As the previous two chapters have shown, better educated girls have, as women, more opportunities in the workplace. As a result, young women today are earning more and have a far greater degree of financial independence than women of previous generations. Women’s wages have not only increased in absolute terms, they have also increased in comparison to men’s earnings. Yet despite this growing financial equality, the gender pay gap is rarely out of the news. Every day brings forward new statistics reporting to show the difference between men’s and women’s wages. But, as this chapter shows, when it comes to measuring pay, statistics can be weighed and measured to prove whatever point campaigners wish to make.
Discussion of the gender pay gap has become separated from reality. At a time when men and women are paid the same for the same work, and younger women earn, on average, more than men of the same age, belief in the pay gap is an expression of faith. Its existence has become a central tenet of feminism – calling it into question an act of blasphemy. The pay gap narrative suggests that gender is the key factor in determining a person’s earnings and that women are at a disadvantage in the world of work, relegated to poorly paid jobs and, especially when children come along, to part-time work. Although this may be true for some women, particularly those without qualifications, it is certainly not true for all. This chapter separates fact from fiction and explores what purpose the pay gap obsession serves.
Over the past few decades, as women have entered the workplace in ever greater numbers, they have secured greater financial independence. Few women today are left entirely dependent upon ‘housekeeping’ money donated, perhaps reluctantly, from their husband’s wages – a situation within living memory and once common for women of all social classes. The female breadwinner, once an oxymoron, is now a reality. Across Europe, one-third of working mothers are responsible for their family’s main source of income,85 whereas in the US, four out of every ten women are either the sole or primary family earner.86 This figure has quadrupled since 1960 – a remarkably rapid social change that speaks not just to women’s success but also to the changed nature of the labour market and the changing structure of the family.
Women today not only earn more in total than at any other point in history, they also earn more as a proportion of men’s earnings. As a result, the gender pay gap, however it is measured, is the smallest it has ever been. On occasion, this fact is acknowledged. In announcing new plans to tackle inequalities in the workplace, then British Conservative Minister for Women and Equalities, Nicky Morgan, said: ‘We are determined to tackle the barriers to women achieving their all. Business has made huge amounts of progress already in recent years – the gender pay gap is the lowest since records began.’87 But the quiet demise of the gender pay gap continues to be ignored by many feminist campaigners who are reluctant to let go of what they perceive to be a powerful indicator of inequality between the sexes.
When the narrowing of the gender pay gap is acknowledged, it is presented as a success brought about by the efforts of feminist activists. Campaigns and strikes for equal pay have a long history, especially in America. In 1883, workers at Western Union Telegraph Company went on strike in part to ensure ‘equal pay for equal work’ for male and female employees. Although communications across the US ground to a halt, the strike was unsuccessful. In 1911, a long battle with the Board of Education led to male and female teachers in New York receiving equal pay.88 In the UK, the most famous strike for equal pay took place at Ford Dagenham in 1968 when women sewing machinists demanded their work be paid at the rate for skilled labour. In 1976, Jayaben Desai led the Grunwick Film Processing Laboratory strike. Although this was not a dispute specifically focused on equal pay, the overwhelming majority of participants were female immigrants, dubbed ‘strikers in saris’.89
These brave women do indeed deserve celebrating. However, their efforts are only partially responsible for the diminishing gender pay gap. Trade unions were reluctant to back strikes for equal pay and government equalities legislation, now much praised, was often viewed by employers as an obstacle to be overcome rather than an impetus for positive change. Today’s levelling-off in pay differentials has come about because of a number of demographic and economic factors that have happened alongside, not simply as a result of, feminist campaigns.
Over the past half century, as we saw in Chapter One, there has been a huge increase in the number of young adults going to university and growth in the number of women students has been particularly notable. One impact of this change is that men and women have been entering the workplace, marrying and having children, later in life. In the 1970s and into the 1980s a woman giving birth after the age of 35, especially for the first time, was considered unusual. In the UK today, women are more likely to give birth over the age of 40 than under the age of 20. The trend for later motherhood can be seen across all social classes and in all developed countries. The UK’s teenage pregnancy rate is the lowest since records began.
