Guest post: Gender pay gap - "Just publishing the numbers won't deliver real change"

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On the surface, any effort to reduce, and ultimately eliminate, the gender pay gap should be applauded. But is forcing businesses to publish data on discrepancies in pay the right way to go about this?

It is important to understand that a business reporting its pay rates by gender is taking an average of what all men and all women earn across the firm – regardless of the jobs they're doing and regardless of skills, experience, seniority or level of responsibility – and stating any difference between the male and female figure. It's not the same as equal pay reporting. Equal pay for equal value work is already the law and rightly so.

The gender pay gap exists for a number of complex and varied reasons. It is influenced by things firms want addressed but can't control alone, like the gender mix going into a particular role, so comparisons between firms aren't what is important. Reporting should be flexible; it needs to be about individual firms showing they're taking action - and that means being transparent in a way that genuinely reflects the position in the business. Without this flexibility, it is all too easy to misinterpret the results.

The gender pay gap is less about direct discrimination within businesses, and more a result of occupational segregation and traditional differences in how men and women have worked in the past. Publishing bald sets of numbers might help focus minds on diversity issues but, on its own, it isn't going to deliver fundamental change. To achieve real progress we need to challenge occupational stereotypes by encouraging more women into male-dominated industries and investing in better careers advice.

At the moment, too many areas of work – often those with the best pay potential – are seen as male preserves, with women steered away from choices that would give them higher-paid options. Better careers advice will help remove the gender stereotyping that encourages girls to think "that job's not for me, because I want a family and flexibility", or "engineering's a man's world but there are loads of women in HR". This is utterly wrong and it needs to be addressed wherever it’s found – starting in the classroom.

Firms also have an important role to play in exciting young people about the range of careers available and tackling stereotypes in schools. We need more girls studying science and technology subjects, while boys shouldn't shy away from careers in caring professions that may have traditionally been viewed as for women.

Diversity targets have been shown to deliver. It's an approach that has worked very well for increasing the numbers of women on company boards. This week, it was announced that Lord Davies' 2011 voluntary target of getting women into at least a quarter of boardroom seats at the UK's biggest firms by 2015 has been met. But we must not let our guard drop. Progress has relied on making sure new appointments are diverse, and this must continue as women appointed since the Davies report begin to end their terms on boards and replacements are sought.

The best businesses recognise the value of having a diverse board and a wider workforce that reflects society and their customers. The ones that thrive are those that seek to harness the talents of all. We've long argued that a target for narrowing the gender pay gap is part of the answer, but to deliver fundamental change we need to understand that this alone does not form a solution.

The Great Business Debate: Because perceptions of how companies recruit and treat staff influence what people think about business more generally, these are issues at the heart of CBI's in-business campaign The Great Business Debate - which they worked with Mumsnet on. Read more here, and listen to a podcast recorded at a joint panel event here.

it hasn't been legal to prevent employees in the UK from discussing pay with colleagues since 2010, if they are discussing to establish whether there are differences in pay.

Yes - my example was from before the Equality Act. However, the culture is still there, that you don't talk about pay.

kubbs, do you have figures or research links about STEM jobs not having pay gaps? I'd very much like to see them, if so. 20 years working in IT makes me feel somewhat suspicious about this! Having said that - we do need more people to be considering careers in STEM fields, men and women, but particularly women.

But I would be surprised if there isn't a pay gap; it's not just about pay per se - there's something about men get promoted for their potential, and women get promoted for what they've already achieved. Over time, this can mean men are more likely to get put in positions and on projects which are higher profile, so they gain good experience, meaning they become more suitable for the next great position - there's a cumulative effect over time, which can add up quite substantially. There have been shown to be differences in how men and women tend to be mentored and sponsored, and that works against women. Of course, it doesn't always happen - if you have a good manager, then there's more chance you'll be treated fairly. But a lot of managers in STEM fields were hired for their technical knowledge and skills, not their people skills, and there is quite a lot of bad management around.

For IT, I have never really understood why there aren't more women - it can be well-paid and flexible and interesting, always something new to learn. (And then I go to work, and there's all the everyday sexism, and I wonder why I would encourage women to go into it...)

