LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

that there are ways such barriers can be tackled. It has a higher proportion of working women than India, largely thanks to the development of its garment industry, where 80 per cent of the workers are female. On a trip there in 2015, I saw for myself the difference that a job in one of these factories can make to an individual’s life. In a room packed with rows of women at sewing machines, one young worker’s ID card, hanging around her neck, bore the photograph of a young boy on the reverse. She was a widow and this was her only child. His future was her biggest motivation and she was able to pay for his education thanks to her job – without it, they would both be dependent on the mercy of relatives. Indeed, Pande and Moore say the garment sector has been important for Bangladeshi women’s empowerment far beyond the factory floor: ‘The explosive growth of that industry during the last thirty years caused a surge in large-scale female labour force participation. It also delayed marriage age and caused parents to invest more in their daughters’ education.’10

      In the UK much of the conversation about the workplace gaps remaining between men and women has focused on pay, largely due to a 2017 law requiring larger employers to reveal the difference in the mean and median pay of their male and female workers. Because gender pay reporting is based on averages it is in some ways a crude calculation – the airline easyJet, for example, reported a particularly large gap because men dominate its cohort of pilots, who are paid considerably more than the mostly female cabin crew.

      The system does, however, lead to questions being asked about how women might be better represented among the higher-paid roles, which is why the director-general of the Confederation of British Industry, Carolyn Fairbairn, welcomes it: ‘This is about fairness but it’s also about productivity in our economy and how we have businesses that have all the talents. We do not have enough women who are pilots, or CEOs who are women, or enough top senior consultants in hospitals who are women. These are issues that we now need to really grip.’11 Others believe the obligation to report has transformed companies’ conversations about gender. ‘When we’ve talked about the pay gap before, the response has always been “That must be happening somewhere else”,’ says Ann Francke of the Chartered Management Institute. Now, she says companies are being forced to confront their data and reflect on the picture it paints.12

      As well as patterns evident within companies, there are others which emerge in comparisons of pay for men and women working within the same occupation. Data from the UK’s Office for National Statistics shows considerable variation in average hourly earnings between, for example, male and female financial managers and directors. Full-time men in that occupation earn an average of £35.52 per hour (or £72,000 per year), while the average for women is £24.29 per hour, translating into an annual salary of around £43,000. In the same 2017 data set, male town planning officers earned an average of around £20 per hour, while the figure for women was £14.50. Most of the roles where the gap disappeared or was reversed, so that women were earning more (secretaries and fitness instructors, for example), had hourly earnings at the lower end of the spectrum.13

      It is possible that these comparisons mask variations about the work done within the different categories: the scope and responsibility of the roles, whether the jobs were in the public or private sector, the region in which they were based and the skills, experience and competence of the individuals whose information went into the data set. But like companies’ gender pay gap figures, they can be a valuable starting point for a conversation about disparities. Perhaps the women had previously taken time out from work or been part-time for a period – but would that, or should that, fully account for the gap with comparable men once they returned to full-time?

      According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, part-time work can have a striking effect in shutting down normal wage progression. In general, pay rises with experience, but part-time workers, who are mostly women, miss out on these gains. ‘By the time a first child is grown up (aged twenty), mothers earn about 30 per cent less per hour, on average, than similarly educated fathers. About a quarter of that wage gap is explained by the higher propensity of the mothers to have been in part-time rather than full-time paid work while that child was growing up, and the consequent lack of wage progression,’ said a study published in early 2018. In what they called ‘the long-term depressing effect’ of part-time work, the authors also reported a significant impact on graduate women. ‘It is now the highest-educated women whose wages are the furthest behind their male counterparts,’ said IFS Associate Director Robert Joyce, ‘and this is particularly related to the fact that they lose out so badly from working part-time.’14

      At Harvard, the economist Professor Claudia Goldin has examined the way different jobs are structured in order to see how this sort of pay penalty might be addressed. She’s pointed to how some occupations – including within business, finance and the law – generally pay a premium for people working longer hours. A lawyer expected to be readily available for clients and working sixty hours per week, for example, is likely to earn more than double the salary of a comparable colleague working thirty hours a week. Professor Goldin says this ‘non-linearity’ arises when the job is set up or has historically been done in a way that makes it difficult for workers to substitute for one another. Within this environment, those who work shorter hours will suffer a disproportionate wage penalty.

      She contrasts that with what has happened in the United States with pharmacists, a high-income profession in which women are well represented. In the 1970s many were self-employed and the sector was dominated by small independent pharmacies, but now the majority are employees of large companies or hospitals. Part-time working is common, but pay tends to be perfectly in line with the number of hours worked – those who do fewer hours are paid proportionately less. Goldin attributes this to the ease with which pharmacists are able to substitute for one another – no single person is required to be available for an extended number of hours or for certain hours of the day. ‘The spread of vast information systems and the standardisation of drugs have enhanced their ability to seamlessly hand off clients and be good substitutes for one another. The result is that short and irregular hours are not penalised.’15

      Professor Goldin says this structure helps to make it worthwhile for women to stay in paid work rather than leave to care for families, and that other professions could learn from the example of pharmacy. There will still be roles where employees won’t easily be able to swap in for each other – the founder of a business perhaps, or someone with unique and non-replicable expertise – but these should be fewer than is the case at present.

      Elsewhere there is other evidence about how changing systems and processes could make a difference in areas where there are significant gender gaps – bonuses for senior doctors for example. When a BBC investigation showed that 95 out of the 100 highest-paid hospital consultants in England were male, ‘additional pay’, such as overtime or bonuses for clinical excellence, was a considerable factor.16 One consultant, Mahnaz Hashmi, told me what applying for the bonuses involves: ‘You have to fill out a lengthy form within a short time-frame of a few weeks, showcasing your achievements and providing evidence for them. If you are part-time you will have less to put down. In the early stages it feels like a lot of effort for relatively small bonuses, but they become more valuable as they accumulate over the years.’

      The NHS process has also been based around consultants putting themselves forward. ‘Women seem to do this less,’ she says. But she also believes that achieving recognition in the system demands a willingness to put in a lot of your own time – for example by serving on awards committees in years when you are not yourself applying, thereby making sure you are up to date with the latest criteria and scoring schemes. ‘It’s difficult to do when you are part-time, and if you come back to full-time later you usually find there’s already a wide salary differential between men and women consultants.’ My BBC colleague Nick

Скачать книгу