Delayed motherhood is, as Alison Wolf notes, particularly a feature of graduates. She says that by 2006, American women graduates were most likely to have their first baby when they were aged between 30 and 35. For women who don’t complete high school, a different picture emerges and they are likely to become mothers by the age of 25. In the UK, the proportion of women graduates having a baby before they reach 30 has halved over the past few decades, whereas a majority of women without qualifications become mothers by the time they are 22.90 More than ever before, women are choosing not to have babies at all; since the mid-1970s, the proportion of American women who do not have children has doubled.91 The fact that women are delaying motherhood, or not having children at all, has helped bring down the gender pay gap as more women are working full-time for more of their lives.
Even more than delayed motherhood, the gender pay gap has narrowed because of changes in the nature of work. As national economies, especially in developed countries, have shifted focus from industry and manufacturing to services, men’s wages have been growing at a far slower rate than women’s wages. In 2016, British men and women both saw an increase in median earnings on the previous year. However, whereas men’s earnings grew by 1.9 per cent, women’s wages increased by a slightly more substantial 2.2 per cent. Between 1997 and 2016, women’s pay grew by 81 per cent compared to 62 per cent for men.92 The story from the US is similar: ‘while middle income male salaries have grown little over the past few decades, women’s have grown quite fast’.93 This means that for many middle- and low-income families, the impact of men’s stagnant wages has been offset by women working and earning more. Women’s wages were once considered ‘pin money’ and a supplement to the main family income; today they are more likely to be seen as a necessity. Low-income families with only one wage earner struggle most.
Despite the speed and scale of women’s increased earning power, celebrations have been few and far between. Barely a week goes by without alarmist news stories reminding us, ‘Women still far adrift on salary and promotion as gender pay gap remains a gulf’ or that the ‘Gender pay gap won’t close until 2069’. Outrage often seems more important than accuracy. From America we have the ‘potty mouthed princesses’, young girls who ‘drop F-bombs’ in protest at the gender pay gap. They pose the question: ‘Which is worse, swearing children or paying women less than men?’94 In the UK, the more sober Fawcett Society petitions employers and the government as well as running high-profile media campaigns to raise awareness about gender pay inequalities.95 On both sides of the Atlantic, there are bi-annual ‘equal pay days’ which mark the point in the year when women effectively start and stop earning relative to men.96 Campaigners present an image of a large and persistent gender pay gap resulting from entrenched sexism in the workplace.
Bizarrely, the narrower the pay gap becomes, and the less likely anyone is to argue seriously that men and women should be paid differently for doing the same work, the more attention equal pay garners. Irrespective of facts, every public figure wants to be seen publicly condemning the gender pay gap. Theresa May, in her very first speech as British Prime Minister, standing outside the door of 10 Downing Street, took the opportunity to declare, it is wrong that ‘if you’re a woman, you will earn less than a man’.97 Her predecessor, David Cameron, had promised to end the gender pay gap ‘in a generation’.98 In the run up to the American presidential election, Hillary Clinton criticized Donald Trump for saying ‘women don’t deserve equal pay unless they do as good a job as men’.99 Clinton, and others, took this to imply that Trump thought women didn’t deserve to be paid the same as men.
It’s not just politicians. Oscar-winning actor Jennifer Lawrence expressed her anger at finding out ‘how much less I was being paid than the lucky people with dicks’. She questioned not the film production company but herself, ‘I’m over trying to find the “adorable” way to state my opinion and still be likable.’100 Fellow Oscar-winner Patricia Arquette also spoke out against the gender pay gap: ‘We see this pay discrepancy between women and men in 98 per cent of all industries,’ she said. ‘So it’s impacting women across the board.’ She continued, ‘It costs the average woman almost half a million dollars over her lifetime, the gender pay gap. And for women with higher education, it costs them $2 million over their lifetime. So it’s an enormous impact.’101
Wealthy celebrities together with politicians of all persuasions add to the voices of feminist campaigners. The YouTube star Laci Green argues she’s a feminist, ‘Because of the gender pay gap that still exists in America. Men are paid more for doing the same job. Over the course of her career, a woman will have lost out on an average of $450,000 due to the discriminatory pay gap. The number is even greater for Latina and Black women, according to statistics from the White House.’102 In the UK, co-founder of the Women’s Equality Party, Catherine Mayer, aims to ‘draw attention to a persistent inequity, a gender pay gap that endures almost 46 years after the Equal Pay Act received royal assent’.103
Unfortunately for the pay gap campaigners, the frequent repetition of a claim does not make it true. The rhetoric surrounding the gender pay gap elides fact and fiction: men are not paid more than women for ‘doing the same job’. This is simply false. The obsession with the gender pay gap gets in the way of a clear analysis of what’s happening to earnings.
Despite all the attention given to the gender pay gap, there is surprisingly little agreement about either its size or the reason for its continued existence. In the US, some reports claim women are paid just 77 cents to every dollar a man is paid.104 In the UK women are said to earn, on average, 76 pence for every £1 a man gets.105 Such figures are indeed alarming. However, they depend upon a highly selective and ultimately misleading interpretation of pay data. As we’ll explore in more detail below, this large gap is arrived at by comparing average wages; in other words it depends upon us ignoring such differences as employment type and total hours worked. The more we compare ‘like for like’ rather than average pay, the smaller the pay gap appears to be. Christina Hoff Sommers argues that ‘when you control for relevant differences between men and women (occupations, college majors, length of time in workplace) the wage gap narrows to the point of vanishing’.106
The beauty of the gender pay gap is that it can be simultaneously large, small and non-existent. As Sheila Wild, former head of age and earnings inequality at the UK’s Equality and Human Rights Commission, has argued, ‘the statistics on the gender pay gap are so various and so nuanced that almost anyone can take anything out of it and say what they want’.107 Campaigners and commentators make pragmatic decisions about what to measure and as a result the gender pay gap can be made to appear whatever size suits the objectives of the person doing the measuring.
Feminist campaigners, researchers and reporters are incentivized to present data so as to make the gender pay gap appear to be as large as possible. To achieve this, they most frequently cite figures that compare men’s and women’s average annual earnings. This measures the difference between the total annual pay of all men and all women irrespective of hours worked, occupation, qualifications, age or career stage. This measure produces the frequently cited claim that women earn roughly 24 per cent less than men. Some campaigners further inflate the 76 pence for every £1, or 77 cents for every dollar, claim by multiplying it 52 times to show a difference in lifetime earnings. Although this assumes people begin their working lives aged 18 and carry on working until they are 70, it nonetheless produces a conveniently memorable figure: over the course of their working lives, we are told, women will earn $450,000 or £300,000 less than men.108
This might not be a complete fabrication, but it is certainly disingenuous. Measuring differences in total pay masks a multitude of variables: older workers who have built careers through numerous promotions often earn more than junior colleagues; people working part-time earn less in total each year than people working full-time, even though they may be paid more each hour; some jobs are handsomely rewarded, many others pay the minimum wage. An average – or mean – measurement includes the pay of everyone, even the tiny proportion of extremely high earners who make more money than almost everyone else combined. This further skews the statistics to make the gender pay gap seem even larger.
Ignoring all of these factors makes it seem as if women are paid less than men for doing the exact same work. Worse still, it presents all women as equally disadvantaged. In reality, the experiences of a woman working part-time in a shop are vastly different from those of a woman working full-time as a Chief Executive Officer of a large corporation. The grouping together of all women into one single group elides these differences and, as a result, further exploits the lowest paid women to justify pay increases for the already well-remunerated.
Arguments around an average pay gap do not stack up. If it really was the case that women could be paid 24 per cent less for doing the exact same job as a man, there would be far fewer men employed. Many countries have passed equal pay legislation, making it illegal to pay men and women differently for the same work. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to matter if a passionate feminist argument bears only a passing relationship to reality.
Most campaigners agree, when pushed, that the gender pay gap is at a record low. Unfortunately, the desire to make headlines comes at the expense of nuance. Simply by using a median – rather than a mean – form of arriving at the average, and thereby minimizing the impact of the small proportion of extremely high earners, the gender pay gap shrinks considerably. When median hourly earnings are compared, rather than total wages, we arrive at a far more realistic, but less headline-grabbing, figure. According to the UK’s Office for National Statistics, a comparison of median hourly earnings shows roughly a 9 per cent gender pay gap.109
This lower figure takes account of hours worked but not the jobs people do or the experience they have accrued. It also ignores the fact that total hours worked can have an impact on hourly pay. People who work more may be more likely to qualify for bonus payments that are dependent upon hours billed. Similarly, people who work more may gain experience at a faster rate, leaving them able to apply for promotion or a performance-related pay increase sooner than colleagues who work part-time.
