Outbreak could help women to close pay gap

UCL says lower wages for women will take 40 years to put right but a seismic event could change that

WOMEN will take another 40 years to close the wage gap with men, according to groundbreaking research by UCL – but the coronavirus pandemic could help them catch up.

The team of researchers, who used data from Labour Force Surveys (LFS) to track the gender pay gap from 1921 to the present day, found the rate at which women in Britain were catching up on wages had slowed in the past two decades to under 0.5 per cent per year.

With the raw wage gap for all employees standing at 17 per cent between men and women, it will take between 35 and 40 years at the current rate to achieve parity.

Prof Alex Bryson, who headed the Government-funded study, said a key factor was women continuing to take prime responsibility for childcare even in countries that had the most womenfriendly workplaces such as in Scandinavia.

That meant that, despite overtaking men in the Seventies in higher education performance, the cut-out in their careers to bring up a family meant women were earning far less than men, so widening the overall wage gap.

“Even in the most progressive parts of Europe, women take up the lion’s share of childcare. That translates into a lack of work experience that means their wages don’t look anything like the rate that we would expect it to be,” said Prof Bryson.

“Unless there is a change that enables women to be as present in the labour market, you won’t see the wage gap closing as quickly as we might want it to.”

The research did, however, show that major societal changes – as happened during and after the Second World War – could have an impact, raising questions about whether an event as seismic as the coronavirus pandemic could change attitudes to work that would benefit women.

The gap in hourly pay among fulltime manual workers closed by a dramatic 11 percentage points during the Second World War – from 51 per cent in 1939 to 40 per cent in 1945.

This was largely because women – many of whom had stayed at home to care for their children – were drafted into the workplace to help.

Prof Bryson speculated that the way the Covid-19 pandemic had forced men to share the childcare responsibilities could be “akin to a little tremor, a little social revolution”.

At the same time, a shift to working remotely from home forced by the lockdown, and social distancing restrictions in workplaces could benefit women who were penalised for seeking more flexible working schedules.

Prof Bryson said it was noticeable that in professions such as law, where business was done face-to-face, there were fewer women in the upper echelons compared with those in lower, younger ranks – a feature largely fired by childcare responsibilities.

“It may be that this will encourage employers to design their jobs in a way that they had not hitherto considered but have been shown can work during coronavirus,” he said. The alternative was that businesses could lose the “potential” of women if they did not alter their practices.

The research showed younger women had made progress in closing the gap with men. While those born in 1958 were 16 percentage points behind men at the age of 23, it had fallen to nine points for those born in 1970.

Yet, the gap increased for both cohorts by the time the women were 42. For those born in 1958, it was 35 percentage points, while it was 31 percentage points for those born in 1970.

‘It may be that this will encourage employers to design jobs in a way they had not hitherto considered’