Sex Pay Gap - A solution?

[FemForceOne]

The sex pay has been around forever and for obvious reasons men do not want it to go. In addition to keeping the money for the selves they use the sex pay gap as a mechanism for female oppression.

So, if a law was passed that made men pay a higher rate of tax than women then several benefits would follow. This would immediately eradicate the sex pay gap. Men would have less power over women. Also the extra money raised could be spent on women's only charities and could be seen as reparations that are long overdue.

What about the age pay gap? It's a scandal that a 17 year old on NMW earns so much less than a 25 year old on NMW doing exactly the same job.

Do we tax age too?

I would suggest that if a company over 250 employees has a difference in average pay per person across different genders of more than a reasonable amount, they be required to make a payment for the shortfall to the disadvantaged group of employees. That'll motivate them to recruit some senior women.

Gronky erm but the example I gave didn't mention it at all, it was a totally different pst.

You assumed the example I gave was part time and are now back pedalling.

Most people reach for "reasons" why pay gaps are fair so you don't need to feel bad :)

I agree that the lower min wage for younger people on same job is appalling.

You have to keep in mind that the sex pay gap exists for a number of reasons:

1. Women tend to be more likely to take part-time jobs so they can take responsibility for child care.
2. Women tend to take more parental leave than men do. Even if the father does decide to take parental leave, the mother still requires time to recover from the birth itself.
3. Women tend to choose certain types of jobs. For example, there are more women than men in nursing.

I make substantially more than my husband does. I have a master's degree and teach at a college. My husband, who is high-functioning autistic, works as a night security guard. This has never bothered us.

Not to mention that some families are fortunate enough that only one partner has to work. For example, my father earned a high enough salary that my mother could stay home. If my father had been taxed extra because he was a man, that would have been food coming out of the mouths of his wife and children. Is that reasonable to you?

it was a totally different pst.

Different paragraph, same post:

*Would you agree with my colleague... ...your thinking ends up.

Why do women who... ...just for doing less hours?*

You assumed the example I gave was part time and are now back pedalling.

As I said initially:

That does sound like an extremely large gap if all other factors are equal.

Don't worry about the confusion. Might I ask again where this 30%, 25 vs 23 year figure comes from and whether all other factors are indeed equal?

it was a totally different pst.

Different paragraph, same post:

*Would you agree with my colleague... ...your thinking ends up.

Why do women who... ...just for doing less hours?*

You assumed the example I gave was part time and are now back pedalling.

As I said initially:

That does sound like an extremely large gap if all other factors are equal.

Don't worry about the confusion. Might I ask again where this 30%, 25 vs 23 year figure comes from and whether all other factors are indeed equal?

Sorry for the double message, the server seemed to crash for a second there (something about an Apache error).

Not a bad idea actually OP. I mean obvs just as a thought experiment. But as a single mum (as 90% of single parents are), it would be very nice if I could pay less tax than xh who's outgoings are enormously lower than mine as he abandoned us.

Bit nosey Gronky :/

Someone known to me.

Resident parent tax discount? Why not?

of course good news is she left and got a new job for nearly double salary

this is why you see good women move around more than the men. it's the only way to keep up to the men salary wise. boils down to women just being valued less, happens all the time though. it's silly as the companies lose talent and have to recruit and etc

double what she had been earning but only a bit above the men she was working with

and for a more responsible job

it's just not on and i really do believe it needs tackling

Someone known to me.

Terribly sorry for not being specific, I mean, what are the circumstances in terms of field of employment, working pattern, training requirements, ect.? If you feel this information is too personal, I fully understand but it's a little hard to comment one way or the other just based upon the scantest of information.

If all other circumstances are indeed identical and the job is non technical then I agree a 30% discrepancy is rather high for 2 years out. Very roughly, I would expect to see discrepancy of less than 10% if the new mother returned to doing the same working patterns as the other individual and had a similar level of proficiency. Perhaps 15% if the individual who hadn't taken maternity leave had recently been promoted to a mangement role (which would rapidly close once the one who had also secured a similar promotion).

Resident parent tax discount?

I believe we already have those in the UK, they were called Tax Credits but are now Universal Credits.

and teh reason it was all set up was to do with women being disriinated against ie sex not gender

Except they made a mistake calling it the gender pay gap. Its definitely about sex.

However its not called the sex pay gap.

I work in HR for one of the worlds biggest employers. We employer over 140000 in the UK. We report on gender. If someone goes on our internal website and changes their 'gender' (the question is gender not sex) they are reported as that gender in the report.

It's a bone of contention due to the issues around it.

There is talk of adding further options. How that would work for this report, no one can agree on.

But we report on gender which is self declared.

You could tax the company an extra amount proportional to the pay gap. Would be a nightmare to administer, would potentially cost jobs (especially women - if you've got 10 badly paid women, replace them with badly paid men and the gap goes away) and companies would relocate or avoid it but it still makes more sense than OP's scheme.

