Duncan Brown explains the issue is more complex than the positive rhetoric suggests
Opinion on how to tackle Britain’s gender pay gap is divided, especially when it comes to public reporting.
“We will make every single company with 250 employees or more publish the gap between average female and male earnings”, Prime Minister David Cameron proclaimed last week. “This will create the pressure we need for change, driving women’s wages up,” he said.
But exactly how well this approach will work is a hotly debated topic. And it was a divisive issue at the recent ‘Challenging Gender Pay Inequalities’ conference, run by the GW 4 university alliance, where I was a speaker.
Sadly one of the few things that attendees did agree on was the estimate that it would take 70 years to close the gap, as suggested by the European Commission.
Dan Coles, from the Government Equalities Office, spoke optimistically of the positive reception to the initiative and its potential impact to reduce the current average gap of 19.1 per cent. While education and equalities minister Nicky Morgan has previously talked of “eliminating the gender pay gap in a generation” in media interviews.
However, Sheila Wild, former Equality and Human Rights Commission lead and equal pay expert, highlighted the general decline in private sector pay transparency and government advice and enforcement activity. She noted that the public sector equality duty in England had been watered down and she said that a much more fundamental reform of the equality legislative framework was needed.
The negative response from business groups, including the CBI, to such a mild intervention was depressingly predictable. And some of the academics present agreed with the British Chambers of Commerce that reporting a single male to female pay gap figure risked “taking a complex set of issues and reducing it to a few headline statistics”.
But the current voluntary approach, favoured by business groups and the government, is an obvious failure. The ‘Think, Act, Report’ initiative has mustered just five of the 7,000 companies that will be affected into reporting their gender pay gap so far.
Such recalcitrance and the ability of employers to disguise their gaps under broad headline figures might suggest that stronger and more wide-ranging government intervention is required. And Amelia John, head of the Fairer Futures Division, explained such an intervention was currently being planned by the governing administration in Wales.
A number of speakers favoured the legislative requirement of compulsory equal pay audits used in Austria as well as Denmark’s remarkably detailed and open pay data comparisons, which employers are provided with and have to act on.
And I think that all would have agreed with Professor Caroline Gatrell that “while it is a good thing to encourage more transparency around levels of average pay and to expose the discrepancies between what men and women in the same roles earn, it is important not to think that the task ends there”.
A range of initiatives can be seen in the higher education sector, which has one of the largest gender pay gaps in the UK. Equal pay audits are now common, ranging from Kings College’s ‘positive discrimination’, to unconscious bias training, and the more widespread promotion of job sharing and part time working at senior levels. The sector has also encouraged the Nordic practice of including breaks for childcare as a positive experience on CVs.
At the Institute of Employment Studies we favour the use of a single figure but with more detailed breakdown and narrative reporting options. A majority female profession, like HR, should not be tolerating anymore of its daughters going into an employment market where they earn a fifth less than men.
Whatever your views and level of optimism or pessimism, we should all respond to the consultation.