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Women, you are now working for free

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women's pay gapSome campaigners have dubbed 4 November ‘Equal Pay Day’.

A new analysis has revealed the strategies needed to tackle the growing gender pay gap which sees women effectively working for free two months a year.

The analysis, by the Fawcett Society, has revealed that for every year a man works full-time, a woman has to work approximately an extra sixty full-time days to achieve the same pay.

In other words, this year women in full-time employment effectively stopped being paid on 4 November if you compare their pay to men’s all-year around full-time wages.

This news has led some campaigners to dub the fourth of November ‘Equal Pay Day’.

The new analysis is based on the mean gender pay gap for full-time employees. It widened for the first time in five years last year from 14.8 per cent in 2012 to 15.7 per cent in 2013.

Some critics have argued that the figures are distorted by the fact that more women work in part-time jobs.

However, the gender pay gap for part-time workers is even wider, at 34 per cent, meaning their ‘Equal Pay Day’ would have fallen back on 28 August – and a woman working part-time would have to work a year and three months to earn as much as her male counterpart.

Remarking on this, Dr Eva Neitzert, deputy CEO of the Fawcett Society said: ‘It is disgraceful that in 2014, women in the UK still effectively work for free for nearly two months of the year relative to men.’

The Fawcett Society has cited the economic recovery in the UK as an exacerbating factor of the gender pay gap, because the six fastest growing sectors have been low-wage sectors such as care work, where women employees predominate, and high-pay areas such as real estate, where men dominate, leading the two to diverge.

Others factor could be the increase in private sector jobs, where the gender pay gap is wider, and the decrease in public sector jobs, where the gender pay gap is slighter narrower.

In addition, newly-created jobs tend to be part-time, temporary or be zero-hour contracts, leading to overall insecurity in the job market.

The UK’s slow progress on the pay gap in recent years contributed to it falling down the rankings to number twenty-sixth in the World Economic Forum’s global gender equality figures released last month.

‘It is small wonder that Britain is plummeting down the international league tables when it comes to gender equality,’ Frances O’Grady, general secretary of the Trade Union Congress said.

‘It feels like the glass ceiling is getting stronger not weaker and we need a much tougher approach to stop future generations of women from suffering this pay penalty.’

There are ways to tackle this problem.

For example, raising the minimum wage to £7.65 nationwide and £8.80 in London would instantly knock 0.8 per cent off the gender pay gap – more than double the average annual rate of reduction seen in recent years.

Better policies around childcare for working parents, such as expanding the UK’s free childcare policy, would help alleviate the ‘motherhood penalty’ where women are effectively forced to take career breaks or take on part-time, low-paid roles in order to raise their children.

The Fawcett Society argues that facing the gender pay gap will need concerted effort on a number of fronts, including work to promote pay transparency and the abolition of up-front employment tribunal fees which prevent women from pursuing justice when they are being paid less than a male counterpart.

More than four decades after the Equal Pay Act was passed in 1970, it would be nice to say that progress has been made. However current trends suggest it will be more than another four decades again before men and women will be paid equally.

  1. Have a look at our Belgian EPD campaign 2009: http://www.equalpayday.be/NL/index.aspx?Id=Archief&Archief=2009 and the overview of our EPD-campaigns http://www.equalpayday.be/NL/documenten/dossier2014EN.pdf
    Greetings from Brussels,
    Vera

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