I had a woman tell me recently that it was perfectly reasonable that a woman who had 2 years out maternity in a 25 year career should get paid 30% less than a man who had the full 25 years rather than 23 experience!

Maybe she was paid less because she wasn't that smart?

anyway if men where taxed more (illegal btw) they would pay them more to make up the difference

Exactly. And isn't this basically the same reason why women doing the exact same job as a man was paid less?

1950 - "As a woman, you don't have to support a family with your wage, so you don't need to be paid as much as a man."

2020 - "As a woman, you don't have as big a tax liability from your wage, so you don't need to be paid as much as a man."

It's not always down to part time hours, lots of mat leave, etc. I'm in a male dominated industry anyway, but looking around my office of around 100 (we're split over two sites so are over the 250 count for gender pay gap reporting), of the top 20 or so people (by grade), there is only one female and she's only recently been promoted having been kept at the lower grade for several years.

There are no part timers.

At the time of the stats there were only three women with children in the whole office, all working full time and doing as many (if not more) hours than their male counterparts. I've since had a mat leave and have had to fight tooth and nail to stop them sidelining me. The single, childless women are spending disproportionately long period in each grade, they're passed over for promotion more. I'm so tired of seeing excellent women passed over for mediocre men

Looking at the quartile reporting stats, at the lowest grades it's 50:50 M/F, but by the top quartile our stats are about 70:30 and that 30% will be very skewed towards the bottom end of that top quartile IYSWIM.

There is still a problem that there is a perception of what a senior person looks like; it appears that for us, it's a slightly balding man in a rumpled shirt!!!

I don't have the stats, but other companies I've worked for seem very similar indeed.

The single, childless women are spending disproportionately long period in each grade, they're passed over for promotion more. I'm so tired of seeing excellent women passed over for mediocre men

This sounds illegal on the face of it (I take the second sentence as related to the first).

Which industry are you in? Why don't you discuss this with HR?

yes so this is quite standard

example of woman being paid less

oh well she's part time (she wasn't)
oh well she's obviously stupid (that's what a lot of people think when the pay gap reporting comes out I suppose - it's the idea that women aren't as good as men, not as clever, not as productive etc whics is not my experience)
oh well she's had 2 years out, years ago, so that makes it fine (said by collegaue at work)
oh you need to give x details so it can be judged (and of course no two poeple have identical backgrounds circs etc so a jsutification for it being "fair" is always findable...

and on and on

and the fact that plenty of women are not paid fairly for the work they do compared to make counterparts + being over-represented in low paid roles and under-represented in high paid ones is seen as aok

my line of work there aren't really any back office type jobs so 40% plus pay gap is just eye-wateringly bad

then they wonder why women keep leaving...

One way to reduce the gap and improve maternity pay and flexible working would be for all women to refuse to spend money with companies unless they have pay parity, equal number of women on boards, offer good mat pay etc.

Imagine if we all said we’d shop at Tesco instead of Aldi if they were brilliant at that - it would change overnight.

I've been reading this book called factfulness which is about how to look past sensational headlines etc for the facts. I do think the pay gap is a problem but one of the bits in the book was about when you hear about a gap, look for charts which compare all the data on a hill type curve and see how much they overlap, as most are somewhere in the middle.

So I found a graph like that for the pay gap. It's American rather than British but its the best I could do quickly on my phone.

www.payscale.com/data/average-mean-median-mode

I would say to reduce the pay gap, the bit we've got to work on is the red peak sticking up on the left. Find which careers most women are in which are paying this specific amount and lobby for pay to be higher in those sectors.

As well of course as putting measures in place to encourage girls into stem and boys into caring roles.

I can see where you're coming from with the tax but I don't think it's feasible. If you try to solve an unfair system with measures people feel are unfair you will simply get backlash.

Unfortunately AlaskanOilBaron, MenuPlant has it nailed with this

"course no two people have identical backgrounds circs etc so a justification for it being "fair" is always findable..."

There's always an excuse of some sort and there's enough difference between what people do (even within the same grade) that it's impossible to prove. But we know, we can see what is in front of our eyes.

Finance sector. And sadly our HR are a shambles

There's three parts as I see it BertieBotts

-encouraging women in to the higher paid careers (STEM etc)
-Trying to improve the pay in female dominated sectors (probably by attracting men to them, ironically!)

That will help at a population level

-dealing with company level issues. Some companies are obviously huge and will have everything from cleaners (mostly women) to board of directors (mostly men!) but in many cases most of the staff work in a similar field and so the difference isn't due to the different job types but due to other issues within the company. Things like:
-Recruitment processes which discourage or disadvantage women, especially at senior levels
-women being sidelined during or after pregnancy when this is NOT what they want (women who choose to step back are a different issue IMO)
-succession/progression plans which focus on men
-a tendency for successful men to look for someone in their own image to mentor and champion
-percentage based pay rises on joining/promotion rather than just paying a fair salary for the role