The glass ceiling to workplace gender equality still looks bulletproof

Almost half a century after the introduction of the Equal Pay Act, the UK still has a gaping gender pay chasm – and in a culture of pay secrecy where a third of all employees do not know that it is illegal for women and men to get paid differently, is this any wonder, asks Josie Cox

The Ford sewing machinist strike 1968: a landmark labour-relations dispute in the UK (Getty)

It was a chance conversation with a male colleague who had just resigned that jolted Laura Smith* to action. “Our industry is known to be poorly paid,” the 29-year-old journalist explains, “so I never really bothered to think too much about it.” But over coffee on his last day, her departing desk neighbour casually mentioned the figure on his pay cheque. She, several years more experienced and with a significantly greater remit and more senior job title than him, was being paid £8,000 less every year. She raised the discrepancy with management and was swiftly awarded a salary bump. Her ego remains bruised though, and her cynicism flagrant.

“For every woman who happens to be made aware of such obvious injustice, there are at least 10 others who never will be,” she says. “Something desperately needs to change.”

Almost 50 years after the introduction of the Equal Pay Act, and a century after the first British women were granted the right to vote, the UK’s gender pay chasm remains gaping. Efforts to close it have had scant success so far, and while discrimination doesn’t tell the full story it still plays a depressingly significant part.

The Fawcett Society, a charity leading the fight against gender inequality, recently conducted research concluding that a third of all employees do not know that it is illegal for women and men to get paid differently for doing the same work. The same study also found that a culture of pay secrecy exists in the UK, which is facilitating discrimination.

Some 53 per cent of women questioned and 47 per cent of men said that they would be uncomfortable telling a colleague how much they earn and a staggering 60 per cent of workers said that they were unaware that they have a legal right to speak to colleagues about how much they get paid if they think they are being discriminated against because of their gender.

“In workplaces all over the country, pay discrimination is able to thrive and is more common than people realise because of a culture of pay secrecy which persists,” said Sam Smethers, chief executive of the Fawcett Society, at the time of publication of the report. “People do not know their basic rights and do not know what their colleagues earn.”

Pauline Becker, who travelled from Leeds to an equal pay demonstration in Trafalgar Square in 1969 (Getty)

Fuelled by figures from the Office for National Statistics showing that the mean gender pay gap for women working full-time is still well above 13 per cent nationally, the government in April 2018 took one of its boldest steps yet to address and try and close the gap. It introduced legislation forcing any company employing at least 250 people to publish statutory calculations each year showing how large the pay gap is between their male and female employees.

For every woman who happens to be made aware of such obvious injustice, there are at least 10 others who never will be. Something desperately needs to change

Laura Smith

Campaign groups at the time hailed the move as a significant step, but numerous critics have since derided the policy as toothless. Others predicted that the data would not be granular enough to facilitate material change. Many argued that the reports – which collectively show that more than three-quarters of all UK companies pay their male staff more than their female staff on average – had shock value, but that the data was a weak weapon in our mission to smash through the metaphorical glass ceiling.

Leader of the Women’s Equality Party Sophie Walker has said that the legislation “will not be enough to close the gender pay gap”. Instead, she has urged the government “to stop fiddling around the margins and build an economy that sees women”.

Hephzi Pemberton, the founder and chief executive of Equality Group, an organisation that promotes diversity in the workplace, also says that there is potential for much more effective action and policy.

“Transparency and accountability are always good places to start when you want to bring around change,” she tells me, adding however that “positive reinforcement for businesses that achieve greater pay parity will work better than simply naming and shaming those who don’t”.

Leader of the Women’s Equality Party Sophie Walker says the new pay gap legislation ‘will not be enough’ (Getty)

Such positive reinforcement, she explains, could be financial – in the form of tax benefits, for example – or promotional, in the form of awards and greater recognition.

“I think sharing the practices and results from those that are succeeding will help to continue to drive the gap down,” Pemberton says.

“For individual companies, it can help for them to do some fairly light introspection and work out where the divergence in outcomes is starting and whether there are specific policies, targeted training, effective returner programmes or working with specialist recruiters on better remunerated positions that could help,” she adds.

