To think if we all boycotted companies with a big gender pay gap we can make a change?

[BorneFeet]

I've just got new insurance and I deliberatly avoided a company that I found out had an awful gender pay gap thanks to an ill fated instagram advert over the weekend.

If we all did the same we could make a big difference right?

@elastamum you may find that you will become known as a family friendly employer and start attracting both men and women who are looking for this in their workplace. That is certainly what happened in my workplace. We have a 50:50 male/female workforce, 3/4 of which is part-time/ practises flexible working/ both, either to factor in caring responsibilities or to pursue hobbies. There may be fractionally more women using the set up to help cover childcare but it is fractional. All the men in the directors team do at least 1 day a week of childcare fi.

*It's the gap between the highest paid male and the lowest paid woman across the whole organisation and all its roles. This includes part time roles which are most often filled by women.

Therefore if it wanted to decrease its pay gap then it would need to hire more men in low income or part time roles NOT "suspiciously" hire a couple of women in senior positions*

This.

The biggest effect on the gender pay gap would be if women stopped being the default SAHM or part time worker.

To genuinely close the gap we need to change societal expectations that men work full time and have careers supported by women at home, who sacrifice their own careers or take on lesser/part time roles and a bigger chunk of the wifework.

You cannot run a massive company part time. You owe it to those employees depending on you to give it 100%. As a mother, neither I nor many of my professional, educated friends would want such a role - by necessity, it does not leave time for much else. I dare say that far fewer women have the time or energy, or desire, for these roles?

@Justanotherworkingmom I agree it's not feasible for the most demanding corporate roles to be undertaken part time. And if a couple agree that DH works full time and DW works part time, that's fine with me. However, I'd like to see more equality ie more couples where the DH works part time, and DW full time

The easiest way to reduce the gender pay gap is to not offer flexible, part-time working.

It's predominantly woman who take up the part-time roles so putting a stop to that would quite likely wipe out the pay gap in many companies as very few outright pay women less for the same role these days.

Perhaps campaign for that, OP?

The 'people should do what they want' comments fail to acknowledge that women's 'desire to work part time' and men's 'drive to have senior, high-paid roles' are a product of the unequal society we've grown up in, not inherent sex characteristics.

No, because this isn't something which can be fixed overnight. We need women in the top roles but you can't just pluck a female and stick her in that role, we need to develop people through their career, encourage women to take part in jobs they may not otherwise consider, support them through their life so that they can have a career and a family, etc. This is a long term goal, not a short term goal. Boycotting won't help.

lazylinguist, exactly! All this "people should just make their own decisions" is the same as saying "let's not ask difficult questions and leave society as it is." Heads in sand.

The 'people should do what they want' comments fail to acknowledge that women's 'desire to work part time' and men's 'drive to have senior, high-paid roles' are a product of the unequal society we've grown up in, not inherent sex characteristics.

Take a bow! I can't believe so many find it difficult to grasp this!

I think you'll find there are many women up for challenging roles who arent given the opportunity to undertake them.

really?

Try to recruit a FEMALE for senior roles when you are specifically asked to. It's hard, it's very hard. It's hard to find someone who is interested. I am bored of the gender gap nonsense when it shows nothing of the real world.

I have seen teams of mid-20s workers, where the only ones willing to stay late, socialise with clients and work weekends were the male. none of them had kids. What are we suppose to do? Promote the less keen just because they are female? When you put an add for a school hour role, and you receive 99.5% female response, what are you supposed to do? Not hire a woman?

Women who want to climb the ladders can.

It's insulting to pretend that we need a push, special considerations, easiest tests to reach the same level.

The 'people should do what they want' comments fail to acknowledge that women's 'desire to work part time' and men's 'drive to have senior, high-paid roles' are a product of the unequal society we've grown up in, not inherent sex characteristics

@lazylinguist yes, that's what I was trying to say, but you framed it better than me!

@justmyview

However, I'd like to see more equality ie more couples where the DH works part time, and DW full time

I completely agree, though having said that you will find that many here will say that men don't want to go part time, but in my opinion it's not really that.

Personally I was keen to keep my career going and I made it to senior level in a large multi-national, though I'm late 40s now and self employed, but nearly all of the women I worked with on the way to that role voluntarily took a step back in order to reduce their workload and/or hours.

Many women I worked with were more than capable of passing me by on the career ladder but didn't want it. In fact out of a group of 7 of us who started our careers together at the same time 20-odd years ago, only myself and one other continued to grow our careers after children. I'm still in touch with 5 of them and I know they stepped back by choice.

I really don't know what the solution is but if people don't want the senior roles it's no good trying to force the issue.

