We got the official data on UK earnings last week. It included the joyful reminder that last year our pay didn’t keep up with rising prices, for the ninth year in the 14 years since 2010. Something we used to think almost never happened, has become painfully normal.
But you all know your wages aren’t going as far as they used to, so let’s focus on what the data tells us is going on gender pay gap-wise. Among full-time employees it’s 8%. On the positive side, that’s way down from an absolutely staggering 36% in 1971, but it hasn’t budged much in recent years. The remaining gap is largely about workers aged 40-plus, which is the age at which the very different impacts of having children kick in on mothers’ and fathers’ careers.
So women don’t get as much money, but they do give more of something at work: appreciation. New Swedish research shows that women expend more energy at work expressing gratitude for their colleagues’ efforts. People in workplaces with 90% women are three times as likely to say they receive appreciation, compared with those in workplaces with fewer than 10% women.
This isn’t just about the kind of jobs women are more concentrated in: firms also become more appreciative over time when they hire more women, and different workplaces of the same firm show the same pattern. Interestingly, while it’s women doing the appreciating, men and women both report the increases in receiving it.
This matters: greater appreciation increases job satisfaction and wellbeing. Maybe it also helps explain why the Boris era, male-dominated, Downing Street was such a bonkers hellhole to work in.
• Torsten Bell is chief executive of the Resolution Foundation. Read more at resolutionfoundation.org
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