What is the pay gap?

It is now 41 years since the Equal Pay Act came into force, but there is still a massive inequality between men’s and women’s pay.

There is a 14%* gap between men’s and women’s full-time hourly rates, and a shocking 35% gap when you compare women’s part time hourly rate to men’s full time hourly rate.

These headline figures represent a lifetime of pay discrimination for women. This discrimination is a contributing factor to women and children’s higher levels of poverty and women’s pensioner poverty. It also impacts on household earnings and on men’s earnings when they work in sectors or occupations with high levels of female workers.

The pay gap is bad for business, and bad for Scotland’s economy. Companies that treat staff fairly are more productive, more innovative, find it easier to retain skilled staff, and ensure that they have a positive corporate image.

There are three main causes of the gender pay gap.

Occupational segregation

Stereotyping about women’s capabilities and skills results in women being clustered into predominantly female occupations that are associated with low pay. These include cleaning, catering, clerical (admin), caring, and cashiering (retail) working.

There are also barriers, sometimes called ‘the glass ceiling’, making women less likely to be found in senior management.

Lack of flexible working

Women also experience discrimination because they are more likely to have caring responsibilities for children, sick relatives, disabled people, or older people. One fifth of women lost their job, or lose out on pay or promotion, simply for being pregnant.

A lack of flexible working in many workplaces means that women are required to look for part-time work in order to balance their many responsibilities. As most part-time work is in low-paid, stereotypically female occupations, this means that women’s pay is likely to go down.

Part-time working also has a long-term scarring effect on women’s wages, even if women return to full-time work.

Discrimination

There is also discrimination in pay systems, with many women being paid less for work that is the same or similar, or of the same value as male colleagues’ work.

There can be many factors within pay systems that lead to inequalities, including: individuals being appointed to different points on the pay scale; different job and grade titles for virtually the same jobs; male jobs having disproportionate access to bonus earnings; women having less access to high-paid shift and overtime work; performance-related pay being unfairly awarded; women not receiving the same access to training; sex bias in analytical job evaluation schemes grading women’s jobs lower.

*Dec 2011 Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings