I don't believe that women earn 75% less than men at a certain airline.

[Gromance02]

I just don't. Unless they are talking about completely different roles. Eg, pilots (generally men) compared to air stewards (generally women). I'm not defending the airline but I don't think they deserve this utterly misleading headline.

Obviously if a female pilot with exactly the same length of career with the same number of sabbatical/maternity/paternity leave as a man is on less than her male counterpart, that is wrong.

Ryanair only pays you the time you take off until the plane lands. She often gets the 1/2 hour flights, whilst he often gets the longer haul ones to Lanzarote etc. Their wage is also based on sales onboard, and she sells as much as anyone else she works with

And of course, people are more likely to buy stuff on a 4 hour flight to Lanzarote than they are from Dublin to the UK. They often don't even bother sending the trolley round on the very short flights, more of a 'buzz the crew if you want anything' arrangement.

That all sounds very unfair, but would be an easy way for an employer to 'invisibly' discriminate between people. A bit like other people on zero hours contracts who have to fight for shifts.

Just need the training...and the desire to do it obviously

And tens of thousands of pounds. Pilot is a strange job, you have to pay for yourself to qualify, then you often have to pay for yourself to be certificate to fly a particular plane, and then you can get a job. Often that comes as a training bond with the airline you're flying with, so a sort of indentured servitude.

Cabin crew is sadly seen by too many as a fun job to do for a short period, so there's always lots of recruits, rather than career staff, giving companies the chance to treat them badly.

sirfred

Absolutely

I remember dh applying many years ago

If it had gone through we would have had to sell the house

Part of the problem begins way before job applications. Too many schoolgirls make poor choices of subjects, avoiding the STEM ones that open doors to well paid careers, and instead go for over subscribed humanities subjects. This then limits their choice of degree course at uni.
Too many young women end up as carers, shop workers and secretaries, who would have been perfectly competent engineers, scientists, architects, doctors etc.
It even seems a struggle to attract them into IT, where they could have good salaries and work office hours, or freelance as contractors from home.
As an elderly feminist, I despair at times that there is still so far to go in educating young girls about the patriarchy and giving them the tools for their own emancipation.

As an elderly (ish ) feminist, I think 'schoolgirls' should do whatever subject they bloody well want and are best at and maybe they would be happy, fulfilled and determined enough to rise to the top. Sorry, but, as an English graduate and teacher of English, that grinds my gears! Even though I take your basic point, it is not a 'poor choice ' to pursue any A level subject at all, or to pursue one you love. As someone said upthread there is actually a lot of girls doing A level sciences now. you don't end up a careworker or a secretary with an A level in English Lit or history any more than you do with an A level in physics.

"Too many schoolgirls make poor choices of subjects, avoiding the STEM ones that open doors to well paid careers"

Sorry, but what bollocks. Loads of women, myself and most I work with, have not only science a-levels but also postgraduate degrees. We are still paid less on appointment than male colleagues in similar bands, doing less specialised roles, because they ask for more at interview and are given it, whereas when I asked for a pay rise I was told there was no business case (I'm resigning in a couple of months). If the problem was women's qualification choices, all women with science degrees would be snapped up. Spoiler: they aren't.

The problem is employer attitudes, not employees or women in general.

But at least the men will get paternity leave..whoop de woo.
It’s not the final answer to everything obviously, but it would be a start towards less bias in the employment market if no employer could secretly think in an interview ‘I’m going to find 3 reasons to go for the male because he won’t be going on a chunk of leave to have a baby in the next few years’

I think the problem is substantially more to do with the relative pay of pilots versus cabin crew than anything else.

If two people work for an hour why should one be paid massively more than the other?

In my place of work we have massive pay inequality ratios with some peoples 1 hour of work being valued at 30 times the amount of other peoples.

This is total BS. If people have had to pay for training then there is an argument for saying they should earn a bit more because of it...but NOBODY gives 30 times the value in an hours work.

