends to be where your career takes off and you earn more.
Maybe it takes off for men a lot easier than for women?

There's a mix of things - there are definitely specific cases where women are paid less than their direct coworkers, and you sometimes see cases of that in the news. One reason for this is because there is a lot of pay secrecy, and in organisations where you have to negotiate your pay, that tends to work against women - men are likely to be rewarded for asking for more pay by getting more pay - women are less likely to do so, and are less likely to negotiate in the first place. Is that cause or effect, though? I'll be interested to see what happens once organisations over 250 employees have to publish pay data. (I don't know what detail will be required to know how clear it will make things.)

There are also cases where roles which are mostly done by women are seen as worth less than roles which are mostly done by men - so there was a case not that far back where a council was found to be in the wrong for paying dustbin operatives (mostly men) more than cleaners (mostly women), because the jobs were shown to be equivalent. Even if they're not directly equivalent, it is generally true that female-dominated jobs tend to be paid less than male-dominated jobs. Compare IT (male) with nursing (female) - they probably have similar levels of training, with IT probably being a bit less. If things go wrong in nursing, then people might die. That's less likely to happen in most IT roles (though obviously there are a few IT roles which might affect healthcare in some way.) But IT is mostly better paid than nursing, mostly because men do it.

On top of that, when you look at the part time roles in the country, women do a far greater percentage of them compared with men, and that's going to show a difference - even if you're on the same hourly rate, if you work 20 hours rather than 40, you're going to be taking home half of what the full-time person does. But there are also a lot of poorly paid part time jobs, even when you take into account that the hours are fewer.

And yes, men do tend to take more of the top jobs as well - but why is that? It's not because women aren't competent (nor because men are, in some cases.)

So basically, it's a bit of everything. There's some more info on how differences are measured here -
www.equalpayportal.co.uk/statistics/
ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Gender_pay_gap_statistics

There's some more discussion in these threads -
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/2502617-To-think-Justine-Roberts-should-not-have-written-this-in-the-FT?
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/guest_posts/2504676-Guest-post-Equal-Pay-Day-The-gender-pay-gap-isnt-a-myth