Morning, here's the entire piece I wrote for FT which gives my comments a bit more context...
Each year at this time, we pass what has come to be known as Equal Pay Day: the point beyond which, thanks to the UK’s gender pay gap, women effectively work for free until January.
The actual date changes from year to year. While in 2013 it fell on November 7, in 2014 it came three days earlier, courtesy of the fact that the pay gap last year widened. This year, it is November 9, making us a bit better off; not that we need feel grateful.
Let us look at the numbers, courtesy of the Office for National Statistics. Its preferred measure of the pay gap uses hourly earnings excluding overtime, resulting in a wage gap of 9.4 per cent. The gap in favour of men is wider in the top decile of earners (18.3 per cent) than in the lowest decile (5.9 per cent).
The one area where women out-earn men is in part-time work, where the pay gap is negative (5.5 per cent in favour of women). This probably reflects the fact that older, more experienced and better-paid women tend to reduce their working hours in order to cope with caring responsibilities.
We all love a bit of righteous outrage, and on this topic there is plenty to go around. The problem is where to direct it. Very few of us work for companies that expressly seek to keep women down or out. Pretty much every job I have had since graduation has been in a male-dominated field (trading floors, investment banks, sports journalism, internet start-ups) but in my experience, these sectors are keen to hire more women at all levels.
Breaking into sports writing was undoubtedly easier because I was an “unusual” applicant. Via Mumsnet’s Family Friendly programme, meanwhile, I see businesses trying all sorts to support and retain senior female workers. Barclays, for example, has instituted policies to help their employees throughout family life, from support during fertility treatment to maternity and paternity leave, or while caring for relatives. At Facebook they are offering up to $20,000, about £13,000, for egg freezing treatment.
Businesses know it looks terrible if their employment ratio is skewed wildly in favour of men, or if the only woman in the senior leadership meeting is there to take notes. Most organisations are increasingly aware that diversity makes good business sense, too. If you are aiming to appeal to as wide an audience as possible, you will need to employ more than just white, middle-aged men. However talented they may be, they will struggle — just as any demographically uniform group would.
As far as I have seen, then, the gender pay gap has very little to do with discriminatory practices or policies against women. There are much deeper forces at work, among which are the conflicting signals women receive about how best to conduct themselves. The behaviours for which men are rewarded in the office (laser-like focus on their own projects; a willingness to tell co-workers what to do without apologising) are often frowned on in women. But failure to display them means women often miss out on promotions and higher pay. Unfortunately that is not the half of it. The second big problem is that women just do not seem to care as much as men do about salaries and promotion.
The 2015 Global Management Education Graduate Survey found that things such as professional development, a good fit with the company culture and flexible work hours matter more. At its starkest it can be summed up as men want to get on, women want work-life balance. No surprises, then, who gets the pay rise.
You could argue that what women lose in pay and seniority they gain in work-life balance, and that is a fair trade. Many fathers no doubt regret the paltry amount of time they spend with their children and would perhaps willingly take a pay cut to increase it.
Whichever way you look at it, one thing is clear. The model of the ideal senior employee that we have collectively manufactured (available at all hours, smartphone under the pillow, last attended a parents’ evening some time before the millennium) produces unfairness on both sides and a certain amount of misery for all. So, now we are working for no pay for the rest of the year, let us from today think about dismantling a model of work whose dysfunction is increasingly apparent.