Gender pay gap persists

The gender pay gap in the UK remains stubbornly high – despite so many advances in equalities over the last half century, women still only earn 80p for every £1 a man earns.

 
Even more galling is that this 20 per cent wage gap exists in the fifth richest economy in the world.

 
A new report released today (March 22) by the women and equalities select committee called on the government to take decisive action to close the gap, which, MPs argued, has hardly improved in the last four years.

 
Too much attention on the debate on the gender gap has focused on professional, already well-paid jobs, argued committee chair Maria Miller, while the millions of women in low-paid, part-time work have been all but ignored.

Forgotten women
Unite has argued that any consideration of equal pay must focus on women at the lower end of the pay spectrum, precisely because this is where the vast majority of women work – 6 out of every 10 minimum wage jobs are held by women and more than 40 per cent of part-time workers are women.

 
While the gender pay gap on average is 20 per cent, among part-time jobs, the gap nearly doubles to an astounding 38 per cent.

 
Unite member Emma Wallworth knows exactly what it’s like to be a woman working on this forgotten end of the pay spectrum – as a care worker, she’s employed in an area that, despite the enormous value it brings to society, pays a mere pittance.

 
The Resolution Foundation found last year that thousands of care workers, because they aren’t often compensated properly for travel time, are actually illegally paid below the minimum wage. It estimates that care workers, the vast majority of whom are women, lose out on more than £130m a year.

 
Emma first began working on a farm but eventually made the transition to care work when she was 19.

 
“I earned more working on a farm than I did in care work,” she explained. “Living on the minimum wage is hard as my contracted hours are only 30. I would have to work 44 to 55 hours a week just to pay the rent and bills.”

 
Being on such a low wage meant that Emma was forced to take on another job.

 
“Just to bring in extra money for food and a night out every now and again, I’d have to work an additional part-time job in a care home at night,” she explained.

 
Emma has experienced first-hand the pay discrimination that women often face.

 
“There was one situation in the care home where I worked in which two cooks who were doing the same job were not paid the same – one cook was male and the other female.

 
“The female was being paid less than the male and when I asked why they said it was because she worked part-time, that’s why.”

Flexibility call
In the cross-party report on the gender pay gap, MPs have said that for these low-paid, part-time women workers like Emma, addressing inequalities in pay is well within reach if the government was serious about taking action.

 
The committee called for all jobs to be made flexible by default from the outset unless there is a strong business case against. Flexibility would include jobs shares, late starts, early finishes, term time working and working from home.

 
“Although the Government recognises the value of modernising the workplace, it is still not taking action to ensure flexible working is offered to all employees, particularly those in lower paid sectors,” the report noted.

 
The committee also recommended that the government create a ‘national pathways to work’ scheme which will help get women back into work after taking time off, as well as encouraging fathers to share childcare duties by offering more generous paternity leave.

 
Tackling barriers faced by women in low-paid, highly feminised occupations can be “addressed by industrial strategies,” the committee noted.

 
“These would focus on improving productivity and pay levels in these industries, starting with the care sector where nearly 80 per cent of employees are women,” it said.

Tougher action
Unite welcomed the report and called for even more forceful action to close the gender pay gap for good. These measures include making equal pay audits mandatory.

 
As UNITElive has reported before, equal pay audits go far beyond the new government requirement that will oblige large companies to simply report on what their workforce’s gender pay gap is.

 
Pay audits are more than a mere data collection exercise. They require employers to closely investigate any pay disparities between men and women – and then they must take action to right these disparities.

 
Unite has also called for statutory rights for union equality reps who are on the frontline of workplace gender discrimination. Exorbitant employment tribunal fees must also be scrapped so that women who face, for example, pregnancy discrimination stand a fighting chance of securing justice.

 
“Some 54,000 women a year have been sacked because they are pregnant but they cannot get justice because they cannot find the £1,200 to start the tribunal process,” explained Unite national equalities officer Siobhan Endean. “These punishing costs are a barrier to justice – they must be removed, now.

 
“This must be brought out into the open,” she added, pointing to a report detailing the vast numbers of women who face pregnancy discrimination which is yet to be published following government delay.

 
“We are calling on [business secretary] Sajid Javid to publish the report into maternity discrimination because this government must set out how it is going to restore basic rights to women workers,” she added.

 
“There is clear cause and effect: this government attacks workers’ rights and within months tens of thousands of women are sacked because they are pregnant,” Endean noted. “In Britain, in 2016, this is surely unacceptable.”

 
Unite also argues that the persistently large gender pay gap will become an entrenched feature of the economy if the government’s austerity policies continue.

 
“Progress on gender pay parity has been made even tougher because of the explosion in low paid work with zero hours contracts and minimal employment rights, in addition to the public sector pay cuts that have been imposed as a result of the Conservative government’s dedication to never-ending austerity,” said Unite assistant general secretary Diana Holland.

 
“Women are over-represented in these jobs so when their pay suffers, family and household income suffers too,” she added.

 
“Pay equality becomes even more urgent during austerity because every penny counts,” Holland went on to say. “Without progress on decent, secure jobs with transparent and fair pay, the important proposal to introduce mandatory pay gap reporting will just be measuring the gap.

 
“It is high time that the government took the issue of women’s wages seriously because when women are denied what they are owed, they and their families pay the price.”