Here is the good news. The pay gap between men and women narrowed by 1 per cent this year. Men now average £10.75 an hour, women £8.70. The not so good news is that women's hourly rates are still 19 per cent lower than men's and that any recent improvement in the fortunes of women is entirely accounted for by the introduction of a minimum wage: so many women were earning less than £3.60 an hour that a new statutory minimum had a discernible impact on the figures. Still, lifting thousands of women out of abject poverty is worth celebrating.
But the total picture of the relative incomes of men and women in Britain is far, far bleaker than a comparison of hourly rates suggests. Hourly pay rates tell us only that hour for hour, across all industries, men's work is valued more highly than women's. They do not reveal that women, usually of necessity, work fewer hours in lower-paid sectors, have worse pension schemes, fewer savings and investments and less opportunity to work overtime or take premium-paid shifts.
A recent study by the Women's Unit and Department of Social Security, using figures from the 1996-97 Family Resources Survey, revealed that the real earnings gap is 47 per cent. In other words, that the average weekly income of women is scarcely more than half that of men: £153 per week compared to £289. This much wider discrepancy was discernible, with variations, through all family types including single households and couples with dependent children.
It would be comforting to think that these are among the things that new Labour, with its 101 women MPs, promised could only get better and that the figures are skewed by the ghosts of dreary Old Britain, where women had poorer educations or stayed at home and expected to live off their husbands' pensions. In fact, another truly discouraging statistic emerged this month relating to graduate pay. Young men entering their first post-university jobs can expect an average £14,619, young women only £12,201: a gap of 17 per cent. This is even worse (by 8 percentage points) than it was two years ago. A survey by Barclays found that over time the differences become even greater. After five years working a male graduate currently averages £28,119, a female graduate £22,851.
Blame women for choosing lower-paid sectors; blame career gaps; blame female reticence when it comes to back-stabbing ambition; blame structural inequalities in the global economy; but let us at least agree that almost 30 years after the Equal Pay Act became law, it is a shaming record. Enough, perhaps, to make a government reflect that to achieve equality, it must adjust its legislation.
The Equal Opportunities Commission, which on Tuesday launched a campaign and a new Equal Pay Task Force, has been lobbying the government, so far without success, to introduce changes that it believes could help. The most important of these is for tribunals to be able to consider group actions. Pay, says the EOC, is still thought of as an individual matter - but the labour market operates according to group dynamics. As long as individuals have to put themselves on the line, then inequalities will persist.
To be successful in an equal pay case, Ann Jones, say, must currently prove that her work is not being valued equally. But it is far harder to argue that the quality or quantity of her work should be valued as highly as, say, Bob Smith's, than for six women in an organisation to argue that for as long as anyone can remember, women in their organisation have always, astonishingly and coincidentally, been considered to be 20 per cent less valuable.
The first stage, suggests the EOC, is to find out who is paid what. It calls on employers to carry out pay audits and advises women to find out what their male colleagues are earning. The first is unlikely to happen since employers rely on the great British taboo of talking about money. The second could start to be genuinely subversive, since, as the EOC admits, the response to its campaign has been much greater than it expected. At a time when the media appears to value only tales of the counter-intuitive ("Girls on top", "Woman rapes man" and suchlike), traditional truths, such as that women are paid less, are considered unglamorous.
But if Tony Blair's "equality of worth" means anything, it must include rewarding broadly similar work with broadly similar pay. No "equality of worth" can accommodate a 20 per cent difference.
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