So, you’ve applied for your ideal job. You sweat over the application and covering letter, and when the deadline passes – ‘We would like to invite you to an interview. This is the second round of the application process.’ Preparing and presenting yourself well, you perform to the best of your abilities. And the next you hear? ‘Congratulations. We would like to inform you that you have been successful in applying for the position of “ideal jobâ€. Welcome to the organisation.’ Even if you have landed your ideal job, how much you will be paid is still likely to be of your first questions. Naturally, how much pay matters to you is completely idiosyncratic. Fundamentally, for all employees in a democratic system, the only requirement of a wage is that it pays all workers doing the same job the same amount. But regardless of the welcome bonus, pension package or discount dental care, a survey conducted by Labour Force shows that in countless cases this doesn’t happen. Since the starting salary for female graduates across all professions is on average £12,584 – over £2000 lower than the comparable £14,768 of their male counterparts – whether you will be paid equally to your colleagues depends on your gender.
According to career advice from Monster, female graduates should expect their salaries to catch up with men in the same positions within the first few years of working life. But only temporarily: the gap will widen once again, to an even greater extent than before. After 13 years of full-time employment, working women will earn on average £9000 less than men doing the same job.
This inequality is excused on two counts: the first, concerning the lower starting salary, is that more women enter poorly paid areas of work than men do. The second, with regards to a lower and slower salary climb later on, is that women themselves impede their salary progress by taking career breaks to raise families. But why are women consistently entering the more poorly paid professions, frequently associated with lack of skills and education, when female graduates are in plentiful possession of both? And just because a woman takes, on average, less than a year off work now to raise her children, why does this necessitate up to a £9000 salary deficit once she returns, and a substantial gap that will never be closed years later?
In the second question lays the key to a Pandora’s Box of gender-based inequality issues facing today’s women. Basic salary rates are just one of the instances where females face economic discrimination.
Neither male nor female employees who take a career break should expect to waltz straight back into the position they held before leaving the organization. Undeniably, women who take time away from work can impede the company or institution’s productivity and/or profit margins on their return, if they are not up-to-date with the current job requirements. But with 67% of women returning to work within a year of maternity leave, does it really justify a considerably lower wage more than 13 years later? This sum implies that it costs the industry around £100,000 for every woman who takes whatever little time off to have a child. What about the women who return to work a few weeks after birth? Or those who never even have children? By paying a female graduate a lower starting salary, she is being treated as a stay-at-home mother before she has even considered the possibility of a family.
It is almost as if the Equal Pay act of 1970 was a fleeting legislation brought into silence the first-wave feminists. Today, if the government does not wish to discriminate against new female workers, then it should implement a scheme by which all women are paid equal until the day they choose to leave work to have children. The returning wage will then be assessed according to the amount of time taken off, and the money needed to re-train female workers, or to make up the profit or production lost during their hiatus. In the pre-Budget speech, Gordon Brown emphasised that childcare and working parents are priorities for the Labour government. The national minimum income guarantee for a couple with one earner and one child will rise to £258 a week, and £199 a week for a single parent with one child. This is equivalent to £12 per hour. About 250,000 single parents will be offered a £40-a-week bonus in their first year of returning to work. Finally, Labour pledges that the proportion of childcare costs parents can claim will rise from 70 per cent to 80 per cent from April 2006. All credit to Labour, should these changes be implemented. However, although ‘childcare’ may strictly refer to the amount charged by the nanny/nursery where you leave your children during working hours, what about the cost of ‘family care’? By this I mean the services which have to be paid to allow a woman to work in the first place. This expenditure includes: cleaners, gardeners, shopping delivery services, presents for the family and friends who help with childcare, sports and clubs for children whilst women work and ‘guilt-treats’ to appease their own anxiety because they do not have enough quality time with their children. According to a survey conducted by British Gas in 2003, 2.3 million of working mothers had less than 10% of their salaries left after all this family maintenance. According to the Guardian article which reported further statistics, of the women surveyed, ‘Four in 10 had full-time jobs and the remainder had part-time jobs – but of the part-time workers, 60% had two jobs. Some 89% of those questioned said they never spent their wages on themselves.’ Yes, (in most circumstances) individuals choose to sacrifice their single or childless couple’s wage to start a family, and once they have children, we, and the parents themselves, should expect their children’s needs to come first. But to be left with mere ‘pocket money’ to spend on yourself when you are working so many hours to keep career and family in orbit is demoralising; it begs the question, why bother returning to work at all if your status as a working mother is insulted by such a paltry financial return?
