UK seeks more from female workers
It was the birth of twins that prompted charity fundraiser Sarah Griffiths to stop working. While her employer tried to be flexible, she found it impossible to juggle the daily commute into London, manage a team of seven and find suitable childcare that didn’t wipe out most of her salary.
Women such as Griffiths are in the spotlight in Britain as new disclosure rules reveal a country in which female workers continue to be paid significantly less than their male counterparts.
The issue is more than one of fairness. For an economy held back by weak productivity growth and skill shortages, the under-utilisation of women in the labour force represents a major cost.
“We really need to identify where potential is within our own workforce and population,” says Jana Javornik, director of the Noon Centre for Equality and Diversity in Business at the University of East London.
More than 10,000 firms and organisations have reported their gender pay gap, with the majority revealing that they pay their male staff more on average than their female employees.
Consulting firm McKinsey estimates that eliminating the disparity could add £150 billion ($291b) to annual gross domestic product by 2025 by boosting female participation, encouraging them to work longer hours and moving them into more productive jobs. Research by PricewaterhouseCoopers puts the figure even higher.
“Gender pay gap reporting could boost productivity by encouraging employers to explore whether they are making the most of their talent,” says Charles Cotton, who heads the performance and reward research agenda at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. Bringing more women into fulltime work through incentives, retraining and better pay, and making traditionally male-dominated professions less daunting, won’t be an overnight fix for the labour market. But such measures may become more pressing if Brexit worsens the situation by making it harder to hire European Union workers.
For many such as Griffiths, there is little financial incentive to carry on working. According to the Family and Childcare Trust, the average price of 25 hours of nursery care a week for a child under two is now £125 in England, and £184 in central London.