So why exactly are cabin crew paid less than pilots again? Its looks from the outside like the pilots have a far easier job than the cabin crew.....and yes they have to train for longer....but not hugely longer.

but not hugely longer

Erm? It's long, and most importantly it's very, very expensive, e.g.
www.l3airlineacademy.com/career-programs/easyjet-finance
you need to cough up over £100,000 just to get trained to get a job, certainly quite a bit of it is repaid being taken out of your salary, but that just means the salary has to be higher.

Basically though, why you need to pay pilots more, is that the job is very heavily regulated with very strict barriers to entry that cost an awful lot to pass. I'm not sure advocating deregulation is a great idea.

Whilst cabin crew is also a skilled job where you need to pass exams, but they take maybe month, rather than many years that pilots do, and they're also generally free and often paid as part of getting the job.

Too many schoolgirls make poor choices of subjects, avoiding the STEM ones that open doors to well paid careers, and instead go for over subscribed humanities subjects

Civil Engineer here.

Trained, qualified, experienced.

Also paid 75% of the less qualified men.

Plus on top of that daily sexism and abuse.

Yay, go me. So I did - as far away from Civil Engineering as I could. Boom.

Even in areas where more girls are entering the profession (eg law) there are still more men in more senior roles. So attracting girls into professions is only part of the problem. Making it appealing for women to stay is a whole lot harder.

sirfred so cabin crew appear to be limited to half what pilots start on...around 20 grand less per year. So a pilot only needs to work 5 years to regain all the costs.

Does that seem right to you?

Then after 5 years when the costs have been recouped, the cabin crew are still stuck and the pilots can keep increasing their earnings to up to 7-10 times what the cabin crew get.

All while doing a far less physically demanding job.

Does that seem right to you?

I trained I trained around 13 years for my current role...I get paid less than a starting pilot...

It clearly isn't to do with how long you train...its to do with how people see your job. And people see jobs done by men traditionally as more valuable....when they aren't actually more valuable at all.

Are there many pilots available to do the job?
Or is it a highly skilled job with a lot of responsibility and few people available to do it so it commands a high salary?

That's got to be a factor in determining the salary someone pays.

Of course, female pilots should have no issue getting jobs now.

But with the large number of women in lower paid jobs, even if half the pilots were female, the median gender pay gap would still be massively in favour of men - because of statistics.

To come back to education , there are also gender pay gaps in sectors where it makes very little sense at all and it has the 4th largest median pay gap. At least in airlines, one is quibbling over what are substantively different jobs. In education, no extra training, no different qualification (well, an NPQH but not always), no pre payment is required to rise to the top. And yet. And yet. Genuinely, what is THAT saying to those 'schoolgirls' who see the leaders who surround them and they are predominantly men.

And it can't all be to do with maternity leave and part time work.

Obviously this is the gender par gap rather than equal pay - two very different things, it’s perfectly possible to have equal pay but a large gender pay gap. I think a lot of the problem stems from the lack of real diversity in the work place. Firms spout on abputchow diverse their work force is but in reality it’s not diverse at all. They reward typically male, middle/ upper class behaviour. Anyone can get ahead so long as they replicate these traits. Promotion criteria is often set by those in power so they replicate themselves as they see their attributes as the ones that matter. Yes a company might be willing to be diverse by rewarding people equally no matter which predefined little box thy slot in eg race, sex, age, disability, sexual orientation. But essentially they are the same people in different packages.

In education, no extra training, no different qualification (well, an NPQH but not always), no pre payment is required to rise to the top

In primary schools, most staff are female. Most staff are teachers or TAs which are not paid as much as senior staff - but there are a lot more staff in that lower sector (especially TAs).

So you could still have a lot of headteachers being female but the median gap would look bad - as there are not many men in the lower paid section.

Female headteachers are paid on average less than male headteachers. Hard to justify.

