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.

And it takes a strong, very ethically minded boss to ensure that those not on the traditional working pattern don't get taken advantage of in these situations.

Actually, it would be unethical not to pay anyone less, if there are no adverse consequences that make it a bad idea. When it comes to owners versus workers, management is supposed to be on the side of the owners.

If lower pay accompanies job flexibility, it is the fact that the woman (rather than her DH) is seeking flexibility that is the problem. It is not her employers responsibility to compensate for the inequality in her relationship by paying her more than he has to.

If a reason women are paid less is because they choose flexibility, the correct solution to that component of the pay gap is not forcing the same pay as non-flexible workers, it's equalising the number of workers of each sex that work flexibly. (If women really do prefer to be the ones who work flexibly, then they have to accept that component of the gender pay-gap is justified.)

Sorry forgot to actually link to the Pao article. It's short.

www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/saying-the-right-things-doing-none-of-them/415092/

While retrieving the link saw this one:

Summary: Female employee claims pay unequal. Male CEO skeptical, but orders review. Based on data spends and extra usd 3M to bring salaries into line. (My personal conclusion, the more data and transparency the better.)

www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/11/salesforce-equal-pay-gender-gap/415050/?utm_source=SFFB

VenusRising
Justine, you are in a position of power and influence, and don't forget, we have put you there.
We expect you to think more clearly and put our points of view forward...

That's not my expectation. Mumsnet is a business as well as a community - people choose to use the boards here for their own benefit. JR is not an elected leader, obliged to accurately represent the views of thousands of members when she writes an article. She has a right to voice her own opinions, which won't be solely formed by contributions to Mumsnet. From your post, I think you overestimate the effects of the article (how many people are going to read it with an uncritical eye and make it their sole source of reference on the subject?).

FreeWorker
I have never had a male manager who didn't have a full time SAHM bringing up his children, cleaning cooking, pressing his shirts and generally supporting his stellar career. I have never had a manager who had a professional woman as a DP/DW who was his equal.

From a previous post, my impression was that you'd been self employed for a long time, in which case, might your experience partly reflect a time when sexism and inequality of opportunity in the workplace were particularly rife and even overt, as well as there being far fewer women at work?

I say again what I said up thread. It is managers (almost always men) who make discriminatory decisions. Not organisations.

Organisations are responsible for their employees' behaviour at work and the culture/values of the workplace. They choose who they recruit and how they train them. Presumably the new legislation mentioned earlier by DeoGratias, obliging larger organisations to publish their gender pay figures, will force companies to focus on pay discrepancies.

DeoGratias, it is not a mother martyr complex, just that I personally would not have left DC screaming for three hours if they would have been settled with me. Or maybe it was a mother martyr complex - my mum was abusive and neglectful, my father was an alcoholic, so maybe I lacked the secure upbringing to know my children would be fine; maybe I did make need to know they were fine.

But that is irrelevant to the discussion, or maybe not - there are so many factor people have to weigh up, some of them rational and practical, others beyond understanding to those from a different background.

Nothing more to add; life to lead...

Needed to make sure they were alright by being there, I mean. I don't know, I am trying to make sense of things myself. Not sure this thread is helping, it is making me depressed rather than anything else

Women who are successful at work tend just to get on with it and they think they are good enough and don't seek perfection. Works for me. So there is no need to think about things that are past - just go forth into a non sexist future in equal marriage. I suppose I always knew the nanny or nursery or father or relative or babysitter might well be better than I am with children and if the child cried in 5 mins after I'd left they'd be right and rain and probably have a better time than had I been there anyway and I'd sure as hell have been happier for having a few hours at work or readingo n the tube into work than if I had 24/7 childcare so all right all round.

I was asked "But there's another difference there in your example that you don't emphasise. Why is that?" I haven't read back to my post. I said in negotiating business to business contracts some people are better negotiators than others so prices end up varying even for identical supplies. That happens a lot in commercial contracts and it's fine - it's part of the work of a negotiator. Many of us on here do negotiations day in day out for our clients and use every tick in the book to pay the least or negotiate the best price. Women do this as much as men. Many women thrive in procurement roles in companies.

