Female staff at Bristol City Council earn £1.27 less per hour than men

[IwantToRetire]

... The statistics relate to the median pay gaps, which is the most commonly used and more reliable method because, unlike mean average pay gaps, they are not skewed by a small number of people on huge salaries and instead relate to the employee whose wages are in the middle when everyone is listed from lowest to highest in the two groups being compared. ...

https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/female-staff-bristol-city-council-10928178

Apologies - my post was about Birmingham but can be translated to any local authority. Not paying equal pay for equal work is beyond stupid. The reasons women earn less are valid and not engineered by a council.

The report says that “ four out of five part-time workers were women” that’s the reason the women are earning less. They are more likely to take low responsibility and low paid jobs than men.

it’s not saying that the women who do identical jobs to men are paid less. They’re saying women are earning less but that’s because often they’re part time.

Isn't this what happened with Birmingham City Council? In 2023 they had to back date pay to the tune of 760 million pounds in order thats female staff were in line with their male counterparts and as a result went bust?

They were not claims where men and women were doing the same jobs for pay which different on the basis of sex. They were roles which were male or female dominated and were paid differently. Eg bin men (male dominated) and cleaners (female dominated)

I think that one of the great things about mn is that there are so many posters who see through sensationalist reporting like this.

We now have equal pay for equal work. The intractable problem lies in the fair evaluation of jobs. E.g. valuing jobs requiring strength over communication and caring skills. Weight put on hazards and unpleasant working conditions. What is the role of trade unions?
The most obvious inequality is in the undervaluing of care work.
Choice is still a huge factor in this pay gap. The reality is women have a choice and are eligible to apply for any job but they then have to do it day in day out.

About this choice women make - you could say men choose not to have a work life balance and drop the ball when it comes to responsibilities outside of work. They get rewarded for that with better pay and pensions.

Women pick up the slack because someone has to.

I didn't mention anything about work life balance. This is as much a question of why aren't women applying for higher paid 'blue collar' jobs. The article is just same old button pressing. I'd like to see the breakdown of job descriptions, person specs, salaries, below the median. Where are the female plumbers, electricians etc. I know women are capable, but they are still in a small minority.
It can't just be an issue Councils are held responsible for.

I've wondered about whether the safety aspect comes into play here. Plumbers and electricians are often going into houses alone, which most of the time is no issue but it only takes one dodgy person to think they can take advantage.

Plumbing is often a physically demanding and dirty job. I can understand why it doesnt appeal to many women.

So is a lot of social care.

Yep.
Thats one contributor to structural sexism, which a surprising number of people don’t seem to understand or recognise.

Not my specialist area I’m afraid Filo, I’ve certainly seen the explanation that occupations become degraded as they become feminised - it certainly seems to have happened to some aspects of law (family). Historic examples are secretaries (used to be male, high status, assistant roles) or printing (the shift from skilled male workers working with hot metal to women on desk top publishing back in the 1980s).

Very interesting question about the entry of men raising status and pay - the only example I can think of us computing - the original computers were literally women who were good at Maths - as men took over the occupation rose in status and pay. I don’t know enough about the wider field to say whether this is an outlier or generally representative.

Why are women so keen to take on lower paid part time roles, I wonder?

I’d love to see the stats comparing the wages of single adults without children.
As I understand, men tend to progress and earn more as parents. Women tend to regress and earn less.

I wonder why?

The reason I get irritated by articles like this is that they never look to the systemic reasons. If you take the baseline principle that everyone should get a fair share (not equal) of GDP it becomes obvious that discrimination against women is built into the fundamental metric. Unpaid work is not counted. This work contributes to GDP in the same way as roads and infrastructure it's fundamental.

