How do you know why a male colleague is being paid much more than you?

[JacqueslePeacock]

I mean, any idea how to tell (and prove!) when it's outright sexism and when it's because he has slightly different experience/qualifications from yours?

It is a unique quirk of law that means it is your employer's job to prove they are not discriminating if they pay someone of one sex more than other.

You could ask your employer to justify the difference but do consider fully the implications of doing so.

Have you tried negotiating a pay rise for yourself in line with their pay?

A couple of years ago I was moaning to DH that a junior colleague was about to be paid the same as me because he negotiated using experience I also had, but didn't think was relevant. DH told me to go and negotiate too. I did and surprisingly got a payrise fairly easily by outlining the extra work and commitment I'd shown over the previous three years above and beyond my job spec.

DH said that he thinks too few women put themselves forward for higher pay, compared with men. Not sure how true that is, but I certainly wouldn't have got the raise without approaching the boss. Also, 'bigging myself up' doesn't come naturally to me and I hate to appear that I'm boasting. Female friends have said similar.

So, I'm not sure how much is blatant sexism in the workplace and how much is down to erosion of women's self esteem that we should be grateful for any job/pay and not value ourselves/our skills enough to negotiate.

Hmm

I found out a male colleague (well in fact 3 of them) were being paid disproportionately to me considering experience, skill, performance reviews etc.

I raised it but was told that salaries were confidential and I was skating on thin ice even revealing that I knew.

Personally I think that in non sales type roles salaries should be paid on competence and skill etc not based on a certain type of bargaining / confidence when it is not even related to the job.

That is one reason why many women like working in certain parts of the pubic sector - you get paid for your job and someone shitter than you can't end up being paid twice as much just because they are a male with a sense of entitlement.

Employers should not be paying women half as much as men, for the same role and the same performance, just because they don't ask.

It's a rubbish excuse.

Plus there have been things done which show that women who do act "like men" and ask for more, get put in an "ambitious woman" category which actually doesn't do them any favours either.

This stuff is also very industry dependent. What will work in one industry will not in another. A few years back my industry had a 40% pay gap. Not sure what it is now.

IME it's practically impossible to prove this in the private sector because the minute you bring it up you're hit with the 'salaries are confidential' thing. And I suppose to be strictly fair there is something in that. But more big companies should publish their payment averages and things like that as part of their annual reports. If the pay gap really is down to factors like more women working part time then there should be no issue with showing the figures, should there

Did it become illegal to put salary confidentiality in contracts?

I think it might have.

I am in same industry now and certainly no-one would dream of mentioning pay. the only reason I found out before was a weird bunch of unlikely things. Not because under normal circs anyone would ever ever say anything.

i agree with publshing. Harriet harman had a thing where employers with more than 100 employees would have to publish banded/grouped data. Great idea, I think. If they had to do that, discrepancies would vanish PDQ, it would look so bad. And of course talented women would start to walk / do graduate elsewhere etc.

Yes it is unlawful to ban or penalise someone discussing salaries where the purpose or that discussion is sex discrimination or suspected discrimination on the grounds of sex.

Unless you work for a large organisation with an official pay stricture it can be very hard t tell why anyone is paid what they are paid.

OK, well the good news is that I do work for a large (public sector) organisation with an official pay spine. The bad news is that I and my 3 female colleagues are all earning quite a lot less than 2 male colleagues, despite all being in the same role, in the same "band" on the pay spine. The two men are being employed quite a few "points" above the women on the spine (but within the same band) - if that makes sense.

The tricky thing is knowing why and what to do about it. If it's simply that the men have slightly more relevant experience then that's OK (although it's a lot of extra cash for not much extra experience in my opinion). If they negotiated a lot harder than the women at the hiring stage, I think that's less OK...but then perhaps the onus is on us now to re-negotiate in light of knowing about the men's salaries. If it's because of deep institutionalised sexism then that's not OK at all, but i'm really not clear what we do about it - especially given K8's remark above about bearing in mind the consequences of asking our boss to justify it.

Women are paid on average 20% less than men in the uk.
For any job.
Here are the statistics on theofficial EU website.

Renegotiate your pay.

Here's the article.

Official EU article about sex based pay gap

It's shocking isn't it. In my sector, the pay gap is thought to be around 20%. This is partly to do with the much higher number of women in lower paid roles and men in the highest positions in the sector. Very depressing.

I just can't help feeling that if we challenge it, we will be told that the men have more experience than we do. The point for me is that the very little extra experience they may have doesn't seem remotely worth the big pay difference.

I just mean to think carefully about how you do it. We don't know much about your organisation, it's culture or processes.

Now you've posted a bit more and it's large public sector organisation and there's others that makes a big difference. If your are in a union ask their advice but I suspect they will suggest this:

Raise this with your line manager along the lines of some of the team have mentioned there's a possible gender pay discrepancy in the department and could they investigate because this is surely a mistake?

If you get fobbed off you could request they do a pay audit either within a formal grievance or less formally. You could do this individually or as a collective.

I always think starting informally and without accusation is best.

What do you think you should do?

JacqueslePeacock - my advice is sit down and do a hard objective and evidence based analysis of your qualifications, skills, experience and performance of yourself and each of your peers on your grade.

Write it down and tabulate it and then send the evidence to your boss and ask for your current pay to be justified against the criteria you have set out and against your peers. The organisation should respond seriously to your request. If they dont they are opening themselves to a claim.

I base this advice on the experience of my DW in recently applying for a public sector job. She was offered the job but at the very bottom rung on the pay scale for her role and grade.

She wanted the job but set about negotiating all the way to the top of the pay grade from where she was initially assessed. She did this by doing a very detailed objective analysis of the output of each of her male colleagues on that grade above her on the pay scale.