But to return to Labour’s proposed legislation. Is this increased income for working parents a ‘feminist’ pledge from the government? The cynics amongst us might read this as Labour’s plan to boost the economy by maximising the number of workers at any time, and the party’s bid to win over female voters in particular before the next election. If the government is really so eager to encourage and to support working mothers, it needs to do more than provide a short-term financial fix, and the later pay gap and pension shortfall need to be redressed too. Perhaps the £40-a-week bonus Labour plan to introduce will ‘justify’ the pay gap later on. After all, from the Treasurer’s point of view, the money to support all those single parents wriggling back into the workforce has to come from somewhere…
In spite of these setbacks, many women do choose to work, regardless of the problems they face with family care and finance. But for many, leaving the day job and returning home is not finishing work. When Naomi Wolf published her book, ‘The Beauty Myth’ in 1991, she described a phenomenon known as “The Second Shiftâ€. She was referring to the unpaid, domestic labour a woman returns home to begin, having finished her waged job. Fourteen years later, there has been a slow decline in the number of women doing the majority of the household’s housework. According to a poll conducted by the University of Ulster in 2004, two thirds of women still do the majority of domestic chores, with the average working woman spending seventeen hours per week on housework, in comparison with the average man who invests just six. Better than nothing. But 85% of women do all the laundry, and one in five men admits to doing nothing at all around the house. ‘Housework’ here does not include childcare either, the majority of which still falls to women (unless a family pays for a nanny. And this is a privilege only an elite minority can afford).
Let’s presume though, that the majority of women are prepared to accept a lower wage and longer ‘working’ hours, and live accordingly. Is it cheaper to live as a woman? In a few instances, yes. Women can buy lower-priced, gender-specific car insurance since statistically they cause fewer accidents. Arguably (at least according to my father, brother and male friends) women can find desirable, cheaper clothes more easily. To a traditional viewpoint, the reason women’s clothes are often cheaper is because women are more interested in fashion. Consequently we have a supply and demand situation, where designers, manufacturers and retailers are simply providing a competitive consumer market with much more than it needs and so prices are chopped in the competition for sales.
However, it’s worth considering why a woman feels she needs so many different outfits. Most women have a ‘working’ wardrobe which is separate to their out-of-hours clothing or dress wear. The same goes for men. But in contrast to most men’s work clothes consisting of a few suits, shirts and ties, women require suits, separates, coordinating shoes, tights, the right underwear, jewellery, make-up etc. etc. The list is endless. To look ‘acceptable’, women have to invest more in their appearances than men do.
And not only do they spend more money, but minutes too. Naomi Wolf refers to this as ‘The Third Shift’. In ensuring an acceptable professional appearance, women have to put in ‘overtime’ both before and after work when the beauty regimes of body and hair priming, eg manicuring, tanning, buffing, haircuts – and the most time-consuming of all – exercise – must be done. This is not to deny that the workplace and modern life do not require certain standards of appearance and physical form from men. But the standards for women exceed these in duration, cost and the level of perfection expected.
Judging by this rather pessimistic picture of a working woman’s life, why bother? Well, retirement and a pension of course: the financial reward for all her pains. Unfortunately the current pension situation is only likely to further women’s hardship on retirement. Our parents have already been warned that the state pension system is unlikely to pay out, and are taking steps to bump up their retirement income by investing in private plans. If you have given this any thought, you will have probably realised that today’s younger generation will be doing the same. But irrespective of this, we still hope to be able to claim a sizeable sum of our income from the state. However, if you’d hoped that the treatment of working men and women here would be equal, you need to reconsider.
