Apparently women at my company earn 11% less than men.
Now.... there are around 2500 employees of whom everyone apart from the executive (around 30 people) are paid on a grade and a scale. Everyone is appointed to the grade for their job and the scale depends entirely on salary of your previous post.
In other words, 2470 people are paid exactly the same as their counterparts and it is not possible for gender to be an issue in Agreeing the scale.
Within the executive, of 30 people, around25 of these are women. There are hardly any men apart from the CEO.
The only possible explanation is that women hold a higher proportion of the lower paying jobs. within those roles they are paid precisely the same as the men.
THere are two solutions- either pay women more than men for doing the same job or stop employing women in the lower paid jobs. I wonder which way we will go
But what of conscious and unconscious bias that leads to women being overlooked for appointments and promotions?
What of inflexible working that makes it hard for women to have a family and maintain a career?
What of the large numbers of women who report feeling discriminated against in the workplace for having a baby?
What of the entrenched patriarchal norms that mean only 1% of men have bothered taking advantage of new shared parental leave?
What of women being reluctant to take on lucrative nighttime shift-work due to legitimate fears about their safety?
What of society's continued under-appreciation of essential but low-paid 'caring' jobs that are disproportionately made up of a female workforce (because of gender norms)?
All *******s, in the main. THe promotions and appointments argument falls flat on its face where I work. 8 out of ten internal promotions are women and we have entire departments that havent hired a man in five years. THey make up 75% of our Corporate Management Team.
When they want to start a family they get a year off, full pay, and even accrueannual ****ing leave whilst on maternity leave! When they finally comeback they get whatever they want in terms of flexible working/working from home etc. Trust me, when a woman wants to start a family the first thing she does is get herself a job here. THey are also immune from the sack or redundancy whilst on maternity leave.
Of course, they all complain about discrimination but its rubbish. Not a single case you could point to here.
There could potentially be an issue with the grading of some of the lowest paid jobs, where secretarial work is graded lower than unskilled manual work despite both requiring similar levels of skills and knowledge.
THey use the 'legitimate fears' argument to get out of working evenings, weekends, going overseas. Blokes have to do all of this.