Still less equal than others: LEADER

When the Equal Pay Act was passed in 1970, it looked like the end of a long battle - equality at last, where it mattered most, in the pay packet. But it didn't happen. Twenty-five years later, little has changed. Women still earn only 79.5 per cent of men's earnings. Among the hourly paid, they get only 72 per cent of men's pay. Right across the social classes, only 2 per cent of women earn as much or more than their partners.

The new draft Code of Practice published yesterday by the Equal Opportunities Commission is unlikely to make much impact, either. At least, the Government hopes not. The EOC lobbied unsuccessfully for a tough new streamlined law: it takes 16 procedural steps to bring a case claiming equal pay for work of equal value. The law is deliberately obscure and hard to use, with one current case still stuck in the courts after 10 years. How many low-paid women have that kind of stamina? This Code of Practice is a sop, better than nothing but essentially toothless.

The Government is deeply, though secretly, opposed to equal pay, for the same reasons it resisted the EU social chapter and abolished wages councils. It likes low pay. Nine out of 10 new jobs are low-paid work for women. Women are cheap and will work at rates men can't afford, though the benefit rules mean the only women who can afford to take these jobs are those living with a man in work.

Does unequal pay really matter? After all, there is no rational pay structure anyway. If there was, a futures trader might not be paid 10 times as much as a dustman, or a PR executive 10 times as much as a nurse. So why should women expect some special dispensation from the peculiarities and injustices of the market?

Because it is not just a matter of being fair to women. The taxpayer is footing a huge, unnecessary social security bill as a result of the fact that women cannot earn enough to become breadwinners: 1.1 million lone mothers with their 1.7 million children live on social security because they can't get jobs that pay them above benefit levels. Why should we pay for them because employers are allowed to pay wages that fall below the poverty line?

Most jobs are still sex-segregated to make it easy to pay women less. Their cooking, cleaning, typing and filing jobs are regarded as low status and low value compared with work men do with no greater training. Deep in the culture, burnt into the psyche at the mother's breast, is the idea that women do this kind of work for free anyway. Their work is related to their housework, so it doesn't really count. Undervaluing what women do runs deep. But now it is costing the state so dear, equality has become an economic necessity.