A Pediatric doctor against a Neurosurgeon both are in the medical profession but we are more likely to be pediatric which pays less. Okay this is a really obvious example but if you claim 2 doctors are not earning the same this is the reason why. It is a cultural issue not a systemic issue from companies. Unless we change our expectations from work idiots will claim massive wage gap when in fact the issue is career choice.

Is the work actually different, though? I assume that neurosurgery is a pretty complex field, but then paediatrics must be pretty complex, too, as it will cover all sorts of different things, and then there are the difficulties of children needing different doses of drugs and so on. But I also suspect that there are more women who are paediatricians, because it's traditional for women to work with children, and as a result, it will be valued less, and that's reflected in comparative pay levels.

I don't think it's just down to career choices - why do people make the career choices they do? It's not usually just down to earning potential alone for most people (though it is for a few.)

I work in the Construction sector in a privately owned 500 employee company. There are NO women in white collar roles above middle management.
This is not true of all comparative companies but certainly the culture of my workplace is that 'responsibility is a man's domain'. I will have to eventually move jobs to a bigger more forwarding thinking organisation in order to progress.

The owner himself who is in his 70's believes women should be in a support role to their menfolk and when asked previously why he was asked why women were not on the management board replied "well this is a mans trade and my wife wouldn't like it if I put another woman on the board"

Hopefully one day this attitude will naturally die out. There is a certain company on a par with ours who has invited a woman to join the board, specifically following questioning from their own client regarding gender equality. The woman herself was surprised when she got the offer and clearly saw it was a 'box ticking' exercise to please the client and improve their 'scoring' result.

Sadly I will have to leave shortly and that will leave one less capable woman, and they probably won't even care.

I can believe that for the same job, our STEM company doesn't show much of a pay gap, but I can assure you the women fade out and disappear above middle management. We have just got a woman on the board - and not from a STEM background.

Simple solution to this problem is just make it mandatory to publish everyone's pay. Full disclosure of individual pay levels would shine a right light and expose discrimination.

Publishing averages will still obscure individual pay levels.

Why wont the CBI agree to publication of individuals pay? After all we know exactly what the pay of main Board members is in public companies - why not people lower down an organisation?

Truth is it would start a massive number of Equal Pay and Sex Discrimination claims. Most women do not realise they are being paid less than man on the same grade doing the same job.

Two books that are still "A commercial book designed to sell to the masses."

1. Yes, of course there's dimorphism - men are on average bigger, stronger and faster. - yes humans display significant sexual dimorphism just like animals. Animals that also display significant differences in behaviour (driven by cognitive differences) between the sexes.

Let me make it simple it mostly about sex (and reproduction) a human woman gets pregnant she is committed to nine months when she can no longer seek a new partner to reproduce with without aborting her unborn child which would not be safely possible without modern science.
Men can go reproduce within a very short period of time. When you understand that what is sometimes called 'survival of the fittest' actually should be applied at the gene level and not the level of the individual organisms carrying them then it makes sense for human females to be far more cautions and selective in life, including who to mate with. Men on the other hand (from the perspective of what most likely to propagate their genes) have evolutionary selective pressures on them (at least before the arrival of modern society) which lead to rewards for completive, risky and sometimes more violent behaviour (witness the male sexual hierarchy in other animals – the most dominant male gets to mate the most). It does not matter that there is only small differences in spacial reasoning. I’m talking about behaviour driven by differences in the brain partly influenced by hormones. I.e. cognitive differences in the brain
Cognitive - of or relating to the mental processes

Ie mental processes that lead males and females to adopt the behaviour outlined above

1. See above differences in behaviour driven by cognitive differences in the brains of male and female chimps
2. Of course there are differences in behaviour in some areas - to do with mating. These vary massively between species and the degree of variability between the sexes varies massively between species. So simply saying "I can see some obvious examples of sexual dimorphism in some areas of behaviour in some animal species" tells us exactly jack shit about humans. I'm still struggling to see what the hell the fact that, say, male stags are bigger than hinds and engage in the rut every autumn has to do with my ability (to do scientific research) and why I'm paid 10% less than my colleagues for doing the same job. I very much doubt you are paid less for doing the same job… see below