HOW DO WE DEFINE UNPAID WORK?
Unpaid work is work that is not remunerated. So, the question is, how do we distinguish between ‘work’ and other activities? In many cases, this distinction may not be clear-cut.
For example, many people engage in cooking or gardening as a hobby or consider time spent with family members as leisure.
To clarify the definition, in 2013, the International Conference of Labour Statisticians formalized the definition of work for the purposes of measurement
as ‘any activity performed by persons of any sex and age to produce goods or to provide services for use by others or for own use’. More intuitively, activities are considered ‘work’ if a third person could perform this activity for remuneration. This includes routine household tasks such as cleaning, cooking, shopping, laundry and home repairs, as well as caring for children, the elderly and the sick within the household. It also includes volunteer work such
as providing services to the community or assistance to other households.
It's much easier to use a tick box approach and sell the DEI mantra which in the end leads to a backlash about merit and discrimination than to address how we measure GDP.

Amen. Blimey, reading some of these responses, I had to check what board it was posted on. I thought it must be an AIBU thread. How depressing to discover that, no, it isn’t.

This boils down to, as usual, a domestic vs economic work argument.

The issue is not whether women or men are better at or better suited to one or the other but, rather, that we respect economic work more than domestic work.
And the reason we all do that, to a greater or lesser extent, is because of capitalism and patriarchy.
Sex based division of labour is not particularly problematic in an inherent way. It’s only problematic when society massively values one over the other.

There is some push back in this thread that feminism should be about ‘equality’ between the sexes and that if women don’t take their opportunities to do as men do, that’s on them, and therefore their fault and no one else’s. I would definitely have had the same view thirty years ago. I would certainly never have thought any women should ever be a SAHM. But back then I also thought that women complaining about sexist attitudes in the work place did so because they couldn’t, and didn’t, give as good as they got, and that was also their fault. I’ve grown up since then and realise that, it is not only a form of chauvinism, but patriarchy 101.

Disrespecting traditional female roles simply because women do them is the problem. Maybe we should respect them more, and precisely for that reason. You see it all the time on MN, motherhood, being a SAHM and caring roles have all been undervalued for the longest time. Particularly, being a full time SAHM is undervalued and taken for granted.
Conversely we also see, if a male manages to do some basic parenting, plenty of women bow down to the Prince Among Men.

And, as traditionally female roles, even when caring is economic labour - for either children, the elderly or disabled people - they’re amongst the lowest paid jobs available.

So no, BCC aren’t paying women less than men for the same job. Of course they’re not, that would be illegal. But if that’s as far as you want to go in terms of understanding the wider issue at stake here, on a predominantly female forum, nothing will ever change.
And you’ll be complicit in that.

I don't find this type of statistic to be any use at all

Well, it's great for a type of person who wants to create division between different groups of people...or anyone who is employed dealing with this data...

usually the same type of person who wants me to be seen as a victim because I'm a woman of colour which can be seen as a double win in the oppression Olympics.... and they get very annoyed that I don't see myself that way.

I mean, this is not shocking, but I don't know that it is necessarily a problem.

It would be helpful to know why there is a difference. And it should be possible to do an analysis and answer that question for these particular jobs. Is there a differernce in the age range? What obs are each group doing? Are men doing more overtime, or working away from home? Does it come down to maternity leaves?

They rarely seem to actually do that work, to answer those questions, so we can really see what is going on rather than making guesses with no context.

I think you are misunderstanding - people are pointing out that they do understand the larger issues. There are all kinds of perfectly reasonable reasons that there could be this pay gap, that are nothing to do with the council.

The reasons aren't necessarily even a problem in themselves.

What, if anything, society needs to do about it is a differernt question. Maybe build unpaid labour in some way into measures like GDP. OTOH, there could be downsides to that. There are a lot of possibilities, but just because people don't bring them up in this discussion, it doesn't mean they are "complicit."

Dirty, yes. But I do see more women in trades where the work is not as heavy or there are better ways to compensate for that. I've seen way more women electricians than bricklayers or plumbers, for example.

Even in nursing it's not unusual to see male nurses in larger numbers in roles with a lot of heavy lifting.