The gender pay gap is still prevalent within the United Kingdom workforce and the gap only widens further when women have children, according to a report published today.
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Moreover, after coming back to work after maternity leave, pay grows significantly slower for women than men, resulting in a gender pay gap of 33 per cent after 12 years. Then, official numbers suggested that the pay gap for the full-time work force – not exclusively at management level – had reduced substantially from 18.4 per cent in 1997 to 7.3 per cent in 2015. The disparity may be explained by women reducing the number of hours they work, meaning they accumulate less experience in the labor market and miss out on promotions, it said.
The study, by the Chartered Management Institute and XpertHR, calculated the pay gap in Scotland to be 29.2 per cent. Better education is one factor – for nearly the past decade more women than men have earned university degrees, boosting female earning power and contributing to the higher pay of women in their 20s.
It is only among the lowest-educated, those with less than three A levels, that the gap has been steadily declining, so bringing down the average.
Among the mid- and high-educated the pay gap has remained nearly constant over the last two decades, although high-educated women are the most likely to remain in work after having children. Most significantly (as we’ve argued before on this site) the gender wage gap increases gradually after the arrival of children. Men also received higher bonuses.
Once children are born, many women return to work only part-time or stop working altogether.
“And that’s very much a story about women who choose to work part of half time”.
The report, funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, noted that the gap in average hourly wages between men and women has fallen over the past two decades.
Figures from the Office for National Statistics previous year found that women aged between 22 and 29 on average earn more per hour than men of the same age. The reduction in the overall gender wage gap has been the result of more women becoming highly educated, and a decline in the wage gap among the lowest-educated.
IFS associate director Robert Joyce said: “Women in jobs involving fewer hours have particularly low hourly wages”.
HR experts have pointed out that the introduction of Gender Pay Gap reporting may have helped address salary transparency for top salary earners, but this report shows that employers need to go further. “Enabling more women to stay in work and progress to better paid work after having children could reduce poverty in the short, medium and long term, with better security for women’s incomes in later life”.
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Ms O’Grady said that “without more well-paid, part-time jobs and affordable childcare, the gender pay gap will take decades to close” and called for a “change in government policy and employer attitudes if we are to fix this problem”.
