A day to celebrate, a rare day when this government does something good. From today, larger employers – covering half the nation’s workforce – must start to publish the data on their gender pay gap. For most senior managers it may come as a revelation. We never knew! Turning a blind eye on undervaluing women is normal. That’s why, at the current rate of change, it will take until 2069 for women and men to be paid the same, by which time virtually all women now at work will be retired.
By this time next year, 9,000 larger employers must publish the gender gap between average and median pay, between who gets bonuses and how much, and crucially, the proportion of women and men within each quartile of an organisation’s staff.
There, job done! Almost certainly not. The Financial Times today finds “companies will almost certainly not be punished if they do not comply” as equalities minister Justine Greening says the government would prefer to “work in partnership” with business rather than issue sanctions.
But even if most do comply, from everything we know about inequality after decades of never-ending research, we know that knowing the facts doesn’t lead to action. There is nothing we don’t know about gender, race and social immobility, but policy-makers pick the knowledge that suits them. Women are poorer? This week Damian Green, the work and pensions secretary most responsible for impoverishing them, offered £30m in counselling to stop poor women rowing with their partners as it spoils their children’s employment prospects. Good idea maybe, but no recompense for the £12bn taken mainly from women’s pockets in benefit cuts beginning this week.
But another potentially good government act starts today – and it connects to the gender pay gap: the apprenticeship levy begins to take 0.5% from large companies’ payrolls, paid back to them if they spend it on apprenticeships. Good. British employers are notorious for investing too little in training, while our education system has utterly failed on technical skills.
But as a Resolution Foundation discussion this week revealed, there is a long history of failed initiatives with fraudulent training providers and useless schemes that don’t improve young people’s prospects. Reasons to worry this time start with yet another reckless Tory manifesto pledge – to provide three million apprenticeships by 2020. That risks another dash to badge anything remotely like training as an “apprenticeship”, regardless of quality. Why is all the £2.8bn levied not to be spent on top-quality up-skilling? The Institute for Fiscal Studies reveals that government plans to spend just £640m on apprenticeships, the Treasury keeping the rest, despite brutal cuts to further education colleges that provide most skills training.
In this dash for three million apprenticeships, the disappointment is that nothing serious is to be done about the great gender divide in the routes young people take. Too many girls are doing what girls always have – caring, catering, cashiering for crap pay, the same old four Cs. The pay gap begins right here, in women’s job destinies.
The popular image of an apprentice is the bright young lad with spanner in hand and draftsman’s pencil behind the ear, headed for high-status engineering at Rolls Royce or BAE Systems, where more people apply for each gold dust place than apply for Oxbridge. But 80% of apprenticeships are in the service sector, reflecting most British jobs. An apprenticeship at level 2 in nursery or social care, hair and beauty, retail and admin is a very different animal, often geared narrowly to an employer’s highly specific task, useless for transferring, with no upward ladder.
Women do badly out of apprenticeships – earning less, even before they have children and hit that pay barrier. The Young Women’s Trust found on average they earn just £4.82 an hour compared with £5.85 an hour for male apprentices, leaving them £2,000 a year worse off. Only 4% of engineering candidates are women, despite decades of exhortations to break down gender strait-jackets. Since 2010 and Michael Gove’s mindless destruction of the careers service, most school pupils just get an online service, or untrained teachers who can’t know about the myriad jobs people end up doing and how to get there.
Social pressure on young women to do traditional feminine work is such an overwhelming electro-magnetic force that change in traditional roles is snail-pace slow. Talking to schools, I have often asked boys and girls to write down their ambitions, and the difference is staggeringly depressing among those not headed for university. The bully-power of being thought unfeminine is far stronger than generally acknowledged – too many girls as trapped by it as ever.
When Barbara Castle passed the Equal Pay Act in the teeth of opposition from much of the cabinet and most trade unions, the Dagenham woman, along with all working women, thought the job was done. Work of equal value, if not identical jobs, would be paid the same. But women’s work is not valued in the same way – because women do it, the sure sign that women themselves are not of equal value. If care was mainly done by men, the world would be turned on its head and their pay would reflect a higher-status occupation.
“Parity of esteem” is the government’s aim for the apprenticeship route. But there is zero chance of that in this unequal, class-bound society where decision-makers will continue, in whispers, to view the skills path as “not for our children” – except for a rare high-prestige engineering or cabinet-making apprenticeship for an oddball son.
For girls, apprenticeships threaten yet again to cement them into jobs with lesser prospects. Money the Treasury is filching from the apprenticeship levy should go towards a strong careers service that reaches girls early, showing them the dismal earnings graphs for traditional female jobs. But little may change until the essential work women do, in care and services, is upgraded and up-respected, along with the status of women themselves – fast sliding back in this pussy-grab era.
