Gender pay gap quickly became common corporate buzzwords in 2018 after the UK government made it obligatory for enterprise organizations with more than 250 employees to publish and report on their pay structures on a government website. The main essence of this policy was to address the obviously widening gap between the two genders at work. For clarity purpose, gender pay gap (GPG) is mainly different from gender pay inequality (GPI).
Gender pay inequality, in the simplest of terms, is a situation whereby men and women who are doing what appears to be the same job are not being paid equal payments whereas gender pay gap is about the average pay of men and women within a particular organization. Simply put, this means an addition of all the men’s salary and dividing by the total number of men, the addition of all the women’s salary and dividing it by the total number of women and then calculation the gap between the two.
While the former is simply what it is – Imbalance, the latter is more likely to reflect structural issues, such as a shortage of women in senior roles or occupational segregation, in which a particular gender tend to be concentrated in certain types of jobs. However, many employees are unwilling to make that distinction between the two and the first reaction to seeing gender pay gap data for their organisation will be to ask why it appears to discriminate between men and women.
The whole process caused a frenzy of media activity. The gender pay gap figures revealed that 8 in 10 UK firms pay men more than women. I don’t think this outcome came as a surprise to many. BBC found itself at the center of, with two-thirds of its top earners being men. Commentators were referring to the BBC issue as being about the gender pay gap when in fact it is actually about equal pay for the same job. Although the media frenzy has rapidly vanished as it began, we are now left with a sense of what next. As all the corporations also published a list of steps they are willing to take to close the ridiculous gaps published, we can only wait to see what measures they will put in place to deliver on their promises of closing the gender pay gaps.
Both GPG and GPI are issues that pose serious problems in our society and as gloomy as it is to say, women are at the receiving end of both of these maladies. No matter the fancy word we want to use to brush it up, there is a blatant inequality and women are being paycheque cheated on greatly in the workplace. I often wonder how this inequality came about in the first place. I know for a fact that while I was still in primary school, girls were out rightly outperforming boys in the classroom. Evidently, this trend carried on in secondary schools with girls still getting higher grades and participating in advanced placement classes at higher rates.
After this blossoming head starts, there are proofs that suggest that the momentum of a women’s career pace seem to slow down at some point, especially when she starts to have relationships and procreate offspring. It becomes apparent that there is a focus shift and career aspiration immediately takes a position at the bottom of the ladder. Many women start to appreciate flexibility from their employer rather than pay increase and promotion. However, flexibility on its own may somewhat be the cause of a woman’s disadvantaged position when it comes to pay. There is a direct correlation between the thinning out of opportunities to work flexibly and the thinning out of women in more senior roles. This has a very huge impact on the gap between average male and female salaries.
Many corporations have argued that it is the women’s fault for not asking as high as their male counterparts that result in gender pay inequality. Interviewers have further supported this argument by saying that the asking pay of men during negotiating interviews is often way higher than that of women. Additionally, men are known to throw caution to the wind and ask for eye-bulging figures during salary review and performance appraisal conversations than women would. This then brings me to my mind-boggling questions – Are we women selling ourselves short? Are we the cause of our own predicament? Are we exchanging being allowed to work flexibly and part-time for a pay increase and promotion? Are we settling for the minimum?
I remember preparing so hard for my first interview right after school but my mind didn’t even consider preparing to negotiate. In the first several years of my career, I am always so happy to get any job offer that when the hiring manager stated the salary, I simply said ‘Okay, thank you. The idea that I could ask for more, that my skills and talent were worth more never crossed my mind. There is a belief that most women behave as I did in those days – that we simply don’t negotiate and this remains one of the prevailing reasons for why gender pay gap persists. Employers often base the starting salary on the candidates’ salary history, which means that if a woman had lower salaries in the past, she will always be at a deficit. Its time to take charge! While we wait for corporations to tidy up the gaps as they have promised, the women folks can also start to speak up more, ask for more and negotiate better for ourselves.
