To think Justine Roberts should not have written this in the FT

[FreeWorker]

Justine writes a comment column in the Recruitment section of the Financial Times section which most MNetters will not have seen as it is behind a paywall.

In her most recent article of yesterday she writes on the gender pay gap and I was astonished to read the following sentences:

"As far as I have seen, then, the gender pay gap has very little to do with discriminatory practices or policies against women."

"The second big problem is that women just do not seem to care as much as men do about salaries and promotion."

One commentator under the FT article called Ezra sums up how I feel.

"Some valid observations - but to say that the gender pay gap has nothing to do with discrimination is frankly delusional."

For those who want to see the full article you may be able to read it via the following link if you search for it via Google and answer a few online questions:

For the rest of the year your pay will be zero

The Financial Times is an extremely influential newspaper in business and Government circles and Justine is also extremely influential as an opinion former because of MN.

AIBU to think that the views Justine has expressed in this article do not reflect the daily experience of women at work? AIBU to think it also contradicts the thousands of posts about unfair treatment at work by women on MN that show discrimination is rampant and that women DO care about salary and promotion?

I have name changed for this post but am a long time male poster on MN and have had male bosses throughout my career who openly and routinely made discriminatory comments in meetings when no women were around to hear them. They knowingly paid women less and passed them over for promotion. I worked in an industry where virtually no women make it to senior positions.

The gender pay gap is always about discrimination in my experience.

In Russia, doctors is the one of the most low-paid professions there is, even though you need the same amount of training and expertise that you get anywhere else in the world.

Guess what sex most doctors in Russia are?

Interesting article in the telegraph by Bryony Gordon about the same subject.

If you go for the male dominated professions then you will get a decent salary. I work in software development. This will help pay the bills and for childcare which is a big plus.

Yes - but you might still not be paid as much as your male comparators, and you might not know because of all the salary secrecy.

However there are major downsides. No female company and role models. An assumption that you aren't as technical. A battle to prove you are just as good. Your face won't fit to get promoted as there will be no female management whatsoever in your field. There won't be any part time jobs to apply for if you want more time with the kids.

Oh, this, so much this. We have had redundancies recently, and the women I've spoken to who are going are all considering leaving tech entirely and finding work elsewhere, because it's just so bloody tiring, having to fight for everything all the time. As a company, we do quite well for women, but the technical areas, there are still mostly men, and a good few incompetent ones at that. Women do care about pay and promotion, but after years and years of going for it and not getting it, you just end up giving up. Buffy's link upthread with the image - I can definitely relate to that.

soft

^I really cannot believe, Justine, that you wrote that sentence about women not caring about salaries and promotions without any kind of context.
I've always said that the glass ceiling lies primarily within the home - the decision to go part - time or not go for a promotion / different job is so often not one that is decided based on equal options available to each parent. Because the level of commitment, organisation and care proposed for running the non-work part of life by each partner is not equal^

Just wanted to repeat softs post (cause it's ace).

That said I don't mind much of the article, if it is true that women aren't as pushy when it comes to negotiating their salary we do need to discuss it. So that fairer pay reviews are conducted in the future (etc).

Guess what sex most doctors in Russia are

We are seeing more and more women Drs. My prediction is that we will see a reduction in the average salary of Drs over the next 10-20 years.

Thanks for the thread, FreeWorker.

I think I recognise you too, and you have massively influenced the way I think about sexism and discrimination in the workplace.

The linked article is a shockingly sloppy and badly written piece of offensive shite.

It is a betrayal of this site and the women who you make your money to have published something that ignores and denies their realities so you can make a lazy, complacent non-point about how the gender pay gap is all just a big misunderstanding and nobody's fault and really women must try harder and complain less.

It is only because of us that you were asked to write that article, and you took it upon yourself to speak for women as a gender and tell lies about us.

Shameful.

Yep.

And it's not a coincidence that the government feel much more able to bully doctors now.

And that professions which used to be high status when mostly men did them, like teaching, are not as high status now that they are dominated by women.

And professions which uses to be low pay and low status, like computer programming when it was done by women in the fifties and sixties, became high pay and high status when men went into it.

It's not the profession which decides the status and pay. It's the people who do that profession. There are very few which buck the trend.

If caring for/raising children was valued above anything else, I think the picture would look considerably different. Mind you, I'm sure the patriarchy would find other ways to suppress women's progression.

Pre, if you've done the things on my list and are still paid less than men who are no better than you are and do the same job and hours then you need to gather some data about it, get rival higher job offers and present them to the employer. If that does not work do what I did - ditch the day job and earn many multiples of what you earned before working for yourself and outearn the men - it rocks.

