Amelia Gentleman (Angry about the pay gap, 3 April) was helpful in separating out the various reasons for unequal pay, together with ideas for women to tackle the problem. But where is the advice to employers that unequal pay is often the result of unequal opportunities; and where is the recognition that they, employers, also have a part to play in providing solutions?
Many jobs advertised as full-time could be done by part-timers or as job shares. There are easy-to-find organisations out there with experience in advising about this. Where are the talent spotters, identifying women in their companies with the capacity to learn and do more, enabling them to move into the higher-paid male-dominated areas.
And let’s not forget the responsibility of government. Years after these issues were first raised, we still have too few girls choosing Stem subjects, a well understood avenue to well-paid employment. Childcare? Often affordable for parents of one child, out of reach for more than one. Hence the exodus of women from decently paid full-time jobs with prospects into part-time work, almost always at the bottom of the pay and opportunities ladder. Exposure of the gender pay gap is of course helpful, but only actions and commitment to solutions will start to solve the problem.
Margaret Prosser
Labour, House of Lords
• The figures so far are fairly crude and open to a degree of interpretation (as some people will not be included in the calculations), but the pattern is clear. Most companies report a pay disparity in favour of men, and the construction and finance sectors seem to be the worst offenders. The real reason for the pay gap is not necessarily that women are getting paid less for the same work as men, but more likely that they are not getting into the higher-paid positions. And if companies want to reduce their gender pay gap, this is the area that would make a difference.
It will be interesting to see what happens next. The reasons given by companies for their pay gap suggests a tendency to make excuses rather than accept that there is an imbalance which they could do anything about. The obligation to report is an annual one, so we will need to wait another year to see if progress is being made.
Amy Richardson
Associate solicitor, Coffin Mew, Brighton
• Theresa May’s gender pay gap data, however imperfect, does shed a little light. For all their criticism of Gary Lineker’s pay, the Guardian (11.3%), Associated Newspapers (19.6%), Times Newspapers (14.3%), Express Newspapers (17%), Channel 4 Television (28.6%), and ITV (18%) all have larger average pay gaps than the BBC (10.7%). BT (-0.7%), where women earn a little more on average than men, is an example to the likes of HSBC (59%) and Plymouth Hospitals NHS Trust (32.1%). Perhaps the Labour party (2.5%) could press Theresa for even more information next time.
Philip Kerridge
Bodmin, Cornwall
• Reading Boswell’s life of Dr Johnson, I came upon the following entry on 11 April 1773. “I put a question to him upon a fact in common life, which he could not answer, nor have I found any one else who could. What is the reason that women servants, though obliged to be at the expense of purchasing their own clothes, have much lower wages than men servants, to whom a great proportion of that article is furnished, and when in fact our female house servants work much harder than the male?”
What answer would Boswell get today?
Jim Baillie
Sale, Cheshire
• Danny Dorling rhetorically asks (Letters, 3 April) whether the Oxford Diocesan School Trust is paying part-timers less per hour than full timers, and if that is the explanation for their large gender pay gap. The answer is obviously yes, something we should expect the professor of human geography at Oxford to know. The gender pay gap being reported currently is the total, unadjusted, one; of all men and women in work and it’s around 18%. The pay gap, unadjusted for any other factor, among full-timers only is 9.6% by the same ONS figures.
That part-timers get lower pay per hour is thus the explanation for some half of that gender pay gap currently being reported, isn’t it? Across the entire economy, it will be higher in those fields and organisations which employ more than the average proportion of part-timers. This is such a well known fact that even those in their ivory towers should grasp it.
Tim Worstall
Senior fellow, Adam Smith Institute
• While Theresa May is probably happy to contribute to the anger about the pay-gap issue, it is a welcome distraction for her: a blue herring (Men paid more at 80% of firms, 5 April). The real battle over women’s pay should focus on the gap at the bottom end, where millions of workers are paid less than a living wage or even below the legal minimum wage, and most of them are women.
The government could take two easy steps now to improve matters for working women: first, make firms obey the minimum wage law or, better yet, ensure that all employees get paid a real living wage, giving them enough to live on without benefits. If companies were made to pay decent wages, the Tory austerity agenda could be shelved, and millions of lives would be improved; it really is that simple.
David Reed
London
• I was buying something and couldn’t decide between two purchases. I decided to look at each company’s gender pay gap and choose the one that paid women the fairest. If other women consult the pay gap before deciding where to spend their money, we could perhaps move this thing along a bit more speedily. Let’s start a “spend where it’s fair” movement.
Janet Graves
Mellor, Cheshire
• So after championing the just about managing, Theresa May has now adopted the gender pay gap as her cause du jour – what could possibly go wrong?
R Schuhle
Pontefract, West Yorkshire
• While not wishing to deny a gender pay gap, it should be noted that gender gap reporting is on gross income per hour, before the effect of tax and benefits. So, for instance, men pay about twice as much income tax as women (£60bn against £30bn), whereas, because some women earn less (and are more likely to head a single-parent family), some women will gain through the benefit system. For instance (based on an online calculator), a single parent working 20 hours a week at £10 an hour with one child under 16 will have their take home pay almost doubled (from £8,000 to £16,000). The effect of using gross pay instead of income net of tax and benefits therefore seriously overstates the headline gender pay gap figure.
Michael McGuffie
Wellington, Somerset
• Your editorial on the gender pay gap (5 April) claims that “exploitation ... is what this is about”, and implies that it reveals “a workplace that denigrates its female staff”. Both these statements go beyond the evidence and distort the real problem. As you rightly say, the survey raises “questions about the obstacles to advancement through male-dominated hierarchies”, as well as “the broader problem with pay ratios”. Of course management should aim to encourage and promote women wherever possible, and overall excessive pay differentials are a central problem for government. But it has been the case that many women prefer jobs aimed at looking after individual people, rather than committing their energy to playing “the organisation game”.
This tendency has been observable both in choosing careers and in accepting promotion into administrative posts – and even in the public sector, where the objective is, in some general sense, the public interest. This is only a marginal tendency, with huge numbers of exceptions, and it may well be gradually shifting as a result of cultural change among both women and men – but so long as it remains, some continuing gap will be neither “exploitative” nor “denigrating”. Such dogmatic language merely antagonises employers, who feel misunderstood and defensive.
Alan Bailey
London
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