I am with Theor. on this of course. I want equality. I don't want those who are lazy enough not to work many hours, who want hours at home sleepig in or dealing with their dogs or even their children to be given some advantage over those of us who puti n the hours. I just want equality and I've had it because I haven't gone part time. In the procss I've avoided hours of extra cleaning and clearing up of child sick and dealing with screaming toddlers so it's win win all round in my book.

I see. Yes, it's not gender neutral if women are worse than men at asking for more pay or if those they negotiate with are sexist. in fact in most work you don't have a lot of opportunity to negotiate higher pay. I've had a good few conversations with one of my children over this and I know it's hard to raise it, you don't always know whether your job is secure enough to raise it, you might not have rival job offers to bring to the table and they might instead say you're useless here is your notice when you'd thought you were invaluable and work a 10% pay rise.

I suppose every single day of the year just about I negotiate my value as every time a new client comes and asks me to do work I put a price on that and agree what that figure will be. I never now of course notice any gender discrimination - they are in effect begging me to work for them so the power is kind of shifted.

I never now of course notice any gender discrimination - they are in effect begging me to work for them so the power is kind of shifted.

(Computer programmer here) But you have incomplete data - you don't know how many clients decided to approach other providers because they want to deal with men only. So you can't quite say that you are not being discriminated, unless you have hard data on your peers' workloads and fees to compare against.

There is a big problem with the argument that women just need to negotiate more to get better pay and really there all sorts of prices for goods and services out there and so its OK to pay women less, etc.

The problem is this.

Suppose a manager is recruiting and believes that a male candidate could bring in £250,000 of revenue to the company and privately decides he is willing to pay him up to an absolute maximum £150,000 of that value as a salary and the male candidate negotiates hard and manages to get a salary of £150,000. All well and good

However...

Suppose the manager also has a female candidate who is just as good as the male candidate but he privately believes the woman is only worth £150,000 of revenue to the company BECAUSE he is prejudiced. He fundamentally thinks women are just not as good as men at doing the job without any evidence when she is in reality just as good as the male candidate he just hired and actually worth just the same salary.

The manager based on his prejudice is only willing to pay her up to £100,000. No matter how hard she negotiates the manager just isn't going to pay her as much as the male candidate because of his prejudiced belief about her value.

The market based approach and telling women to negotiate hard will never close the pay gap if managers just 'believe' women are worth less. Still worse what if managers really do believe women are worth the same but determined to never offer women the same salary regardless.

Both lead to unfair outcomes for the women candidates no matter how hard they negotiate and the pay gap will never close.

Recruitment, especially at that level, is (highly) unlikely to be undertaken by just one manager. I think somebody who works in HR made the point that recruitment is less likely to be an issue than pay rise decisions - it's subject to greater evaluation, scrutiny etc.

Improving negotiation skills is useful but doesn't address the core problem. Organisations and the individuals within it need to be aware of any gender inequality, and accountable for their decisions. (I still believe it's fundamental to re-shape jobs and conditions to enable true flexibility at work and home for all and make domestic/childcare equality much easier.)

I am sceptical about the bright future for women's careers depicted by some if only men would share domestic and childcare duties.

IMVHO jobs with a lot of responsibility go hand in hand with a lot of availability.

Agreed BoboChic. I was thinking about this earlier. I see a lot of threads on MN with people working "FT" compressed hours. I also know of a lot of rl instances. As I said earlier, in my profession a normal week was 60 hours over 5 days with some weekends thrown in and a fair amount of national and international travel. My concept of FT is therefore very different and I would consider 40 hours fitting in around work / life balance to be PT.

I'm letting my imagination run away with me here, but I'm envisaging a future where we come out of the EU, scrap the Equality Act and maybe retain a token direct discrimination bar, but do away with indirect discrimination. So any time a woman complains about less pay for equal work, she can no longer go to a tribunal to get it resolved, but has to put up with comments like:

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

Its such a careless, throwaway generalising comment, even taken out of context, which I hope it was.