When the wages of women and men working in the same jobs for the same number of hours, at the same level and for the same number of years, are compared, there is no pay gap at all. In fact, when we compare the pay of men and women in their twenties, no matter which way we measure the statistics, we find that women are the higher earners.110
Campaigners wanting to raise awareness of the gender pay gap prefer the average statistic not just because it is large but also because, they argue, women are more likely to work part-time and this is itself a sign of the sexism endemic in society and in the workplace. As we saw in the previous chapter, despite the absence of legal barriers and huge shifts in social attitudes, work remains highly segregated along gender lines. This is far more the case for unskilled jobs; men are more likely to work as labourers on building sites while women are more likely to work as carers in nursing homes. It’s also a fact that far more women than men work part-time, although recently this gap has been narrowing. The number of women working part-time in professional occupations has, over the past 20 years, been offset by a dramatic increase in the number of men employed part-time in poorly paid unskilled positions.111
Nonetheless, women remain far more likely to work part-time than men. In the US, 64 per cent of part-time workers are women.112 In the UK, 41 per cent of women work part time compared to 11 per cent of men.113 What these figures can’t tell us is whether women freely choose to work part-time or have no alternative either because there are few other employment options, or, more usually, because child care and family commitments fall disproportionately upon women and make full-time work impossible. This is the topic of the next chapter.
Different women’s experiences, and the choices available to them, vary enormously. For well-qualified women in professional jobs, particularly those who are married, working part-time allows them to supplement the family income and keep the status and stimulation of being employed outside the home while at the same time juggling the demands of intensive parenting. For these women, part-time work is a positive choice. For women without skills or qualifications, poorly paid part-time work may be the only option available. Furthermore, the high cost of childcare in comparison to earnings might make working more hours unviable for these women even if full-time employment was available.
As we’ve already noted, part-time jobs tend to pay less, not just in total but also per hour. When we compare solely female earnings we find that women who work part-time earn, on average, 32 per cent less each hour than women who work full-time.114 However, when just part-time workers are compared, a very different gender pay gap is revealed: women are, on average, paid more than men. Looking at people aged 30 to 39; we find that 38 per cent of women work part-time compared with 8 per cent of men. But the gender pay gap for this group is actually −8 per cent; in other words, women working part-time earn substantially more than men working part-time.115 This part-time gender pay gap in women’s favour is increasing.116
The explanation for this negative gender pay gap lies in the different types of jobs men and women working part-time are likely to do. A significant proportion of women work part-time in highly paid, professional occupations. Even though their hourly rate of pay may eventually fall behind their full-time colleagues, they may still earn more in total than people who work full-time in unskilled jobs. The female doctor who chooses to work part-time while her children are at school will initially earn the same each hour as her male colleague working full-time. After 10 years she is likely to be earning less each hour as her incremental pay rises and promotion opportunities have not kept pace with his. However, she is still earning more, in total, than the male retail assistant who works full-time or the male lorry driver who works part-time. There are some signs that a very small number of men in elite occupations are beginning to opt for part-time work.117 However, by far the majority of men who work part-time are in low-paid jobs and have taken part-time work, often supplemented by state benefits, in preference to no work at all.
Even though the number of men who work part-time is small, this is a growing proportion of the workforce. A report by the UK’s Institute for Fiscal Studies shows that men today are four times more likely to be working part-time than they were in the 1990s and that ‘men with low skills and in areas of the country with few jobs are among the worst hit by the loss of well-paid full-time employment’.118 For many men it seems that part-time work is still less likely to be a positive choice and more likely to be a last resort. Campaigns around the gender pay gap overshadow news about the decline in wages for men in low-skilled occupations. Yet, as most people still live in couples, a drop in male earnings has an impact upon entire families.
The continual evocation of gender in discussions around education, employment and earnings gives the impression that this is the key factor in determining a person’s life chances. In reality, this is far from the case. Wages are determined by many factors other than a person’s gender. Although rarely acknowledged, age is a big contributing factor in the gender pay gap. People over the age of 45 today began their working lives in an era dominated by very different attitudes. It was far less common for women to have careers; as we’ve seen, practical and social obstacles stood in their way. People currently in senior positions in any profession have built careers over a number of decades and promotions, and therefore more of the highest earners are, unsurprisingly, men. Older women entered the world of work without the educational advantages young women have today and when childcare was not so readily accessible; this historical legacy still has an impact upon their hourly earnings.