Do you really not think that the differences in mating behaviour spill over into the rest of an animals life and if that animal is human modern society? Let me put it this way care to given an example of an animal with large physical differences between sexes where behaviour is very similar. You seem to claim some statistical background I’m sure you can appreciate that as you approach the ‘top of any game’ that increasingly small differences between subjects can make all the difference

1. See above - animals vary in their degree of sexual dimorphism and the behaviours in which you see sexual dimorphism. So pointing to how deer, or chimpanzees or sea slugs do things tells you very little about human behaviour. And in any case, even if it is the case that less women than men want to be, say, neuroscientists, that doesn't justify paying the women neuroscientists less than the male

ones. Nor does it justify paying, say, speech therapists (predominantly female) less than psychologists or pharmacists (predominantly male).

Ah the old 4th wave feminist lies start to surface. Not equal pay for equal jobs…. no equal pay for what feminists claim are equal jobs. I’ll be blunt people should only be paid the minimum required to attract and retain suitable qualified people to a role. If women want the better pay why are they not going for the better paid jobs? Who are you to gauge which (different) jobs should be paid equally. Go apply for these better paid jobs if you want the money stop asking for special treatment

1. I'm not Scandinavian so have no first-hand knowledge of the system there.

It’s a well recorded phenomenon why the hell would you need to be Scandinavian to comment on it. More dishonest avoidance. You claim to have a statistical background do you only deal with figures you have first hand knowledge of or do you go out and look for sources of information and compare against other sources?

Can I ask you some questions?

1. Even if we were to suppose that there was an underlying difference between the abilities of men and women to do, say, maths, would that justify tailoring the education system and selection system at university and for jobs to favour men, to the detriment of the (for argument's sake) small minority of women who were good at maths and wanted to do it professionally? Because it seems to me that a lot of people's thinking is predicated on the idea that the probability density functions for ability across populations look like delta functions - as soon as someone claims to have identified a difference between the means of the populations (and not reported the d-value) lay-people jump to the conclusion that what's been established is that all men can do X and no woman can, or all women can do Y and no man can. When in fact even where you can point to clear examples of sexual dimorphism (height, running speed), the distributions of ability for each sex overlap to a huge extent.
   My initial most answers this equal opportunity not necessarily equal output. Either sex should be able to go for any job they are suitable for without unnecessary impediment

2. Looking round at jobs which probably take the same amount of training, the same level of education, and are of similar importance to society as a whole, historically there seems to have been a general tendency to pay the male dominated jobs more than the female dominated jobs (hospital porters versus hospital cleaners, for instance). Why do you think this is?
   See above dishonest four wave feminist special pleading. Women want to be paid like porters go apply for the job. But I suspect you know that the jobs are not the same despite their superficial similarity in both being relatively unqualified. Far more cleaning jobs are part time working more out of hours ‘flexible’ work then the rotating more frequently full time work of a porter. Again who are job to say what different jobs are equivalent? Go out there and apply for the better paid job and ill be one of the people supporting you do so

3. Do you think it's right that I and my female colleagues are paid 10% less for doing exactly the same job as our male colleagues?
   I very much doubt this is true given you above entries. If you’re in the UK you would have a simple employment case against your employer. I must assume therefore that you want equal money to other jobs you ‘feel’ are equivalent to your job.

I can believe that for the same job, our STEM company doesn't show much of a pay gap

No, I've heard too many tales of massive pay rises when departments have pay audits to believe that equal pay is as common as it ought to be.

Also, with employers who give bonuses, that's usually on percentages, so if you have two staff members with a £5K difference in pay, who each get a 10% bonus, that only goes to increase the gap.

ebear the important bit in there is our. I've seen DHs pay slips

Have to agree with MoreBeta - people come up with reasons why it would upset current colleagues but once transparency is in place I suspect it would just settle down. It's remarkably hard to convince senior managers who've always worked in a system where extreme secrecy (to the point of not even sharing pay bands!) is the norm. Despite evidence that it clearly doesn't make the sky fall in, and can even be attractive to top candidates.