To wonder what we can do about inequality?

[malificent7]

Also i have noticed that inequality falls mainly on women.
Most jobs that are typically done by women for example teaching, cleaning, nursing etc are badly paid.
Most jobs that are well paid such as investment banking are done by men.
I have made a series of life choices that mean i have less money than i would like...including not marrying , teaching and also bad mental health have held me back.

In order to fund myself through retraining i clean which i love and many of the houses are just massive..huge.
I don't begrudge people this but it does make me very aware of ineqyality. It alao makes me awate that women still have to marry money to e comfortably off.
Dp is wonderful but not a high earner. We both work very hard and have a good university education but have suffered a series of misfortunes. We are also quite gentle people; not alpha types . I am certainly not management material.

I guess the park in Lambeth thread got me thinking.

I did work experience in banking at the age of 17 but my boss tried to touch me up and i hated it!

1. Cheaper childcare and more childcare options would be a good place to start. Women’s careers are generally put on hold by having children and high childcare costs prevent many from returning to work.

1. Better employers who are open to flexible working patterns to suit the caring responsibilities that a lot of women have. This could be legislated for. The civil service are committed to considering flexible working for all roles.

1. More female role models in the kind of jobs that pay well and more women on boards (which should have the effect of creating more diverse workforces and more flexibility)

1. Encouraging girls to study STEM subjects at school and university since these often lead to well laid jobs.

I agree with many of your points...is this going to happen though? Scandinavia seem to have it sussed.

Stop voting Tory.

Make better educational and life choices?

Women have to start being nicer to each other, more forgiving and more accepting. We'll never get equality until we accept and support each other.

4. Encouraging girls to study STEM subjects at school and university since these often lead to well laid jobs

How about we also encourage boys to consider traditionally female dominated professions?

We should be ensuring current legislation is used to challenge poor working practises, overt discrimination when it comes to promotion and salaries, that kind of thing. Despite the legislation, it happens all the time.

Encouraging successful business owners - both make and female - who operate flexible working successfully to share their experience and success and act as mentors to managers and organisations who want to improve things for their employees.

Ensuring PSHE curricula includes teaching on the difference between marriage and living with someone and how this plays out when divorce happens. Too many people just don’t get it.

Women can be wealthy independently of men. It takes either a good business head or being qualified in certain fields.

The thing I find is a lot of women give up their careers to become SAHM and essentially become financially dependent on a man...after they've gone to University and studied really hard.

I wonder how girls seeing SAHM affect their career choices.

I do believe it's about choice and in many cases about opportunities. I know a lot of teachers chose the profession because of the school holidays and childcare.

What age are you OP? I am 44 and all through school and university girls and boys had the same opportunities. If females aren't filling out high flying careers it is most likely by choice. Quite often women put family above careers.

I am 40. A lot of it has been choice but j think i have to make different choices from men....should i keep a baby as my man has run off? Should i persue teaching as it is family friendly ( ish) or get a high flying career etc.

Restructuring tax would help. Limiting the wage range (from board to shopfloor) multiple within any given organisation would help. Hiking up the NMW would help. A citizens income would help. Cracking down on huge scale tax avoidance from companies like Amazon would help. Reversing changes on IHT would help. And so on.

I disagree
I work in male dominated high paid management position, I'm female.... I work as hard as the males, and get paid the same

Funny enough ....the woman who work under me in my team have a lot to say about me.... I've yet to have a female employee comment to me on how I defy the inequality argument.... instead... they advise me how they could do my job, But don't for own reasons don't, and tell me how I should do my job.

Bottom line, females in high positions don't work together they compete !

We shoot ourselves in the foot

Quite often women put family above careers.

As OP says, it's more often men who bigger off, cheat, turn violent, and more often women who get left holding the baby.

So another one; Decent Child Maintenance collected through tax would help.

Decent Child Maintenance collected through tax would help

Collecting child maintenance from those who pay tax isn’t really an issue. Collecting it from the self employed, agency workers, people who work cash in hand, serial job hoppers, is an issue. Laws on self employment and business tax are a very poor fit with child maintenance laws and much could be done to tighten it up. Primarily, there needs to be the political will for change but until we stop seeing the single mum literally left holding the baby as the problem and the hard working dad as some kind of victim of sperm robbery, nothing will change.

Collecting child maintenance from those who pay tax isn’t really an issue. Collecting it from the self employed, agency workers, people who work cash in hand, serial job hoppers, is an issue.

Yes ExDH has done the whole "limited company, dividends" route as well as the contract-hopping route in his epic voyage of CM avoidance.

But I take the view that it all helps and that HMRC are more rigorous in pursuing debt that's on their own books, as it were.