She presented the analysis in writing and and asked her prospective boss to justify why her male colelagues were on a higher level in the pay scale. She set out the objective crieria that should be used to decide her pay scale level. She clearly outclassed or matched each of the men on objective criteria including the highest paid one.

It turned out that despite putting in a very detailed CV and is no shrinking violet in negotiation that all of her interviewers (all male) had simply assumed immediately and with no justification that she was very very junior in her previous job and coming back to work after having had children she would just accept what she was offered.

Her boss eventually admitted they had wildly but not deliberately under assessed her experience and qualifications and agreed to correct the error. He admitted that they had also assumed she had exagerated her seniority on her CV like everyone does.

This example is a real life one and shows how unconcious prejudice causes women to be paid less than men who have the same or lower performance and qualifications.

I think you need to be very careful when going to your employer and doing your own analysis of your peers. This can have problems because it might be inaccurate but mainly because it can detract from the real issue and make you look unprofessional and like a busy body. You need to be less personal and more circumspect. It is also likely to be unnecessary for a gender pay claim.

Let your employer do the investigation but if nothing comes of it you can raise a grievance using your colleagues as potential comparators. The burden is then on your employer to prove there is no discrimination. Usually in sex discrimination cases the petitioner has to prove sex discrimination but in gender pay cases it is the employer who has to prove they are not discriminating.

More beta -that is fascinating and shocking. Well done to your DW.

I don't think I'd feel at all comfortable making my own analysis of my colleagues - not least because I don't have all their details. How was your wife able to do that before she even had the job, MoreBeta.

I think raising it with my line manager would be a good idea, but unfortunately he's utterly hopeless and is likely just to fob me off. I don't really want just to negotiate a pay rise for me, as I don't see this as a personal issue but an issue of equality for all of us. I may sit on this information for a while, until several of us have completed our current projects, and then see about requesting a review as K8 has suggested.

In general, though, I find it very interesting that the burden of proof should be on the employer in these cases.

Jacques - some of the objective criteria were publicly available and others were revealed to DW when she questioned management and other employees she was interviewed by.

A slightly more neutral and less in your face way of going about this is at your next annual/performance/pay review ask what objective criteria you are being judged on versus your peers and how that objectively translates into for pay and promotion. That is a perfectly reasonable thing to ask at your employer about. Be firm and put it in writing as part of that process. The organisation has to have some criteria it uses to judge performance and award pay rises and promotions otherwise it has no defence against a claim.

Yes the law was changed to put the onus on employers to prove they are paying people fairly because it is was belatedly recognised that it is nearly impossible for employees to gather all the necessary hard data on peer group pay to bring a case.

I like the sound of MrsBeta. Ballsy woman :)

It's definitely much easier to negotiate hard when starting a job then when you're already appointed. Once you're in the incentive to give extra and the political appetite are often not there.

Op you could also have a chat with HR in a "I'm not sure you're aware of this and now you are so bloody well do something about it" way.

These thing can be back dated up to 6 years (or is it 7? I forget) by a tribunal and they can make an organisation do an organisation wide pay audit which can be ££££££ so they should be keen to put this right once raised to avoid the potential costs. But equally people like the status quo and doing nothing until they have to so you may need to be more direct.

Strike out fail. Arse.

A good part of it is people not challenging it. You should always know what you're worth. If you don't push, you'll never get.

Salaries can be a bit random, especially in some professions. I was replaced in banking (several years ago) by someone with less experience and younger and he was paid 10x what I was (to do a far worse job and ultimately be "sacked", necessitating another huge payout. To be fair, I was ridiculously overpaid and his salary was equivalent to a mid level footballer in the premier league.

Salaries should be benchmarked against some sort of grid based on experience, qualifications and some sort of objective assessment of performance. On the other hand, especially if you are good and important to the organisation, it is important to ask for a raise. Don't wait to be handed one and moan if it is not forthcoming. It is a hard thing to do, especially for some people, but as long as you approach your boss in the right way and can justify it objectively, it can only work in your favour. A lot of boss's jobs consist of retaining loyal staff for the minimum cost and it is easy to assume someone is happy unless you know otherwise.

I don't think paying a woman less for the same job ever works in the long run and I think few bosses do it "deliberately". However, it is certainly possible that subliminal discrimination makes a male boss pay women less. This makes it doubly important to demand the "right" salary based on objective criteria (which he can then justify to his boss and HR). Not fair but I do think, in business, it is important to manage one's own career. Cannot comment on public sector employment.

I'd check with the Union too.

Beware of educational differences, my DH once ended up in the situation in a Public Sector job where he had more experience and more responsibility than his collegues, but was the lowest paid because the others had degrees so were automatically placed higher on the scale, even though the degrees weren't really relevant to the job they were doing. He did try to get raised at reviews based on experience he had in the job but didn't get anywhere because pay seems to rise in a uniform fashion once you are in. So he was in the position of training up new folk who were paid more than him. He found a new better paid job.

Not saying that's definately a factor in your case. There ought to be a way of checking whether its just individual differences or sexism. I'm afraid I don't know how. All this secrecy about pay just seems designed to cover up anomolies like this rather than address them and have them fixed.

Check whether there may be an anomaly.

For example, I worked for the NHS. I moved up the 'points' quite quickly because:

Started as 'D' Grade Nurse, then

Moved to theatres, where they had 'theatre practitioners' not nurses. I had to move onto TP1, which was slightly higher than 'D' Grade starting point.

Then, I moved to Neonatal care. Back into 'D' Grade, but they couldn't take me on at a lower pay point than I'd already been paid, and as I had been on TP1, which was higher than the equivalent 'D' grade point, they had no choice but to put me on the next pay point, despite the fact that I had only been nursing 18 months and shouldn't have reached that pay point until my 3rd annual increment.