Even completely ignoring financial implications for employers and/or government in trying to entice women to stay, I simply cannot think of the solution to so many of us walking away from careers. I wish I had the answers.

Take a bow!

I find myself thinking this about so many things tbh. I know we want to feel like we have autonomy, but do people find it so hard to accept that their opinions are not independently formed in a vacuum? Every single thing we think about anything is affected by our roots and socialisation. Even if we buck the trend and rebel against expectations, that's still an effect of the social rules.

I have seen teams of mid-20s workers, where the only ones willing to stay late, socialise with clients and work weekends were the male. none of them had kids. What are we suppose to do?

What we are supposed to be doing is thinking how to make workplaces more human-shaped. Working all hours and never seeing family should not be a requirement of a "high-flying" position for anyone. We should also be thinking how to create a society where men are just as willing and able to take on the family responsibilities as women. I suspect making advances in the latter will also expedite the former objective.

And yes, I understand that this is not something that an individual organisation can achieve in isolation. But we have to start somewhere.

lazylinguist, I find that many-many people subscribe to the individualist dogma. I suspect the reasons are three-fold:

1. the continuous individualist propaganda that is necessary to support the current capitalist system (e.g. Thatcher with her "there is no society, there are only individuals),

2. the sense of fear that often results when an individual realises that he/she does not control everything and is actually subject to external powerful and unpredictable forces, and

3. the sense of discomfort that results from realisation that one's achievements are not based on individual merit but on social advantages afforded by one's upbringing.

Hence we have the shit brand of "feminism" that is the "lean in" movement.

DowntownAbby
The easiest way to reduce the gender pay gap is to not offer flexible, part-time working.

This in a nutshell.
Some industries don't particularly want part-time flexible working but they tolerate it for those who do want it.
Don't make it harder for women (mainly women) to get part-time work, to keep a hand in work, while keep spinning the plates at home.

Blackbear19, you are forgetting that Gender Pay Gap reporting requires organisations not only report their pay gap but also the proportion of men and women working in each pay quartile. An organisation that does not offer flexible working may reduce its gap, but the side effect will be a reduction in the number of women employed there which will show in their Pay Gap report. This will not make an organisation any more attractive to potential employees or ethically-minded customers. So the strategy you are proposing is not as easy as it sounds, however cynical the employers may be.

What would you propose, @PissedOffProf ?

If more women than men choose part-time working then unless employers pay women more to make their pay up to the same as the men working more hours I don't see how the gap can be closed given the reporting criteria you're talking about?

An organisation that does not offer flexible working may reduce its gap, but the side effect will be a reduction in the number of women employed there which will show in their Pay Gap report

Very much depends on the industry and circumstances. If I wasn't able to get P/T I'd be loathed to throw away my career, training etc, for a low paid job that I could do without training. So I'd suck it up and stay F/T to the detriment of my family and work / life balance.

Things are far from equal. I’ve been asked about childcare at interview. I’m been told that I couldn’t possibly have a job requiring travel and a young family (my husbands job requires travel - no one says that to him). I’ve been told that my husband couldn’t possibly make adjustments to go to part time hours (a women would be expected to).

But it doesn’t have to be like that. The company I work for is now more open to accepting family commitments for men and women - this year several male colleagues are taking (mostly paid) shared parental leave. We do have slightly different policies around return to work to enable women to keep breastfeeding if they are doing so. Everything else is equal.

I have found the company much more open to find different ways of making things work. I have been promoted. It was a full time role but they offered it to me allowing me to keep my part time hours - I took someone else on to mentor and support the workload. Its about flexing enough to find a solution that works - it doesn’t have to be a 9-5:30 bums on seats mentality.

There are still a lot of attitudes to change but I really believe they will only do so when society stops considering childcare a woman's problem. It’s a parents problem.

The 'people should do what they want' comments fail to acknowledge that women's 'desire to work part time' and men's 'drive to have senior, high-paid roles' are a product of the unequal society we've grown up in, not inherent sex characteristics.

Take a bow! I can't believe so many find it difficult to grasp this!

Do you have scientific proof of this? How do you propose to address what you see as a problem but what many, many women very much see as their preferred option in their family lives?

I may be misunderstanding you here, but it sounds to me like an endorsement of the dangerous idea that feminism somehow means that women are free to have choices as long as they make the 'right' choices. Instead of being limited and restricted by men, it is the job of other women to take over and do exactly the same thing.

