Pay Rises & Promotions | FemaleBreadWinners

Show Me the Money – New Equal Pay Portal

Because getting your full monetary worth is so vital for women who are the main earners we often report on equal pay at Female Breadwinners. Therefore I was intrigued hear about a new website focused on pay issue and the gender pay gap. The site was created by Sheila Wild who led on Policy at both the Equal Opportunities Commission and the Equality and Human Rights Commission.

Equal Pay Portal is for anyone who has anything to do with equal pay, and its aim is to provide easy access to the wide range of material that is available, but can be hard to find – statistics, statutory instruments, codes of practice, good practice guides and advice for workers.

EqualPayPortal aims to:

Help people understand what the gender pay gap is and why it is a problem that needs to be addressed
Provide a single source of current and recent information on the gender pay gap
Equip individuals and organisations to deal with equal pay issues
Promote good equal pay practice
Signpost sources of expertise, including conferences and seminars

Sheila Wild says:

“There is a huge amount of information out there on equal pay, but it has too many owners, and can be difficult to find, even when you know what you are looking for. I wanted to create a portal which allows users to get up to date information quickly and easily.”

The site is jam packed with useful information so if you need any research material on equal pay this should be your first point of call. Read more articles on pay from Female Breadwinners and if you need tips on how to negotiate for what you are worth check out our webinar recording “Getting What You Want: Negotiating for Professional Women to Ask and Get More than You Thought Possible”.

Equal Opportunities Commission Poster

Women’s Job Losses – How Do Redundancies Impact Child Care Woes?

Women make up 49.4% of the 24 million strong UK workforce, yet are experiencing the effects of the recession in a way that is far from gender neutral. The gender pay gap hasn’t significantly shifted since the 1970′s and stands now at 14.9% among all full-time workers. As bad as this is, the pay gap rises to as much as 55% when discretionary pay such as bonuses is taken into account in financial services sector.

In the first quarter of 2012, a staggering eight out of every ten job losses across the country were for women. Over the last 6 years I recall leading maternity coaching sessions in organisations with women patting their heavily pregnant tummies questioning if they would find their jobs waiting for them when they returned – despite any supposed legal protection. Who can afford to fight a legal battle after a maternity leave? Who has that energy on top of a newborn? And certainly I heard on the HR grapevine that it’s easier to ‘get rid’ of women during a recession since legally it would be hard to prove any individual woman was penalised unfairly. However, to leave the work force prematurely costs individual women and their families dearly.

Women’s rate of unemployment hasn’t been this high since the recession of 1987. Clearly most redundancies aren’t planned but if you have any control over deciding whether it’s smarter to opt out of paid work to offset spiraling childcare costs think very carefully because it’s often costlier in the long run. It will be the lower paid partner – too frequently, the woman within a family, who leaves her job to look after the children. In 2011, the average cost of childcare in the UK was £385 a month, rising to £729 for a toddler under the age of two. When deducted from net pay and added to commuting costs – many families decide it’s ‘cheaper’ for the mother to leave work.

When we take into account not just her salary, but pension contributions, tax on her earnings paid back to the government and the pay rises she would have the earned as she progressed her career – we are looking at a loss-making exercise. If at all possible, I always advise clients to stay in the game, rather than leave work. It benefits confidence as well helps secure her, and her family’s, longer term financial future. Interestingly, some employers are able to negotiate new paths that work better for the company and employees in the long term. Forward thinking employers are offering employees the option of going to a four day week on 80% pay – and are surprised by just how many men take up this option, particularly when it is seen as an alternative to redundancy. How are childcare costs and the threat of redundancies affecting you?

How Discretionary Pay Penalises Women Breadwinners

To what do female breadwinners attribute their success? In a 2010 US Redbook magazine survey, breadwinning wives did not feel particularly strategic about their careers, nor that they worked longer hours than their partners. Instead, they recognised that they were more highly educated and so landed more lucrative jobs.

As we have seen, women are capitalising on unprecedented educational opportunities. Quite rightly, this wave of educated women expects to be paid at a level commensurate with their skills. According to the Pew Research Centre, women’s earnings grew 44 per cent between 1970 and 2007, compared with a mere six per cent growth for men. This sharper growth has enabled women to narrow, but not close, the earnings gap with men. To this end, median earnings of full-year female workers in 2007 were 71 per cent of the earnings of comparable men. This was a rise from a paltry 52 per cent in 1970.

In the past, employers often viewed working women as being the secondary provider to a male breadwinner. This effectively legitimised paying women less. It contributed to the concept of the ‘family wage’: a salary for one person that could support an entire family. The concept of the family wage has been all but eradicated, yet the gender pay gap has remained.