Female pensioners are notoriously one of the poorest social groups in Britain today, with 1 in 4 hitting the government’s poverty line. This generation of men and women made up the families of the 40s and 50s, when women’s liberation and equal workers’ rights were but a twinkle in their new-born offsprings’ eye. Many only worked part-time, if at all. (This, of course, overlooks the fact that many women were employed in full-time unpaid jobs as housewives and mothers.) Having paid no National Insurance contributions, around 90% cannot claim full state pension. Arguably, these women did not contribute to the economy, trade and the professions to the same extent as working men – but naturally, without their contribution to domestic life, men would not have been able to work everyday in the way they did.
Current female pensioners can claim from their husband’s NI contributions – which gives them a weekly income of £47.65 a week, in comparison with the full rate of £79.60. BUT an unemployed man is entitled to exactly the same amount, even though his wife probably carried out the majority of domestic duties. Currently, she receives just £28.50 for her efforts. Widows can claim their late husband’s pension but what about separated, divorced or abandoned women?
The average working woman’s pension stands at £212 a week. The average pension for a non-working man is £191. This very small gap screams of the vast inequality in how our current pension system treats men and women.
And what about our generation? To receive the full state pension, you need to have worked 44 years. You qualify as having worked for every week you earn just over £79. One year worked equals one year of some rate of state pension. Previously every year a woman looked after a child, she lost a year of pension. This has been changed. Now, a woman can claim pension for the years spent at home provided she also worked 20 years in paid employment. On average though, no matter how hard a woman struggles with juggling work, then motherhood, and then a combination, she will still end up being paid less for her working life by the state upon retirement. With a lower income, how will she be able to fund an adequate private plan? This begs the question, why consider employment at all? When a woman who has worked receives just £21 more a week than a man who has never bothered, why should she?
This is not just a discriminatory anachronism, relevant only to an older generation. Unless the new batch of graduates challenges the system, they too might as well reconcile themselves to a frighteningly similar fate.
The current wage system supports the institution of marriage and heterosexual relationships. It does not support working women’s rights. It does not support childless women’s rights. It does not support independent women’s rights. It decrees that, in the majority of instances, women wanting a standard of living equivocal to current societal levels of comfort must seek a male partner to help supplement their income.
It is our responsibility as the post-sex-discrimination, equal opportunities generation, to continue the progression of women’s rights. Whilst ever women are paid less for doing the same jobs as men, we are condoning the labour market’s treatment of women as second-class citizens. With the western working culture showing no signs of slowing down, the work place becomes perhaps the most crucial arena for equal rights. If we accept that women are generally paid less for every single job they do, we might as well condemn women as being good for nothing bar reproductive and domestic duties. Admittedly there are more well-paid professional women than ever before. But as long as a porn star or prostitute can earn more than a health educator, research scientist or member of parliament, we are rewarding women for perfecting their pouts over training their brains.
Clearly, the issue of women’s working rights during all stages of their lives is a complex, multi-pronged problem. Yet, currently, the state refuses to provide available, adequately-funded childcare for those women willing to earn a living, be it porn star or MP. It also refuses to support women adequately in old age, ignoring any contributions they made to the economy, pre-retirement. Whichever party takes over government at the next election, it needs to recognize that not one of the issues mentioned above can be overlooked, if it is to act in the interests of more than half the British population.
But it is also women’s responsibility to ask for equal working conditions if they believe in their own equal rights. We live in a democracy, with the freedom to ask for what is fair. And if nothing else, we should honour the memory of women that suffered greater inequality before us. The suffragettes campaigned so tirelessly, and at such risk to their own lives to give women the vote. It is a slight to them if modern women merely shrug their shoulders when the man sat on the desk opposite receives an extra £50 a week, for no better reason than the sheer fortune of his gender.
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