Gender pay gap calculations don't make sense?

[sunshinecloudyday]

I'm really looking for opinions and for anyone to enlighten me to why I cannot understand why the gender pay gap is calculated this way (see image).

It doesn't take into account men and women doing different jobs or working different hours, which I think it should.

Why aren't men and women doing exactly the same jobs for the same hours compared?

It said on the news that the gender pay gap at Ryan Air was around 72% males higher than females. But if more males are pilots and more females are flight attendants I can reasonably expect there to be a difference. It isn't Ryan airs fault they chose different jobs, so the companies shouldn't be punished? Instead shouldn't we focus on why men and women choose different jobs and work patterns and aim to even this out at the root of the problem?

It doesn't take into account different working patterns, e.g. if one employee is full time and the other works 2 days a week I would expect the full timer to be more likely to get a bonus?

If more women choose to work part time due to childcare surely that is their choice and they will understand their career may take a temporary hit. Men also have the option to take paternity leave or work part time also but again I don't see why the company should be punished for this or why the calculations are not adjusted to show this?

I feel like maybe I'm missing something?! Please enlighten me - I want to fully understand the situation before I talk to others about this....

I have been wondering about this too.

Thank you!! Maybe I am not going mad!

The point is that in 2018 most companies should have a fairly good mix of male and female workers. So far as I understand, that all qualifications and hard work aside that just being born male or female shouldn’t mean that you will earn less.

So lots companoes need to look at how use part time work for woman or how they print equal numbers to the top jobs, so it becomes normal. So while if your balance isn’t exact there may be a small difference between average worker and CEO but it shouldn’t be huge.

It's being partly confused with equal pay (same role paid the same for both sexes) which isn't helping.
This is about understanding the balance across the whole company and looking at the sort of structure problems that mean companies have lots of men in high paid roles and women in low paid roles. Why is that? Do women not want to be pilots or are there other bars societally or within companies to them flying? Unless you actually map a baseline, you can't demonstrate the problem or the effectiveness of changes.

I think the point is that many mor when are in senior jobs and it should be more equal. Women shouldn't have to forgo their careers due to childcare needs. I did happily but there should be more equality in top level jobs.

Meant to be many more men!

I actually argued with dh about this because I assumed that they did compare like for like, this was when the police figures came out. He was saying it didn't make sense for there to be a gap in professions with salary bands, but obviously there will be when it doesn't account for different jobs.

I was discussing this today with a (male) colleague who earns more than I do... doing the exact same job with the exact same responsibilities same hours working per week...but his hours are more favourable for childcare reasons... he gets paid more than me as he has a few-not many-years experience on me BUT the gap in pay is 30% more!
A further colleague gets paid more than him! Same details as above-but she has around 10years of experience on him

The figures are basically meaningless because they don't consider experience/time taken out for paternity/maternity/people who have reduced hours for any such reason etc!

But it shouldn't be obvious that there is a gap when you take types of role into account. That's what this highlights - that women take on low-skilled and/or part time jobs, while men occupy more of the higher skilled, managerial roles.

Why aren't there equal numbers of male and female cleaners and care assistants? Why aren't there equal numbers of male and female Finance Directors?

It is a really blunt tool. But it is somewhere to start. I hope more meaningful figures will start to be published, or required, or at least analysed by companies trying to explain the gap. Because it will be used by women choosing where to work.

There's another good thread going on this.

It's a fairly blunt instrument but it illustrates structural inequality very well. I work in a law firm. Almost all our admin staff are female. The lawyers are a mix. The board is currently all male. The gender pay gap figures are supposed to make you think about that. Does having a penis make you an inherently better board member? Does having a vagina make you a better secretary? If not, why do we have this divide? A bit might be due to generational impact (the people at the top of the food chain now are from an era where fewer women worked after marriage) but there are plenty of women at might place equally senior to the men on the board, so why aren't they on it?

The figures are basically meaningless because they don't consider experience/time taken out for paternity/maternity/people who have reduced hours for any such reason etc!

No! That's what makes them meaningful - how many men's careers take a back seat because they take paternity leave? How many women's do? How many men work part time? How many women?

I think a lot of people are getting confused with the concept of equal pay for doing the same job, regardless of your sex. This is a legal requirement.