Sharing the caring

Other measures intended to combat gender inequality in the workplace have received mixed reviews at best and have yet to produce meaningful results.

In April 2015 the government introduced a policy of Shared Parental Leave – or SPL – allowing new parents to share up to 50 weeks of parental leave and 37 weeks of pay between them. But the law, which at the time was championed as a step towards quashing an “Edwardian system” that encourages mothers to bear the brunt of childcare, has done little to flush out arguably anachronistic norms.

Official figures reveal that a paltry 2 per cent of eligible parents have taken advantage of SPL annually since its introduction. Government figures have also shown that in the 12 months to March 2018 approximately 9,200 people took SPL. Around 1.2 million workers had children during that time, of which about half were entitled to SPL.

“I think the problem is partly that many couples simply don’t know that SPL exists,” says 35-year old Dan Smith, who has been the primary carer of his one-year-old daughter since getting made redundant from his job in the City in 2017. “And then I also think that our culture has something to do with it. We’re programmed to think that the mum will be the one to stay at home for at least a few months when the child is born”.

Only 2 per cent of parents have made use of shared parental leave since its introduction (Getty/iStock)

“Clearly we need to get with the times. But this isn’t something that’s going to change overnight.”

Still male, pale and stale

Lack of progress at entry and mid-level has left the top echelons of corporate Britain stagnantly homogenous in recent years too, and prospects of marked change in 2019 seem dim.

The chief executives of the FTSE 100, the index of the UK’s largest publicly-listed companies, are still 94 per cent male. In November, the independent Hampton Alexander Review found that while the index is on track to meet a target of filling at least 30 per cent of company board positions with women – up from 12.5 per cent in 2011 – almost one in four companies in the broader FTSE 350 still only have one woman on their board.

As you read this list of excuses you might think it’s 1918 not 2018. It reads like a script from a comedy parody but it’s true

Amanda Mackenzie

In May the government published a report detailing some of the explanations top executives have provided for not appointing women to FTSE company boards. These include that women “don’t fit in”, “don’t want the hassle” and that “all the good [women] have already gone”.

“As you read this list of excuses you might think it’s 1918 not 2018,” said Amanda Mackenzie, chief executive of charity Business in the Community, in response to the report. “It reads like a script from a comedy parody but it’s true.”

As we head into 2019, optimism about imminent and material change when it comes to making Britain’s boardrooms more female and workforce more equal, is therefore muted at best.

The TUC has warned that, based on the current pace of progress, it would take around 40 years to reach pay parity between men and women. To speed this up, the union says, the government would need to “get tough” on gender pay gap reporting by “increasing resources for enforcement, introducing immediate fines for non-compliance and requiring employers to publish action plans about how they are going to close their gap alongside their figures”. Smaller employers should also be required to report, the TUC has said.

It has also called for an end to “the motherhood pay penalty” and urged for a crackdown on “pregnancy discrimination”. The government, it has said, should work more closely with employers to create better paid part-time jobs.

In late November, minister for women and equalities Penny Mordaunt announced that her department was launching an initiative to help marginalised, low paid and unskilled women to maximise their potential in the workplace.

This includes a £600,000 fund to “help women who are especially vulnerable, to return to work when they are ready”. It’s particularly designed to support those who have experienced homelessness, domestic abuse and mental health problems.

The move underscores the government’s awareness of the problem, but for many women it still only represents a gesture of goodwill; a drop in the ocean, at best.

Journalist Carrie Gracie and BBC employees gather outside the BBC studios on International Women’s Day (PA)

“The problem to my mind is so entrenched and so far-reaching,” journalist Laura Smith says. “We might be taking baby steps in the right direction, but the reality is that most people still don’t understand the full extent of the gender pay gap and inequality in the workplace. I like to think that 2019 will create new momentum and fresh hope for change. But for now, I’m not holding my breath.”

Father of one Dan Smith agrees. “Arguably we’ve made some cracks in the so-called glass ceiling over the last few years, there are definitely more women in senior positions – more female role models – but perhaps it would be more accurate to call it a concrete ceiling for now,” he notes, wistfully. “If it really is a glass ceiling we’re probably dealing with the bulletproof kind.”