The ever-present focus on gender in discussions around pay prevents us from seeing that the real pay gap is not between males and females but between an elite group of both men and women in professional occupations and a growing number of people employed in low-paid, part-time, temporary jobs. What we have, today as much as ever, is a social class pay gap rather than a gender pay gap. A report by the UK’s Social Mobility Commission published in January 2017 calculated that professionals from working-class backgrounds earn £6,800 less each year than colleagues who come from affluent family backgrounds.119 This 17 per cent pay gap shows that Britain remains a ‘deeply elitist’ society according to the Commission’s Chairman, Alan Milburn. Yet even this 17 per cent statistic is a comparison of the wages paid to people in ‘professional’ occupations. It is not a measure of difference between professionals and unskilled workers.
Professional jobs in medicine, law and business tend to pay better than low-skilled work in catering, cleaning or caring. In general, within employment sectors, doctors earn more than nurses, teachers more than classroom assistants and lawyers more than secretaries. The jobs people do, in turn, are determined by myriad factors including gender but also, perhaps even more significantly, their educational level and type of qualification, their family contacts, role models, aspirations and ambitions.
Significantly, the jobs people end up doing also depend upon the work that is available and accessible. I may dream of being an astronaut but sadly few such vacancies are advertised in my local paper. What this means is that, particularly when national economies are struggling to be productive and social mobility is low, working-class children tend to grow up to get working-class jobs while upper- and middle-class children go on to take better paying professional jobs. In other words, social class is a far bigger determinant than gender of the work people do and the wages they earn. The French sociologists Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, writing in Reproduction, Education, Society and Culture, demonstrate how social class positions are reproduced and legitimized through home and school.
Among cleaners, caterers, carers and shop workers the gender pay gap is very slight; minimum wage jobs tend to pay the minimum wage to both men and women alike. Among Chief Executive Officers, on the other hand, the gender pay gap is roughly 30 per cent: more men work as CEOs, many have been in post for longer and they tend to be in bigger, more established firms. Yet I imagine few female CEOs, even those who campaign loudly against the pay gap, would trade their position for a less well-remunerated job complete with smaller gender pay gap.
The small and shrinking remaining pay gap primarily affects women over the age of 45, particularly those who have taken time out from employment to raise children and have then returned to work part-time. As always, this historical legacy plays itself out most profoundly on those in unskilled jobs who live in areas of low economic growth. As a result, a sizable group of working-class women enter retirement with significantly lower pension provision than men of the same age. Yet among all the discussion of the representation of women on boards of directors, the pay of female professors and the starting salaries of female graduates, little is said about this group of women.
The narrative of the gender pay gap is worse than just a distraction from real-income inequalities. In overlooking social class differences and the enormous progress elite women have made in recent years, feminist campaigners claim all women suffer the injustice of being paid less than men. Rather than telling young women that they are doing better than ever before and have a world of opportunities available to them, feminists tell women nothing has changed and they are still badly treated in the labour market.
Various solutions to the gender pay gap have been proposed. In 2015, the then British prime minister David Cameron introduced new legislation to make it mandatory for large companies to report wage differentials broken down according to gender. His proposal mandates every business with over 250 employees to ‘publish the gap between average female earnings and average male earnings’. This would, he declared, ‘cast sunlight on the discrepancies and create the pressure we need for change, driving women’s wages up’. This ‘naming and shaming’ legislation is set to come into effect in 2018.120
All legislation runs the risk of instigating perverse incentives and this focus on publicly exposing companies that apparently underpay women is surely no exception. For example, one very straightforward way for a company to lower their overall gender pay gap would be to get more women into senior and better paying roles. For some women this might be a welcome opportunity to realize a long-held ambition: indeed many public sector employers, universities and multinational corporations already run mentorship schemes and other training programmes designed to help women advance their careers. But if such voluntary schemes do not have the desired effect then perhaps more pressure might be applied to women to push them into roles they are reluctant to take. At the same time, it is hard to imagine that women’s requests to work part-time, flexibly or take a career break will be looked upon favourably.
