Equal pay audit - same job, pay gap

[ThinkAboutItTomorrow]

Coming out of the government gender pay gap reporting my company did a full pay audit. This is a great sign that they are properly committed to fixing the issue. I think we'd all hoped that it would confirm that the pay gap is 'just' the seniority mix. There are a load of plans in place to improve this, including every senior manager being targeted to improve the proportion of senior women, so they are taking it seriously but it's obviously not a quick fix.

Anyway, I've not seen the report but have been told it does show a gap. So on balance men are being paid more at the same level.

This is a shock. I've read the BBC pay audit which concluded there was no gender bias even though there was a big gap in senior roles (& the roles with the biggest population in too). This seemed mostly to do with tenure.

I'm struggling to work through 2 things:

1. a senior team who value me and my work less for being a woman. It just doesn't fit with the people I know. And I get unconscious bias but our pay system is pretty specific. I don't get where it comes from
2. on the tenure point, is it ok that like at the bbc most junior women are paid more than junior men because of longer in role and more senior men are paid more than senior women because of time in role? Or is this in itself highlighting a gender bias of women stuck in junior roles and maybe not staying long in senior roles?

Any insight would help. I like and respect our leadership and they are trying bless them but it's really shaken me up to think there is a gap when you look role by role.

I dont get why that pay gap would be difficult to fix.
Its so outdated it ridiculous. It used to be that they couldn't pay women the same, the men would object. But we've had equal pay legislation for nearly 50 years.

Men can be nice to your face and still consider you are worth less than them.
''Niceness does not equal goodness. Niceness is a decision, a strategy of social interaction, it is not a character trait. People seeking to control others almost always present the image of a nice person''.

The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker.

But it's not just men. Until recently my boss was a woman, her bosses boss was a woman. And believe me, 2 tougher feminists you'd struggle to find.

The bbc audit showed a clear gap at senior levels yet concluded it wasn't gender bias, it was tenure.

It just feels more complex.

Did your immediate boss set the payscale?
Women can be biased as well.

Think our HR team also looked at hiring mix, time to transition between roles, and also exit rates split male/female

From what I understand we don’t have an issue of same tenure (modulated by performance) / diff pay, or different speeds to promotion - what we do have is inequality in hiring mix, and more women leaving

The pay scale is externally benchmarked but they are broad and I guess what is coming out is that women are generally at the lower end and men at the higher end.

This could be negotiation at the entry point. Which women are worse at and maybe none of us resets. If you are hiring and someone is willing to start at the lower end of the scale you're just happy that it's an easy conversation. We don't stop and question if it's fair and driven by female socialisation. That's a big but fairly easy shift I suppose.

It could be time in role, so more men stay and get pay rises in roles where women struggle due to work life balance so the women in senior roles are generally there for less time? Just a guess though as no data to back it up. That's an issue of the attractiveness of senior roles to women though. Hard to fix, at least quickly.

I don't think women are less attracted to senior roles. I think they are more likely to be burdened with responsibilities outside of work that prevent them from taking them.

Women are not given the same evaluations that men are and this affects their ability to move up.

Three of us were involved in a life and death situation. We resolved it professionally, although I did have to persuade one of the two men not to confess to doing something very stupid in his incident report.
Bother of them proudly showed me the commendations they received from the supervisor in their evaluations. The incident was not mentioned by the same supervisor in my evaluation.
That is one of the thoughtless careless ways they do it.

This could be negotiation at the entry point. Which women are worse at

There was a study done recently (maybe in Australia? A country where, by law, they have to keep a record of all pay discussions) which showed no difference between how often men and women asked for a payrise. Yet the men were getting payrises and the women weren't.

There have also been studies which showed that bosses are more receptive to men asking for more money than they are to women (Man feeding his family, woman gets pin-money).

So don't assume it's that men are "better" at asking/negotiating. It seems to be more that bosses are just more willing to give to the penis person.

It's unconscious bias. It's still wrong though.

Thinkaboutit - the same happened to me a few years ago, in that the audit of the company I worked for showed a pay gap - not just more men in senior roles, but women in the same role payed less than men. Like you, it came as a real shock because in many ways it felt like a good place to work - women seemed to be taken seriously, numbers of women in management were steadily increasing year on year, they were very supportive of maternity leave and part time/flexible working. But then it turned out we had a big pay gap, over 10%.

I think it was cock up rather than conspiracy. It was an artefact of overly long pay scales (so a couple of maternity leaves and "average" marks on your annual review by default, and women's pay on average started to drift away from men's, more of whom had been able to get "outstanding" marks in their annual review). This sort of structural inequality is quite common - arising from management not thinking through the consequences of the marking system, rather than any sort of conscious decision to pay men more.

But (crucial point) it's still illegal. However, our employers said they couldn't afford to fix it, and we had to take them to court to sort it out. Fortunately we were all in a union, so we had the union's legal team to build the case. (We weren't the first organisation in our sector that the union had fought this battle for, and I doubt we'll be the last). Anyway, we won in the end, though the pay deal the company then brought in robbed Peter to pay Paula in some respects, so there was a lot of bad feeling (and the company played dirty - we agreed to what looked like a straightforward pay increases, and it wasn't till the 11th and a half-th hour that they pulled a fast one and shafted some other people over terms and conditions to claw back some of the money - so the "uppity women" were left looking like the bad guys, when in fact we hadn't seen the changes to terms and conditions at all during our negotiations!)

Anyway, long post, but bottom line: sympathy, I've been where you are, and it feels massively demotivating (to put it mildly) but you can fight it and win.

However, our employers said they couldn't afford to fix it, and we had to take them to court to sort it out.

Oh sure they couldn't 'afford to'. /snarkasm

Thank you fermats that's really helpful. One of our divisions is committing money to it but the others aren't. Maybe they will when they see the actual numbers though.

Amazing that they went to the trouble of running the audit but no intension to fix it.

The mat leave thing rings true, I know it's impacted me.

Yes our promotion cycle for senior roles is partly based on annual metrics, and if you are on maternity leave the way the placeholder system works plus no accommodation for not being able to ramp up business day 1 when you get back means you mess up at least 2 years of measures for 1 mat leave