I'm reminded of the campaign that led to the banning of the grid girls. Yes, it was rather tacky, but I don't think any of the women doing the job were forced into it against their will. They were earning good money performing a role that they had freely chosen, which suited their own abilities and life choices. It's probably not an unreasonable assumption that many of them weren't ever going to be in line for highly academic careers. Now they've had their choice taken away from them - mainly because certain other women presumed to dictate to them that women should not be free to make their own career choices if those women don't approve of those choices.

Whatever the reasons behind it, the fact is that being a SAHP is far, far more attractive a proposition to women on the whole than it is to men. It's what they want to do. Plenty of women don't want that and a lot of men do, and that's absolutely great too. Everybody should have the same employment opportunities and pay, but also the same right to pursue a different life path if that's what they and their families prefer.

However, I don't see how it's in any way desirable for those women (and men) sincerely wanting to be SAHPs to be told that they have made the 'wrong' choices for their own lives and families and should instead pursue a complete different life path that they don't want, just to serve an ideology to which they don't necessarily subscribe.

Additionally, as has already been stated, refusing to allow (mostly but by no means all female) employees to work part-time or flexibly in order to achieve the family/life/work balance that suits them best would be one 'solution' to narrowing their published pay gap.

It's not always straightforward. Take the minimum wage, for example - many people were thrilled when it first came in; I'm a huge supporter of the principle of a legal NMW (being on not that much more than it myself) and it's definitely an extremely good thing. However, as well as boosting the pay of a great many appallingly-paid workers, it also had the effect of a lot of people losing their jobs completely or workforces being thinned out with the wage bill staying the same but the remaining staff expected to cover their ex-colleagues' workloads as well.

It's also had the knock-on effect of forcing people with severe learning difficulties out of very simple, undemanding roles - which often helped them to feel valued in society, and which, in many instances, were created altruistically with their personal circumstances and limitations in mind. If an employer is forced to pay the minimum wage, are they going to choose somebody in this position or somebody without any such circumstances and who will be able to be far more productive? Ultimately, who wins and who loses? It's not always black and white.

There are a lot of people on this post who don’t understand how gender pay gap reports are created or what they have to report.

The report (where calculating base pay) is calculated based on hourly pay, so working part time or flex should be irrelevant. Of course it’s not, because many companies intentionally pay their part time and flex staff worse hourly rates than the full time staff, because they can get away with it. But simply getting rid of part time work or flex work wouldn’t change the gender pay gap results at all, unless companies also had to increase the hourly rate of those jobs to then fill them. And if they did, that shows they are intentionally paying less to people who want to work part time. Which in itself is discrimination, because more women want to work part time.

The report also reports on, for example, the percentage of men getting bonuses and the percentage of women getting bonuses. There is literally no reason why women should get less bonuses than men as a percentage, unless a business is set up to only give bonuses to its most senior staff and it’s most senior staff are men. Or only give bonuses to full time staff, who are more likely to be men. But loads of companies have a gender pay gap on bonus %.

I can’t believe there are so many women on here saying that gender pay gaps don’t matter because they want to work part time, without even knowing how the gap works. It’s really demoralising. Women beware women.

I can’t believe there are so many women on here saying that gender pay gaps don’t matter because they want to work part time, without even knowing how the gap works.

I'm not saying that gender pay gaps don't matter at all - I was largely responding to those who appeared to be criticising society for the fact that many women find it works well for them and their families to not work full-time.

I agree with you that, based on an hourly comparison in a like-for-like job with the same experience and qualifications, there is no justification whatsoever for any pay disparity; but very senior, highly-paid positions just do not lend themselves to part-time workers. The company doesn't want somebody for whom the job isn't their primary focus and the part-time worker doesn't want that level of responsibility and commitment to a highly stressful job - otherwise, they wouldn't have chosen to work PT for a better work/life balance in the first place.

@WeBuiltThisBuffetOnSausageRoll

Completely! Couldn’t agree more.

For god sake, people need to stop telling me that the reason I chose to work PT was because I’m part of some patriarchal conspiracy. This comes from the same people who argue in every other sphere that women should have free choice (as, of course, they should).

Some women choose to work fewer hours and so get paid less. If you can’t understand that’s often a free choice, you are really missing something!

For god sake, people need to stop telling me that the reason I chose to work PT was because I’m part of some patriarchal conspiracy.

So the fact that far, far more women than men work part time is pure coincidence, is based purely on personal preference (women just don't fancy doing as many hours) and has nothing whatsoever to do with women's traditional roles as childbearers and carers or the fact that they have in the past been considered by nature 'less suitable' for demanding, high-powered jobs? Ok then. I work part time. And yes, I chose to. But if I were a man I almost certainly wouldn't be working part time. It's a choice, but it's not a choice made from a position of equality.