Thursday 19 August 2010

40-years of good intent!


Despite 40 years of equal pay legislation a survey by the Chartered Management Institute has shown a male manager in the UK earns £10,071 more on average than his female counterpart. It has suggested that girls born in 2010 will face the probability of working for around 40 years in the shadow of unequal pay.

At a senior level, male pay outstrips female pay by as much as 24pc, the survey found. Even at a junior level, male executives were found to have received £1,065 more than females carrying out the same work, the study of pay at 197 organisations, covering 43,312 employees. This is despite a 2.8pc growth in pay packets for women over the last year, compared to 2.3pc on average for men.

APA lobbies hard for pay equality and stridently supports CMI’s call for Government to “take greater steps” to enforce pay equality by naming and shaming organisations who fail to pay male and female staff fairly. But it’s not just Government that needs to enforce its own legislation, businesses also have to neutralise subliminal gender biases it the equality goal is ever to be achieved..

Gareth Osborne, DG of APA said, “The forecast of continued decades of pay inequality cannot be allowed to become reality. We must press Government to take the matter much more seriously.”

The IT industry was the worst offender, the survey showed, with women on average getting paid £17,736 per year less than men. The pharmaceutical industry generally paid its female workers £14,018 less than males.

Across the regions, women in the Midlands fared the worst, taking home £10,434 less than men doing the same jobs, the survey, carried out in conjunction with XpertHR, showed. Even the smallest pay gap, in the North East, stood at £8,955.

The Equal Pay Act, designed to eradicate gender inequality, was introduced in 1970. Four decades after the legislation, the national gender pay gap stands at 16.4pc, according to the Office for National Statistics. In certain sectors, such as finance and law, women working full time can earn just over half the amount men get.

The Government’s new Equality Act due to come into force this October, is expected to outlaw contractual gagging clauses that prevent colleagues from discussing pay and bonuses. Theresa May, the Home Secretary, said the move will bring an end to the “culture of pay secrecy” that has dominated the workplace for decades.

APA

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