Yes, I also once worked in a sector/role with those sorts of time and logistical constraints. My colleagues who were mothers quickly fell into the three-nanny family scenario...

". I don't want those who are lazy enough not to work many hours, who want hours at home sleepig in or dealing with their dogs or even their children to be given some advantage over those of us who puti n the hours"

Nobody is arguing that lazy people be given some advantage over people who love spending all their time at work.

I am arguing that most people are part of families and that our society needs to be structured so that everyone, male and female, can function within their families and within their workplaces.

Also most people who don't work many hours, are not lazy. They are working at home looking after their children which would cost you at least £30 p.a. if you got a nanny to do it, doing gardening which would cost about £3K p.a.if you paid a handyman to do it, doing all the household management which when you pay a housekeeper to do it, is worth about £30K p.a. and then a whole load of odd clerical stuff like dentist appointments, banking stuff etc. It's lazy to grasp at the nearest misogynistic characterisation of people who do reduced hours as lazy.

Perhaps families with two parents doing these sorts of jobs is unlikely or undesirable, bobo. When I say things like fathers stepping up, what I mean is 50% of the parents with those sorts of jobs could be fathers with a wife at home taking most of the responsibility for the children, and 50% women with the father doing most child rearing . There's no reason that couldn't happen.

Not unlikely, because people tend to meet their partners at university or work and go into similar types of jobs these days.

Yes AskBasil and Bobo. That is why a six figure salary would be barely enough to get me out the door, although that is not really any excuse for my "laziness" as I did used to command one.

A boss of mine once calmly explained to me that he had calculated what his wife was worth to him in terms of the 'services' she provided.

He thought £40k would do it about 15 years ago so with inflation that is pretty close to what AskBasil said. Mind you he wasn't exactly being complimentary about his wife and thought with woman from the Far East he could cut his costs.

Yes, that is all most of us want 50% of this stuff done by men.

By the way I am not saying most men and women want to work the hours I work and therefore of course they don't now (whether male or female) earn anything like I do. That's just how it is.

Someone said above how can I know what others earn. I do look at published accounts every day so it's not impossible to know. I know I do pretty well and of course it will get easier and easier for me as my children will leave home soon.

FreeW in your example above though women leave for other companies, prove the level of business they can generate and get higher pay there or found their own hedge fund or whatever the business is. So the market does work to that extent.

BoboChic
I am sceptical about the bright future for women's careers depicted by some if only men would share domestic and childcare duties.

IMVHO jobs with a lot of responsibility go hand in hand with a lot of availability.

A more equal sharing of domestic/childcare duties also requires a shift in attitude to and from full-time work(ers). It's part of the problem that f/t work is often viewed as more important, and less flexible, than p/t work, sometimes taking priority over family life. In some cases, it's difficult to tell where the inflexibility comes from - the organisation and/or the job holder.

By the way anyone nosy like I am about high pay of other people read this divorce judgment www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Fam/2015/2921.html

£2m a year as a fuel trader.

No children.

"Each party comes from a relatively modest financial background. Each of them worked hard to achieve the qualifications and experience which each of them brought to their relationship at the start of the six years for which their cohabitation and marriage lasted. W since before the parties met worked continuously for one employer and proved her value as a trader in a particular sector of the wholesale fuel trade. H was from before they met in mid-2007 continuously till October 2012 employed by an international company involved with IT. Their basic salaries were not very different in the early years of their cohabitation, around the £100,000 p.a. mark. But there was this significant difference, that W received discretionary annual bonuses until her trading activity recently became limited as a result of developments which affected her industry. For the central 5 years of their relationship W's bonuses totalled £10.5M, whereas any bonuses H's employment brought were comparatively trivial. The parties were both continuously employed until in October 2012 H took voluntary redundancy in circumstances which have been the source of one of the many challenges and disputes in this case. "

DeoGratis - not sure what point you are making. Some people are in high paying jobs.

The important question is what would a female IT worker exactly the same as H be paid and what would a male fuel trader be paid identical to W?

Plenty of female City traders have brought cases where they were paid considerably less than men for the same performance.