I am an accountant and don't get paid as much as my peers because of maternity leave which meant i missed promotions and pay rises. Basically I got promoted later than those I started with as I had children.

I also work part time (4 days a week) as I value my time with my children (although would like more but I like working!)

I was talking to a couple of male peers who have young kids who joked about mothers guilt and how their partners felt guilty about leaving their children in childcare.

I've also had discussions with dh where I try to explain why I want more time to be around with the children. He sees things from a practical point of view whereas for me it is emotional I.e. I want to be there for our DCs as they go through school, to have time to provide emotional support. I find that when work gets tough, I can't just switch off (especially when working long hours and bringing it home with me) - that is the nature of the job. I suspect this is why many women in high powered jobs walk away.

Men with children tend not to take on more flexible hours let alone stay at home and I wonder if this is more than just a cultural issue. But whether fathers in general don't have the same emotional connection - this is not me saying that they have no emotional connection, but they see their roles as provider which requires different things. Most women I know with DCs are focussed on the caring side of things.

Believeitornot - your desire to work 4 days a week and the fact that you had to take time off does NOT me you should be paid less than a man on a pro rata basis. The 'mummy track' is just another random excuse for discrimination that was always going to happen to you whether you had children or not.

whether fathers in general don't have the same emotional connection

But how do we know and why should we generalise? It's a self-perpetuating cycle. We know that part-time workers are sidelined and given lower status and fewer opportunities to progress. It therefore doesn't make sense for both careers to stall whilst the children are small and this may not be an economically viable option. So now you have to choose upon which partner the penalty of caring falls. Here comes the Catch-22: because the female partner is typically paid less than the male (due to the wage gap, due to the fact she is often a few years younger than her partner) and the woman is the one who has to take maternity leave to recover from the birth and it is much more 'acceptable' (read: tolerated) for the woman to take time out for caring and SAHDs are still so rare that it is quite a socially isolating experience ... all add up to the apparently 'logical' conclusion that women want to stay at home with their children more than men. So you're already behind on the career ladder and you 'voluntarily' push yourself several rungs further back - this is what the Pay Gap Myth believers point to - women choose to take a back seat when their children are little and men don't choose this (but is it really a choice on either side?).

Most of the guys I work with have chosen to move into careers which are similar to the work we used to do in big name consultancy, but in the public sector. In nearly every case, this is in order to be at home every night and every weekend for their children. I am starting to see some going part-time (but only when they've reached a certain level of seniority) in order to share childcare more evenly. Change is coming but it is slow, extremely vulnerable to economic downturn and still beset by the general attitude to part-time workers.

It's impossible to say what the picture would look like in terms of mothers' and fathers' desire to doing the caring work for their children if we stripped away all the other factors. Maybe it still would be biased in favour of women, maybe not. We're so far away from being able to study that phenomenon that our best assumption, the one that will maximise choice for everyone, is a 50:50 model.

Morning - thanks for all your comments everyone.

I take the point about discriminatory "practices" probably being a poor choice of word - in context; "discriminatory policies and practices" where I was talking about employers and recruitment, I do stand by my subsequent statement - I don't think most companies deliberately set out to discriminate (and in my experience fact some positively discriminate towards women) but, of course, discrimination obviously still happens. Clearly from the sentiment expressed by some here though, it's obvious I could have worded it better though - apologies for that!

Secondly, I want to reiterate that I believe there is considerable evidence to show that women do care less about pay and promotion than men. Not that they don't care about those things, but that on the whole they care more than men about things like working environment and flexibility first. (Obviously this is an aggregate stat - there will be many exceptions etc etc). For many, many complicated reasons women are more likely to put their career second, relative to their male partners.

And this was the issue I was trying to highlight in the piece; that reducing the pay is complex, not simply a matter of reigning in nefarious employers - it needs a dramatic change in culture and behaviours - around parental leave, around the share of domestic and parenting responsibilities, as well as around unconscious bias and the messages we give women about how they behave in the workplace.

Morning Justine - I think I'm still left with a feeling that the workplace could change to become more women-friendly rather than women change to fit in with how it currently is. As I've said in previous posts on the thread if women are tending to behave in certain ways in the systems we currently find ourselves in there are reasons for that!

"women just do not seem to care as much as men do about salaries and promotion" should have been "men just do not seem to care as much about work/life balance and doing childcare"

Agree completly, very good point! Although I'd change it to "men just do not NEED to care..."

Also I posted and ran upthread so didn't see the comments back. Sorry. Yes I agree it's the practices. What I meant by more subtle was more ingrained, assuming women won't be ambitious, dedicated, judging on achievements v potential, women being "bossy", not disclosing salaries for jobs and saying it's open for negotiation - a blatant way of discriminating on pay because men will be able to negotiate harder because of all the bias that exists. Etc.

