Ready to fight for what’s yours, ladies?
The gender pay gap is at its most obvious during the annual bonus season, says Lucy Mangan
Ofrabjous day! The Government has finally pulled the trigger on legislation requiring larger companies to disclose how much they pay their male and female employees respectively, thereby revealing how large the gap remains.
In July, David Cameron swore that, following a hard-fought campaign by
Grazia magazine, he would rid the UK of its payday gender divide. More transparency, I say! More conversation prompted on a vexed issue! More cash! Well… maybe.
According to figures just out, women earn an average of 19 per cent less than men, a gap that is one fifth greater than the European average, which the Prime Minister has called “a standing rebuke to our country”.
However, as part of Mr Cameron’s plan to “name and shame” employers that give less to female staff, details of bonuses will now have to be revealed, too. So with City bonus season almost up on us, there are still a few things women can usefully do to secure what is rightfully theirs – not least the £100,000 that employers otherwise fail to pay them over the course of the average working lifespan.
1 Start praying
Turns out there is no penalty to businesses for non-compliance to these new rules. They are, according to Nicky Morgan, the Minister for Women and Equalities, “a first step” designed to “concentrate minds” – a gentler synonym for “shaming”.
A cynic might say that if shame worked as a motivating tool for either men or companies in general, we would have very little need for legislation of any kind.
Remember Harry Enfield’s Loadsamoney character in the Eighties? That was meant as a critique of greed. But joyful fans took the idea and ran with it. And not in the direction of redistributive justice. There’s just a chance that any concentration of City minds will be on how to tweak the (very few) figures whose publication is required, so that business can continue much as normal.
So pray otherwise.
2 Don’t get pregnant
There are many ways of calculating and of parsing the pay gap, but two things are clear. One is that it persists, and is always weighted in favour of the Y-chromosome (which may legitimately be more expensive to maintain). And the other is that taking a bit of time off to produce a family is a very bad idea.
Motherhood is not what life is about. Life is about being in the office. If you are not in the office for a few months, you might as well be dead. So people come in and take your place. You may be ready, willing and able to come back, with all your skills and knowledge intact, but of course the office doesn’t know this. The office has no memory. It is just walls and a desk. If someone new sits at the desk, the office can’t be expected to evaluate the moral, practical and economic ramifications of letting you rot at home. So don’t get pregnant.
3 If you do get pregnant,
be sure it’s to a man who is happy to be a full-time, stay-at-home dad. Like vampire slayers, there is one of these born to each generation. Make sure it’s your inseminator.
4 Do be one of the lucky few who is in line for a bonus
Women are much more likely than men to have low-paid, insecure jobs and to live in poverty. So make sure you are pretty privileged to begin with, otherwise you won’t be protected at all. Nightmare.
5 Double your self-esteem and add a nought
Women, by and large, are terrible at negotiating better deals for themselves. I don’t know what’s wrong with us. I suspect a genetic predisposition not to make a fuss, plus, by the time we get to negotiating age, the internalisation of a lot of overt and covert social messages that tell us we’re not quite as good as the man next to us.
That’s a lot to overcome in the half hour before your bonus meeting. But if you can manage to set it all temporarily aside, you could come out a lot richer. Fake it until you make it. It works in more situations than you think.