Far worse than pushing women into top jobs is the potential for companies to tackle a pay gap by not recruiting women into less well-paying lower-level positions. Such junior posts can provide people, particularly those without formal qualifications or high-level connections, with a ‘foot in the door’ and an opportunity to work their way up in a business. Concern about increasing the gender pay gap might have the unintended consequence of denying some women this route to social mobility. Another solution to the pay gap already being trialled by some employers and perhaps likely to become more prevalent when naming and shaming legislation comes into effect is simply to pay women more. This is already happening in some British universities.
Paying Women Professors More
Data analysed by the Times Higher Education in 2016 shows that women working in UK universities on full-time academic contracts earn, on average, 11 per cent less than men in the same roles. For professors, this pay gap is smaller, with women earning 5.8 per cent less than their male counterparts: a difference of £4,570 a year.121 There may be many reasons for this pay gap. Academics are often awarded an annual pay increment, so people who have been in work longer tend to earn more than new entrants to the profession. The pay gap data could be skewed by a preponderance of men at the end of their careers and women at the start of their careers. We can expect such a pay gap to decline over time – which is indeed what is already happening.
The gender pay gap in academia might also be down to the institutions academics work in: older research-focussed universities tend to offer higher salaries than newer teaching-focussed institutions. Similarly, the subject areas people work in also have an impact on their salary. Data from the Higher Education Statistics Agency show that women comprise 45 per cent of academic staff in UK higher education. However, there are quite considerable variations by discipline. Although women and men are almost equally represented in social studies and humanities, more men work in science, engineering and technology disciplines while more women are employed in education and subjects allied to medicine.
Although we may wish it were otherwise, people working at the cutting edge of scientific and technological research can command higher salaries because they have competitive employment alternatives in the private sector that are rarely available to those working in humanities disciplines. Furthermore, discipline impacts upon career structure – which, in turn, has an effect on salary. More women academics work in education or nursing departments and are likely to have spent the first part of their careers working as teachers or nurses. When they then embark on an academic career they compete against colleagues of the same age in other departments who are already in possession of a portfolio of publications.
Rather than taking account of real differences that might underpin the data, many universities prefer to demonstrate their feminist credentials and be proactive in tackling the pay gap. Mentoring schemes to support female academics in negotiating salaries and applying for promotion abound. Some British universities have gone further. At the University of Essex one-off pay increases, averaging about £4,000 a year, have been awarded to all female professors.122 These special additional payments, awarded on the basis of biology, are presented as a logical solution to a gender pay gap assumed to result from deeply entrenched sexist attitudes rather than a combination of historical legacy and the choices women make. Making ‘compensatory’ payments to female professors creates the false perception that women are disadvantaged in academia and need special treatment to achieve equal status with their male colleagues. They suggest that women should be paid more just for being female, rather than for the quality of their research and teaching. Female academics have no need for such pity-payments.
As always, the focus on the gender pay gap in academia ignores other, far greater, pay inequalities. Many women employed by universities work in administration, catering or housekeeping – photocopying, cleaning offices and making coffee for academics. Likewise, many men are employed in maintaining buildings and ensuring campus security. These women and men are paid a fraction of a professorial salary but their jobs do not permit them the time to attend mentorship programmes and support networks. The women who keep the university infrastructure going on a daily basis are often too busy simply getting by to put effort into presenting themselves as victims of the patriarchy and in need of bonus payments for being female. Yet I suspect they may well be envious of the pay increase awarded to female professors.
The current obsession with the gender pay gap does women few favours. At a time when women and men earn the same pay for the same work and younger women earn more, on average, than men of the same age, campaigners rely on a disingenuous and highly selective interpretation of statistics to summon the pay gap into existence. As a result, the reality of there being many well-paid career opportunities available to women today is overshadowed by a view of women as poorly paid and taken for granted in the workplace. The politicization of the pay gap means it has taken on a symbolic importance for feminists and a continual round of high-profile initiatives raise this one issue above and beyond its real-world impact. The obsession with the gender pay gap means that women’s lives are judged solely according to how much they are paid and a more nuanced discussion about both pay and the problems with combining work with being a mother is avoided. In the next chapter we explore why women are more likely than men to opt for part-time work.