Last week, GM became the largest organisation to date in the USA to name a woman as CEO. The appointment of Mary Barra, in what has to be possibly the archetypal male world of car manufacturing, was some welcome good news, at a time when coverage of women in the workplace can seem dominated by the idea that they represent a “burden” to their employer.
But just two days after the announcement, the Office of National Statistics released its annual report on pay across the UK. The headlines were startling: for the first time since 2008, men and women’s earnings have started to pull further apart, with the gap increasing from 19.6 per cent to 19.7 per cent. The gender pay gap is actually increasing.
The most shocking jump is in the difference in the wages of men and women who work full time. In its analysis of the figures, the TUC says that the gender pay gap was actually 15.7 per cent in 2013, up from 14.8 per cent the year before. On average, therefore, a woman is paid £5,000 less per year than a man.
It’s true that the changing dynamics of part-time work muddy the waters around pay differentials - the ONS data shows the impact of increased part-time working across the board, with the number of people taking reduced hours because they are unable to find a full-time position having reached its highest level since 1992. Nevertheless, it remains the case that average rates of pay are significantly lower for part-time than full-time work, and that the part-time workforce is overwhelmingly female.
So what is going on, and what can be done about it? Is it a regrettable but incidental casualty of the country’s economic woes? That the story gained comparatively little coverage in the press would suggest that the media thinks so - but the rest of us can’t afford to take a fatalistic, resigned approach to this depressing and damaging shift.
“Men are just better at negotiating pay rises” goes one explanation. Well, yes, perhaps the average alpha male does swagger into his (male) boss’s office, fully convinced that he is entitled to a raise. Or, perhaps, many women feel that they have already used up their bargaining chips on requests for part-time or flexible hours, or using their holiday at short notice to accommodate caring responsibilities. Perhaps they genuinely have a poorer case to argue for equivalent pay, because they've missed out on experience or training due to time out of the workforce or the workplace.
The fact that childbearing can significantly change a woman’s career path is less of an elephant than a great stinking nappy in the room: impossible to ignore; still needing to be changed. The figures show that men and women in their twenties and thirties earn very nearly the same, so ongoing gender discrimination and occupational segregation - whilst still factors - cannot be the only reasons for the gap.
What stood out for me in the report was a footnote to the huge jump in the gender earnings gap in the over forties:
“This is likely to be connected with the fact that many women have children and the time taken out of the labour market, combined with career choices they make subsequent to this, may impact on their earnings thereafter.”
The aim of the ONS report is to crunch numbers, not reach conclusions, but the words they chose to use - “career choices made subsequent to this” - hint at the insidious impact of the assumptions made in our working culture. “Career choice” suggests a much greater degree of agency in working life after children than many women actually enjoy.
The availability and affordability of childcare; the huge amounts of airtime given to debates on whether employers should give jobs to women of childbearing age; the general assumption that having children – and every decision relating to them which comes afterwards – are exclusively women’s issues. Together, these have a far greater impact on women’s working ‘choices’ than the ONS seems to suggest, as do the other caring responsibilities which fall disproportionately to women.
The TUC have called for all new public sector jobs (oxymoron though that might be) to be made part-time or flexible, so that women don’t have to “trade down”. More widespread disclosure of pay scales - albeit only in larger organisations - is already envisaged under the Equality Act 2010. Full implementation of these measures, together with robust and continued scrutiny, is needed to ensure that this year’s figures are quickly reversed. So, too, however, is a change in the way we talk about and value women’s labour - both in the workplace and outside it.