The pay gap is a statistically meaningless number, with the current formula. If you have more men in the highest paid roles, then the average hourly rate will be biased upwards. 9 men earning £100 an hour each and 1 earning £10 an hour, will give a simple average of £99 per hour. At the same company, if you have 1 woman earning £90 per hour and 9 women earning £15 an hour each, will have an average hourly rate of £22.5. Look and behold, you have a massive pay gap. And this is exactly what all the companies are writing in the report they provide with their pay gap report.
The 9 men are senior management or pilots in the airline, while the 9 women are secretaries or cleaners or junior analysts or stewardesses, say, in this example.

The questions that gets swept under the carpet are:,

1. what is the gender representation at each level ie. Are there more men as senior management and why are there not more women in senior management?
2. Are people being paid a similar amount for similar roles? Note that companies can and will argue that all roles even in a team are not the same, and all staff are not equally skilled or equally qualified. Hence, the "better" staff need to be paid slightly more to maintain equitable structures.
3. Are there any roles where women get paid more than men? Quite possibly, this exists, in more women - dominated areas. One of the companies I was randomly checking out did have an example of a positive wage gap where women earned more in certain levels of the organisation.
4. At what point do the women disappear from the career ladder and is there a real or perceived glass ceiling? Bear in mind, when women drop out to have kids, they are going to have to work their way up again. And not everyone wants to do that. They might choose to stay at a lower level in the organisation just to keep better work life balance.

9 men earning £100 an hour each and 1 earning £10 an hour, will give a simple average of £99 per hour. At the same company, if you have 1 woman earning £90 per hour and 9 women earning £15 an hour each

The median for the men is £100 and the median for the women is £15.

So the gap is £85.

Female headteachers are paid on average less than male headteachers. Hard to justify

Indeed. Same role, same hours, same commitment should get the same pay.

So a pilot only needs to work 5 years to regain all the costs.

No, far longer (since the training costs are out ot taxed income, and NPV of money spent today in the future) but also the risk of doing the training needs to be rewarded, and as kalapattar said there is actually a shortage of pilots - only a few months ago Ryanair cancelled loads of pilots as they didn't have enough.

Length of time training is not the deciding factor in what you're paid, but it does heavily influence the number of people who are able to do a job. Particularly a job which for a European is essentially global.

If you need more cabin crew, you can get more in six months, an advertising campaign, some recruitment, a bit of training and they're there.

If you need more pilots, you can't, not only do you have to convince them to spend a few years on no pay, you have to convince them to pay, then you need to lease the planes, and get the simulators etc. built. It takes years and lots of investment to respond to pilot shortages. Pay is a supply and demand thing.

As others have said - why do women not want to pilots, and why do men not want to be stewards is the question, although also in Ryanair's case, I suspect a much larger proportion of their pilots are not from the UK compared to their stewards so it may have international differences too.

Men have kids too. Why do women need to work their way up and again?
Why is there a route for most manual trades dominated by men from the shop floor to management, but there is no route from nurse to Dr or from secretary/office worker to management?
Why are the same roles in this country that are dominated by men suddenly become lower paid if they are dominated by women in other countries?

If they are comparing different roles, it is an utterly pointless statistic. Like giving a hospital's statistic saying porters are paid less than doctors!

The same arguments were made when all the doctors were white and many black people did menial hospital jobs. Do you really not see the problem when half the population don't have the same access to well paid jobs as the other half?

The question you have to ask is 'why are there so many more men in the higher paying jobs than women?'

unless women are just lazy, unambitious and less competent (which we can all agree isn't true...) these stats show that there are structural barriers preventing women from attaining the highest paid positions.

The point of the reports is to show that there are more men in more highly paid roles. Do you not think that's an issue OP? Why are pilots predominantly male? Why are CEOs predominantly male?

Its illegal to pay men and women differently for the same role with the same experience. That's not what this is about.