Brexit Is Distracting Us From The Gender Pay Gap

Following Grazia’s Mind The Pay Gap campaign, UK companies with more than 250 employees were legally required to publish their gender pay gap for the first time last April. Next week they will reveal their second year’s figures – and far from marking a new dawn for British women, the data we have so far doesn’t look encouraging. In fact, for many companies the situation has actually worsened over the past year.

British women have had equal pay since the ’70s – in law anyway. In 1982, an EU legal judgement forced us to introduce equal pay for work of equal value, which made things a bit better. In 1997, another EU directive put a stop to UK companies paying part-time workers (75% of whom are women) less per hour than full-time workers, which made it a bit better still. And yet, today men in the UK earn an average of 18.4% more than women. So what will it take to close the gender pay gap?

The evidence suggests that transparency works. In Denmark, companies with more than 35 employees have been legally required to publish gender-specific data on wages since 2006. At those firms that had to report their data, the gender pay gap shrank 7% by 2008, while the pay gap for those that didn’t stayed the same. So why does progress in the UK look like it’s still sluggish? Of course, our gender pay transparency is still in its infancy. But women’s exclusion from leadership roles is also a significant factor.

When the US university MIT looked at 30 years of hiring data, they found that it was only when they made a specific effort to promote more women to senior positions that women were promoted on an equal basis to men. And no, standards were not lowered. In fact, the women hired were ‘more successful than their male peers’. Conversely, when MIT just went about business as usual, exceptional women were far less likely to be promoted.

A study of 9,000 employees at an unnamed US tech company revealed similar findings. This tech firm actually prided itself on meritocracy, but when they looked at the sex-disaggregated data, they found that men were getting larger salary increases than women who scored as well as them in performance reviews. The company made its procedures more transparent and, within five years, the pay gap had all but disappeared.

The truth is that the gender pay gap doesn’t disappear on its own. If we want to eradicate it we need constant vigilance. And the problem is that in Brexit Britain, companies have just been a bit... well, distracted, to say the least. When you’re fighting for your survival and have no idea what your costs may be in two weeks’ time, closing the gender pay gap may not be at the top of your agenda. Especially if you know no one else is really paying attention either: who has the bandwidth to care about women’s rights when we don’t know if we’re going to have access to necessary medicines? Certainly not the Government, which has failed over two years to pass its once flagship – but now watered down and repeatedly delayed – violence against women bill.

Meanwhile, we are missing out on the EU’s action plan on equal pay. Issued in November 2017 and due to be implemented by all member states this year, it gives legally binding rights for workers to request information on equal pay in their companies, and mandates sanctions, compensation and enforcement powers against rule-breaking firms. Our Government has repeatedly refused to answer questions on how and when the regulations will be introduced here, in light of Brexit.

This was meant to be the week we left the EU. Whether we do actually crash out with no deal, May manages to impose her deal or we have yet further delays, one thing is clear: managing the Brexit fallout will continue to dominate the UK’s agenda for at least a decade. Whichever way you voted in 2016, a decade more of this is not what anyone wants. Most of us just want this to stop so we can talk about something else. Anything else, but particularly the many issues that need addressing to make Britain a better and fairer country.

Women for a People’s Vote, the campaign group I’m involved in, believe giving the country another say is the only chance we have to stop talking about Brexit. I don’t know about you, but to me that looks awfully attractive right about now.

Find out more about Women for a People’s Vote at women4pv.org