A new City Living Survey by* Time Out* has revealed the extent of the gender pay gap in London. The magazine quizzed 12,350 Londoners about everything from their ingoings and outgoings to what makes them happy, and reported that women on average earn £4,500 less than men a year, or £375 a month.
They also highlighted that average London wage is £29,500 p/a but that the average resident of the city thinks they need £38,500 p/a to live comfortably. That means London residents feel they need an extra £9000 a year to fully enjoy their city - a gap that's wider for women already earning on average half of this figure less than their male peers. All in all, pretty crushing stats for any woman in London who regularly scrapes her overdraft in the struggle to balance a social life and extortionate rent - the average is £700 a month according to Time Out.
It's likely that for the most part, we aren't even aware of the disparity between our pay compared to our male peers. When Grazia launched its Mind The Pay Gap campaign in 2014, we highlighted that women can earn £200,000 less than men over a working lifetime.
However, female workers in London - and beyond - will soon have a tool to use as a weapon against discriminative pay and get closer to what we deem a comfortable pay threshold. After succeeding in having our campaign brought forward by David Cameron and the Conservative government, existing pay transparency legislation - Section 78 of the Equality Act 2010 – will be compulsory by early next year.
That change in the law will mean 10 million women employed by companies of 250 staff or more in the UK will have access to vital information about their own pay gap. Hopefully it will also put pressure on companies themselves to assess how fairly they pay men and women respectively.