Member Article

Equal Pay Day: Gender pay gap will take 60 years to close, say campaigners

A prominent women’s rights charity has called for more action from the government on equal pay with women still lagging behind their male colleagues in the pay stakes.

Data by the Fawcett Society has shown that there remains a 13.9% pay gap between men and women, and that the disparity will take 60 years to close at the current rate of progress.

It means that from today (Thursday) women will effectively be working for nothing until the end of the year, marking today as this year’s Equal Pay Day (EPD).

EPD is a symbolic date that changes each year depending on the size of the disparity between men and women’s pay, with last year’s event occurring on the 9 November.

However, the Fawcett Society have said that such glacial progress on the problem is not enough and called for more efforts from the government to prevent job segregation, tackle pay discrimination and help get more women into senior posts.

Sam Smethers, Chief Executive of the Fawcett Society commented: “A root cause of the gender pay gap is that we don’t value the work done by women.

“As we mark EPD this year, we are focusing on the fundamental question of who and what we value and asking why it is that we don’t value women and the work they do – paid or unpaid.

“Equal value goes to the heart of the fight for pay equality, because the reality is that if it is a sector dominated by women the pay will be lower.

“As we look ahead to a UK outside the EU and possibly the single market, we have to guard against the risk of going backwards and losing some of the rights that women have fought for over many years.”

It comes a day after a government-backed review recommended that by 2020, FTSE 100 businesses should have at least 33% of their executive pipeline positions filled by women.

While there has been some recent success in getting more women into senior positions, with just 11 all male senior boards for FTSE 350 companies compared to 152 just five years ago, progress elsewhere remains slow.

According to the Society’s report, the jobs that women do are more likely to be poorly remunerated, and they are also less likely to receive a bonus or promotion compared to their male colleagues.

Rebecca Hilsenrath, chief executive of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, believes it is ‘shameful’ that 40 years after the enactment of the equal pay act, women continue to face barriers in the workplace that hold them back.

“We simply cannot ignore the scale of the disadvantages that working women face,” she said.

“Girls and women outperform men at every stage in education, but time after time this success is not translated into rewards at work.

“Women are a vital part of the workforce and any proposals to tackle the gender pay gap must be strong enough to deliver the change everyone wants to see.”