Paygap

[EBearhug]

Just had some interesting links:

Female managers work for free for 57 days a year

Lloyds ends all-male shortlists - Lloyds Banking Group will not progress candidate shortlists unless at least a third of the list are suitably-qualified women. I think this could be very interesting, and it will be interesting to see whether it slows down their recruitment processing too much, and whether they can maintain this rule.

Business in the Community gender pay gap survey - deadline midnight on Sunday 06 September.

Goverment consultation on closing the gender pay gap - this also has a deadline of 6th September for responses.

Interesting to see that Lloyds policy. Hopefully that will give senior staff an impetus to encourage women all the way up, as opposed to just setting a quota at the top (which is potentially a bit problematic IMO).

Things are getting better... very gradually...

Went in to lloyds bank for one of those account chats was a lloyds consultant and as we leaving talking about kids etc I asked how she found it coming back, said about being treated as if having a baby had wiped her memory and especially annoyed at a women appearing to try to undermine her using this language,in front of, I'm assuming other male colleagues.

I still dont get why some tory MP's are going to be blocking the pay equality bill.

Because quite a lot of tory MPs are twats, I think is the summary. Plus I suspect that some of them are aware at how much pay inequality there is.

Why don't we just do what the Swedish Feminist Party advocated for and have a man-tax to balance things out?

Thanks EBearhug.

I'm currently part of an equal pay claim my union's putting forward in my workplace. I get so fed up when this topic comes up on chat threads with people saying "But nowadays women get paid the same as men in the same jobs. It's all because women go into low paid careers voluntarily, innit?" Doesn't matter how many times you point out that, no, equal pay legislation is more honoured in the breach than the observance, that countless studies have shown in numerous professions that women with the same job description get paid on average less than their immediate male counterworkers, that this is actually true of my work place and we're going to court over it... no, the same old "women voluntarily go in for different jobs with lower pay because of childcare responsibilities" line gets parrotted over and over again.

I'd love to know what odds William Hill would offer me on a woman in a job where disclosing your pay to your colleagues is contractually forbidden being paid the same as her male counterparts is!

I am really looking forward to the publishing of pay stats for larger companies.

I really hope that things turn out not to be as bad as they might be! I expect there will be big differences between different industries and probably some companies will come out amazing and others utter shite.

In some companies you need to factor in other stuff like in my company I expect in the office I work women will come off just fine (I hope so anyway!) but then observe the lack of women as you go up the management tiers, and that suddenly after sort of "having children" age the numbers go from 50%ish to hardly any. Those women have vanished off and many of them will be in lower paid part-time work elsewhere (some may be doing fine of course!) and that's where the "choice" thing comes in also.

Anyway it's a big topic but it's still good to see things moving. Many companied (not public sector) are making various commitments (and not just to women, to other groups who have faced discrimination as well) and this is good, and they are doing it because it makes financial sense which makes it difficult for the "old guard" to argue against even though it means less "people like them" where they are used to seeing them.

Not read all of it yet but this jumped out at me from the gov document "Although girls often do well at school, they tend to end up concentrated in sectors that offer narrower scope for financial reward. " and the following paragraphs.

It is not as simple as we go into lower paid sectors, it's that tgose sectors are lower paid (and valued) because women go into them. Until that is acknowledged there will be no real change imo.

There is an obvious oddity in simultaneously talking about the pay gap and needing to hire more women in senior roles. If a business operates for profit and women are cheap labour surely it would make business sense to stack senior roles with women. The twin issues really highlight why it's just about bias and prejudice.

Sad thing is that it starts so early. I've hired 12 people this year, 9 being women. All or mostly with MBAs. I've only had 1 person negotiate on salary. It was one of the guys.

Women are getting better at valuing their talents and pushing themselves forward but they are still generally more reluctant than men to be demanding.

Yes they say that don't they thinkaboutit, from my point of view I think that apart from maybe roles where negotiating and so forth are key - sales type roles - which often have different sorts of incentivisation anyway - people should be rewarded for their expertise and performance.

If eg you have two people performing a role and one is demonstrably better / more experienced / adds more value than the other then they need to be rewarded accordingly. To me that's just kind of obvious. But that isn't how it works. You end up with situations where people who are pushy but a bit average at their jobs getting rewarded more than those who keep their head down and perform excellently.

I know that many companies are working with competency based stuff and deliberately trying to make sure things are fair but this doesn't get aorund things like

Unconscious bias
People bringing higher salaries with them and so jumping up ahead because of having negotiated well etc

I saw something recently about a company where all salaries are agreed and open and everyone knows and at that company it works. Not sure how I'd feel about that, but someone is trying something different.

Thing is they have found that once basics are met in terms of money, further money doesn't motivate people. OK. BUT what demotivates better than anything is finding out the bloke you are training is getting paid more than you. Just as an example off the top of my head :D

"I saw something recently about a company where all salaries are agreed and open and everyone knows and at that company it works. Not sure how I'd feel about that, but someone is trying something different."

That's effectively how the public sector works and it works fine there.

YY this was private sector, so very unusual indeed.

Like this company I just found on google

It is so utterly alien to me - most companies I have worked for in the private sector you weren't allowed to discuss it, and my public sector roles were the sort there were ranges so you still never quite knew.

Add the british reticence about talking about money and salaries and stuff and the idea of working at a company like that is really weird! But refreshing - you wouldn't (as a woman or other group that can get shafted) have in the back of your mind "am I being paid fairly compared to my peers" because there it is in black and white.

I think I would really like it actually. It's all open and done and clear and transparent so you can stop worrying about whether you should be negotiating more / less / same, how do you ask, when is right time, are you being done, etc and just relax and get on with the job!

They interviewed someone on the radio recently - think it was while I was driving home, which suggests it was probably PM - it was a British company where they had open salaries like the one linked to above. Can't remember the company, but it seemed to be working well.

I wonder if there's an optimum size of company for it to work well, so up to 100 employees or something, where you all know each other more or less, and know what each other do, and what's involved with the role.

I don't know if I was paid fairly in my public sector job - I knew what grades people were on, but no idea where they were on the scale within that, though I could take a guess. I do know that by moving to a very similar role in the private sector, I increased my salary by about 50%.

Actually, I know what grades people are on in my current private sector role, but because each grade ranges over about £20K, I still don't know whether I'm fairly paid compared with my direct comparators. In fact, I don't even know where I am on the scale (near the top from what my manager said at our last salary review discussion, i.e. there's not much more he can do - except f'ing ignoring my case for promotion...) Obviously you could have two people on the same scale in the same job, but if one's at the bottom and the other's at the top, that's a massive discrepancy.

You would think that most employers will be looking at salaries and doing their best to iron out any major discrepancies before they are expected to release the figures. In a previous company, my department got pay audited (they were working round all the departments over time), and I got a 26% payrise - when I'd questioned my pay a couple of years earlier, I just had the response, "It can be a sackable offence to discuss pay." Now I'm older and pushier and wouldn't accept that as the end of the discussion, but I was just in my 20s, and couldn't afford to risk unemployment. Which is of course exactly why so many companies do get away with paying people unfairly.

Yes I got that too when I found out and questioned it "if you pursue this remember that it's contractually not allowed to talk about pay and so you will likely lose your job" and as I was pregnant when I found out, I didn't pursue it obviously as I didn't have a leg to stand on what with being about to go on mat leave.

People like to say "oh but there's rules about equal pay and you can bring a grievance" and what have you but in real life, ordinary people don't go around calling in the lawyers when stuff like this happens. They just feel pissed off, understand that this sort of thing happens and it can happen to them, and either suck it up or leave.