It’s that time of year again when large employers are reporting their gender pay gaps. This year we (unsurprisingly) find that 45% are reporting bigger gaps than they did last year. So what is going on? Undoubtedly, the fact that employers are not required to have an action plan in place is one of the issues. We have to focus on the action required and hold employers to account for that, rather than just requiring them to report the gap. But we also have to get behind the numbers and the regulation to address the underlying causes, and the elephant in the room is gender stereotyping. By that I mean the social norms and expectations that limit what women and men or boys and girls should do.
Take who does the caring, for example. We build our parental leave system around a 1950s model of family life. Yes, we have shared parental leave, but it is structured in a way that means fewer than 1 in 10 dads take it up because it is paid at too low a rate. It starts from the assumption that it’s the mother’s leave to give to him and not a dedicated entitlement for fathers. Pregnancy discrimination drives 54,000 working mothers out of their jobs each year. Many mothers find themselves trapped in low paid part-time work. Working mothers experience a 30% pay gap by the time their first child is 20. All of this is underpinned by the expectation that mothers should be at home caring for children and not in the workplace, and that fathers should work to provide for the family. You may think we have left all this behind, but Fawcett research suggests that we haven’t.
Another cause of the gender pay gap is occupational segregation. This is where we see men concentrated in some sectors or roles and women in others. Take childcare and teaching, for example: both are grossly underpaid and undervalued (because women do them) - just 2% of pre-school teachers are men. Take as another example engineering, where just 7% of apprentices are women; or physics where just 20% of A levels are taken by girls. This is after decades of trying to ‘encourage’ and ‘inspire’ young women into STEM subjects. Girls’ attainment at GCSE is equal to or better than boys, but at each subsequent stage girls fall away. By the time they graduate or complete their apprenticeships, there are just a handful left. So why isn’t it working?
The answer to all of this is the way society is straight-jacketing our children into harmful gender norms and stereotypes. Often, as parents, we do it unwittingly. Sometimes we are simply so bombarded by the ‘pinkification’ of life, as campaigners like Let Toys be Toys have so powerfully demonstrated. Sometimes we give in and think ‘What harm can it do really?’ (I have four children, so I understand how hard this is). But, as our research shows, the truth is that pushing children to conform to gender norms is indeed harmful. It’s gender norms which make us reward men who ask for a pay rise but regard women who do the same as ‘pushy’, or which treat women in leadership roles as ‘imposters’. It’s gender norms which create the expectation of visual perfection for girls and which contribute to one in five 14-year-olds self-harming. It’s gender norms which limit boys to be one version of masculine, and which reinforce and normalise aggression in boys from a young age.
It is tempting to feel helpless in the face of such an enormous problem. But evidence suggests that all is not lost. Research shows the wiring in our brains is soft, not hard. Professor Gina Rippon argues we can mould our ‘plastic brains’, even as adults. The truth is, though, that we have a better chance of change if we intervene early on. This is why Fawcett is launching an exciting new Commission on Gender Stereotypes in Early Childhood and we would love Mumsnet to be involved. We have to get to the underlying causes and make some fundamental changes to our education system, our parenting, and the commercial world too. Gender stereotypes hold us all back, but if we can change them, we can change the future.
You can read more about Fawcett’s Commission on Gender Stereotypes in Early Childhood here.
Sam Smethers will be returning to this post on the 1st of May to answer some questions