The gender pay gap promotes discussion - hopefully - about why, across the board in any one company, men end up so muc better off. Where I work, it is because there are more full time men, more men in management, fewer men in the cleaning/catering/admin roles which are paid less well. So why does that imbalance exist? Why are there so many more men in management? Why so many more women in lower paid roles? Why are there so many women in part time roles? Can companies pay lip service to the concept of equal pay while ensuring that “jobs for the boys” is still alive and well as a concept?

Those are the questions that we as a society need to be tackling now.

Aha - I wasn't thinking of the difference between the gender pay gap and equal pay. It makes more sense now.

So I guess the moral of the story is let's get more women interested in being pilots and more men interested in taking paternity, and break down the social barriers surrounding those things?

It would be nice to live in a world where both me and my partner felt completely comfortable to choose either to go for a top job or focus on childcare, without society, our friends and family or even ourselves assuming we have one path.

It does very much piss me off when it is assumed I will give up my job to have children even though I worked very hard for my degree and like my job. What is the point in all that if I'm assumed to give all of that up?! I guess analysing the pay gap is a way of measuring the outcome of all of that.

Interesting how you use the words “choose” and “choice” in your OP. Do women really actively choose the lower paid jobs?

Perhaps not - but the don't choose to aim for higher paid jobs either?

X-post - yes “assumption” is much closer to the mark!

The part time stuff is irrelevant because the figures are based on the hourly rate.

“ I guess analysing the pay gap is a way of measuring the outcome of all of that.”

That and also a starting point to looking at why there are better or worse gaps in companies in the same industry...

Is it as simple as not choosing? Or is it all that social conditioning women are battling?

Even if it was split down grade by grade the picture isn’t necessarily simple. (I mean grades in the private sector sense, where the salary range is pretty wide and doesn’t progress in a set way, rather than the fixed pay bands you get in the public sector l.) I know where I worked until recently they also did the analysis grade by grade. In the grade I was at - the lower end of senior management - women were paid more than men on average.

My hypothesis is that is because it’s the grade women “get stuck” at. I’m pretty sure if they also analysed time in grade they would find a much higher proportion of women who have sat at that same grade for a long time, gradually earning more, compared to a larger proportion of men who spend two or three years in that grade before being promoted. So whilst in that grade the men earn less on average, but they don’t hang around there for as long, movingly into the next grade with a much larger pay rise.

Yes sunshine and also looking at returning to work after maternity leave and balancing parenting. Women often struggle to get back into their old career after becoming a mother and certainly in my line of work it's hard to get a part time job. So if you get made redundant from a 3/5 role, you are going to struggle to get those hours in a new job.

After reading these comments I now understand why this is different to equal pay. I just wish the news would portray this difference properly, many people aren't getting the right message from this!! As I wasn't.

It looks like shaming on companies rather than analysing our social structure. We really do need to do something about it.

There is a large gender pay gap in the call centre where I work. There are similar numbers of men and women in the higher paid jobs but there are significantly more women working the part time hours taking the calls. This is because these are the jobs these people have chosen to do. There are many people like me who are working 4hrs a day on the phones for personal reasons childcare etc but could be working in higher paid full time positions if we chose to. That's why the Gender Pay Gap doesn't really tell us anything.

Because if there was a gap between men and women doing the same job, that would be illegal

The gender pay gap shines a light on the fact that women are less likely to be in senior positions and highly paid careers.
I am responsible for gender pay gap reporting in our business and we have done a lot of analysis - by age, by job role, by department.
By age: In our business, there is no pay gap at entry level and stays that way until about the age of 30 when the gap starts to widen, and then continues to widen. Women are disadvantaged because they either choose / or are conditioned into choosing to take successive maternity leave and then return part time - so they are perceived as unable to have a senior role, they are overlooked for promotions and projects, they have to leave on time to collect children from childcare and so end up platauing for a few years while their male peers careers are flying. It’s then a vicious circle as loss of confidence and feeling trapped in a highly prized part time role prevents further career progression
By type of job: we are a digital business and in our tech dev team, we have only 7% women. Girls are choosing not to/being conditioned not to choose STEM roles which are more highly paid then the “girly” creative subjects.