**Grazia may have changed the law, but new figures show that the pay gap problem starts earlier than we thought. Helen Lewis has a plan
When does the gender pay gap start? Depressingly, a new study shows it begins with pocket money. The average 14-year-old boy gets £11.47 a week, while a girl the same age gets only £10.67. The finding wasn’t a one-off: in 2013, a website that allows parents to assign pocket money to their children in return for doing chores found that boys got an average of £1.46 per task. Girls? Just £1.25.
It seems mad, but 133 years after married women were given the right to own property, we still assume that women’s incomes are merely a supplement to the (male) breadwinner’s. Just last month, Blanche Girouard, a teacher at top London girls’ school St Paul’s, said it was a shame her pupils were spending their youth ‘cramming their heads full of facts’, adding ‘Not so long ago, parents didn’t bother to educate their daughters – who had more fun as a result.’
Really? Bad education meant poorer girls lacked the skills to escape a life of drudgery, while the diaries of heiresses reveal how dull a life of gilded leisure could be. (How many boating parties with chinless posh blokes could you stomach in a single summer?) But the attitude that women’s careers just aren’t as important as men’s is stubbornly persistent. Unlike our grandmothers’ generation, though, we don’t give up our careers when we marry. Instead, it’s having children that puts the brakes on.
Many women move to part-time work or leave high-flying careers when they have kids. (Others rule out even trying to get a demanding job, believing they’d have to give it up.) Fathers don’t face the same problems – in fact, research shows bosses like their male employees to be reliable family men.
So what’s the answer? We need to stop telling girls that they would have more fun if they were less ambitious. We need to stop telling ourselves that it’s selfish to want to keep our careers. For most of us, what we do is a big part of our identity. It gives us economic independence and makes us feel like a person in our own right; not just someone’s girlfriend, someone’s wife, someone’s mother.
And we need to start those lessons early. Sweden has just announced it is giving all 16-year- olds a copy of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s We Should All Be Feminists. In it, the Nigerian author argues that when raising children, we should ‘focus on ability, instead of gender’. We should tell boys it’s OK to care about others and it doesn’t make them less of a man
if they don’t want the big corner office. At the same time, Adichie says – in a passage that was sampled on Beyoncé’s latest album – we should stop saying to girls, ‘You can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful, but not too successful, otherwise you would threaten the man.’
In other words, we should treat children equally. And pocket money would be a good place to start.
Helen Lewis is deputy editor of the ‘New Statesman’