I agree that male exec FT readers will revel in this though.

tribpot - "So you're already behind on the career ladder and you 'voluntarily' push yourself several rungs further back - this is what the Pay Gap Myth believers point to - women choose to take a back seat when their children are little and men don't choose this (but is it really a choice on either side?)."

Exactly. Spot on. The 'choice' that women make to go part time or 'work life balance' is a choice forced on them and then presented as a reason to justify lower pay for women.

I do wonder if in fact in the article Justine has conflated her own choice to leave her career in investment banking and sports journalism and have four children while living off her husbands salary while building MN. In effect she has taken the route forced on millions of women through a very constrained set of choices to stop working and become a SAHM with a part time kitchen table job on the side when she has a degree from Oxford. I know four women who were forced into exactly that set of choices and unlike Justine are very unhappy and bitter about the destruction of their former high flying careers once they had children. They all now work in far lower powered jobs for a fraction of what they earned a decade ago. Their work life balance is not the one they wanted o chose.

To be sure Justine has made a brilliant success out of what she has done and I admire her greatly as we all do and my posting this thread is absolutely not an attack on her. Like other posters I am concerned about the way her article will be read in business circles by senior male managers. I know very well women have no voice at all at senior levels in business and City because they are weeded out well before reaching senior management levels. Successful people like Justine are essential in helping to put forward the real issues that women face.

Like others on the thread I would like to hear a full response from Justine as sometimes newspaper articles that have then been edited do not give the nuance of what the writer was trying to say in the draft article.

There is a thread going on right now where the OP's DH has said that his 10 year-old DS (the OP's step-son) is coming to live with them.

He has a job where he works a minimum of 12 hours a day and is away from home completely a minimum of 2 days a week.

He does not seem to anticipate this changing. He has just assumed that his wife will bring his son up.

And most posters on that thread are telling the OP she's cruel and heartless for saying she doesn't think she can cope with this. Only a few have pointed out that the child's actual parent should be the one stepping up.

The item that DeoGratias left off her list, as she so often does, is:
10. Have a wife. Have someone who's career and life will always come second to yours, who will do the grunt work. (DG had a male wife, but she still had one.)

Justine - I x-posted with your reply this morning. I have now read your response.

I agree men need to care less about a work/balance. After all they can work the longer hours knowing their female partner will step in. I've had the benefit of this as DH is a WAHD so I am able to do the 7.30am conf call or work until the early hours. I makes a huge difference.

Pausing, I don't have a wife and my chidlren's father and I both worked full time (more than full time) for 20 years of marriage. It is not true that I had a male wife. Instead we both did 50/50 at home out of working hours.

" Basically I got promoted later than those I started with as I had children. " - I disagree with this statement above. The problems came because you took the leaves. I took 2 weeks annual leave to have the babies in and surprise surprise my career was not behind any men's. I do feel emotionally connected to my 5 children as do most fathers despite us all working full time. Perhaps some women come from sexist homes where they are conditioned or conned into thinking cleaning and looking after men is some higher calling but more fool them. Let us lift the scales from their eyes and say part time work is no panacea and in fact it's fool's gold. I call the enhanced maternity rights a poisoned chalice - proffered to you to bribe you into become chief cook and bottle washer at home and pin money earning and all you get in return is more of the same, no money and often (50%) a man who runs off with someone else anyway leaving you without earning potential. Don't be seduced into the supposedly nicer life of being more at home - the grass may look greener but all that is over that wall is the green nappies and domestic dross. You can work full time, earn a lot and have a lovely family without having a stay at home partner.

Of course not everyone like capitalism and many many people are more than happy with very little money. I have never said you need money to be happy but that is a different debate.

JR is correct that more women than men choose to work less. I think those women are making very foolish choices they will regret and I exhort them to change their ways but I don't see that happening en masse any time soon although I remain hopeful now 60% of graduates are female and women under 30 earn more than men in the UK. We shall see. If all goes well I will be seeing the next generation soon and I will leave them utterly free to make any choices they wish as I learn as much from the children as they learn from me. i wonder who on MN would take my oldest son who is using his degree to work as a postman, who has years of childcare experience as he is in effect his brothers' father and who as a feminist would be very supportive of a woman's career. How many women on mumsnet would see him as a catch I wonder or do they all want to "marry up" so they have a man who will keep them at least in part if not in whole?

It makes

DeoGratias, you were married to a teacher.

DeoGratias - to be utterly truthful, your son sounds very worrying! So, no, I wouldn't see him as a catch for my DD. I hope she wants a partner who is assertive and self-starting and not under his mother's thumb.