Pay equality is one way in which organisations demonstrate their commitment to attracting and retaining talented women. Much progress has been made in recent years at encouraging parity. However, according to research by the Equality and Human Rights Commission in 2009, in fields with discretionary pay elements such as financial services, women earn up to 47 per cent less than men.

Bonuses are often too subjective and left to managerial discretion which is subject to unconscious bias at best. There is a problematic lack of transparency. Indeed, organisations will go to lengths to protect that lack of clarity, such as termination of those who seek to compare salaries with colleagues. This all suggests that until employees have far greater transparency in how discretionary pay is awarded and how they compare with colleagues, there can be little progress in pay equality.

The pay differential cannot be explained solely by women leaving to have children either, as most women in these positions start on lower initial salaries as well. This means women, particularly if they are responsible for all of a family’s income, are doubly losing out – first by the likelihood of being underpaid merely because of their gender, and secondly by not having a financially contributing man to bolster the family income.

Organisations need to rectify pay inequities for several reasons. Women are increasingly choosing organisations with a commitment to equality, in deed and not just in word. The establishment of lists in the UK that publicise ‘Top 100 Employers for Women’ or ‘Companies Women Want to Work For’ are evidence of the greater awareness that talented women have more choice than generations of women before.

At a time when more women are taking up the mantle of primary breadwinner, a gendered pay gap can no longer be tolerated. It’s just not good for any employer who wants to attract the best talent. Any discrepancies will encourage this group of hard-working women to take their skills to an employer who will pay them at a rate commensurate with their skills, and that number of women is rapidly growing.

I will be speaking about Female Breadwinners on March 26th at Women in Banking and Finance in Edinburgh, so if you are north of the border and would like to join me you can get more information here.

Minimising Your Own Pay Gap – Why Your First Salary Counts

According to research from the Centre for American Progress, the average American woman in full-time employment loses $434,000 in income over a forty-year period due to the gender pay gap. For women with more education, it’s even greater.

Women with at least a university degree lose up to $713,000 less over that forty-year period made up from the cumulative effects of lower starting salaries and their related benefits. The statistics aren’t much better in UK, with the wage gap currently hovering around 15% (21% in private sector versus 12% in the public)

This pay gap accumulates for a variety of reasons, but chief among them is that pay rises are typically given as a percentage of current salary, leaving women further behind each year. A new employer will typically ask a job applicant for a salary history when determining his or her starting salary, which further limits women’s upwards mobility. These figures don’t even take into account part-time workers where the disparity is even greater.

Certainly, women are twice as likely as men to be in part time employment. Since few jobs offer part-time flexibility, they tend to pay disproportionately less because there is greater demand for them – but in reality this does not explain fully the gap in pay discussed above.

It is important to note that a gender pay gap exists in the first year that women graduate at university, at a point in their lives when differences in work experience between them and their male colleagues cannot realistically play a large part in determining pay.

The American Association of University Women found that women who go to the same kind of university, with the same degree, getting the same job with similar workplace flexibility perks, and who have the same personal characteristics – such as age, race and number of children – still earn five per cent less than their male colleagues in their first year of school alone.

Ten years later, even if the women have not taken a break for child rearing and kept pace with their male colleagues, this widens to 12 per cent according to statistics published by the American Association for University Women. Clearly, the gap cannot be conveniently blamed on the ‘lifestyle choices’ a woman has made. I suppose the small silver lining is that according the Office for National Statistics, the pay gap in the UK is at its lowest point ever for full-time workers, now at just 10 per cent for full time workers and 20 per cent for all workers in all categories.

Similarly, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the wage gap between men and women has narrowed so dramatically that it is now the smallest on record. There is even evidence that young women under thirty in many metropolitan cities are earning slightly more than men their own age. In the US, in 2011 it was discovered by the Bureau for Labour Statistics that single, childless women in their twenties now earn eight per cent more than their male peers. The UK’s Office for National Statistics found similar disparity favouring young women.

However, before we congratulate ourselves on pay equality achieved, this is not real evidence of long term pay equality that continues as these women age. Instead, it is due to the widening gap between the academic achievement of young men and women today. There are simply more women working in professional occupations than men in the same age bracket, which is why the average earnings for women of this age group surpasses their male counterparts.

Additionally, recent recessionary job losses from many traditionally male industries, such as financial services and construction, play a part. Indeed, this ‘equality’ stops as women enter their thirties and begin to have children, at which point the pay gap significantly penalises working women over the age of 40 who, according to ONS data, take home only 73 per cent of male earnings.

For more on how gender disparities affect families with a female breadwinner, get your copy of Female Breadwinners: How They Make Relationships Work and Why They are the Future of the Modern Workforce.

Make sure you get what you deserve – if you are about to negotiate your salary for a new job or a pay rise you will want to listen to our upcoming webinar on negotiation on Monday January 23rd “Getting What You Want: Negotiating for Professional Women to Ask and Get More than You Thought Possible”