Is the pay gap our problem?

10^th November was equal pay day this year. This represents the point in the year when women stop earning relative to men, writes Sophie Harris, Acting HR Director at SOAS. Nationwide, the pay gap currently stands at 14.1%. 

During the Summer, I attended a talk on the future of work, organised by the Fawcett society, which focused on the future of the workplace with particular reference to the implications for industries dominated by women, including part-time work and lower paid jobs. The session reflected on the positive impact of the requirement for organisations to publish their gender pay gap. This new statutory requirement seems to have focussed attention on women’s pay to a level that wasn’t previously there, creating transparency, discussion and an increased understanding amongst employers of the inequalities in their workforce. 

At SOAS, we have reported our gender pay gap for many years. The School has seen progressive change over this period. Annual review of the gender pay gap at our institution has shown a steady decrease in the average pay gap between male and female staff, to a low of 9.8% in 2017. This reflects the steps already made by the School to identify and address the underlying causes. 

The value of reviewing and analysing our data on an annual basis has been invaluable. We have, and will continue to take action to tackle our recruitment, promotion and workplace policies and practices, to reduce the gender gap further (I outlined some practical tips for narrowing the gap in an earlier blog post).

For this reason, I fully support introducing mandatory ethnicity pay gap reporting. Indeed at SOAS we are already undertaking work that will allow us to report our ethnicity pay gap in the same way as we do for gender. Seeing the figures, digging into them and having an action plan is invaluable. We really need to have our eyes opened to the underlying causes of the disparities in our organisations and society at large and take meaningful steps to address them. 

The findings of pay gap analysis can make for uncomfortable reading and I recognise that there is more that we, and others, can do to address the pay gaps that we find in our organisations. However, I do have some underlying frustrations with gender pay gap reporting, and think that this is something we need to pay attention to, particularly as we move towards expanding the reporting requirements.

The expectation on individual institutions to report seems to have both devolved responsibility and focussed attention on organisational failings, rather than recognising the wider societal problems to be solved.

However much we do as individual organisations, there are cultural and societal norms and attitudes and structural issues that do and will continue to have an impact on the ability of women and people of colour to access the highest paid roles. On the radio last weekend, Sandi Toksvig described her experience of being refused the role of host on Have I Got News For You 25 years ago, explicitly because she was a woman. We are still seeing the impact of these decisions on our attitudes, and on the pay gap, today.

More serious and focussed government policy change is one way that we can make faster progress towards equality. At the Future of Work talk, an example was given of women still doing the majority of childcare and giving up work. While shared parental leave has been introduced, this is still a poor relation to maternity leave even when (as we do at SOAS) the benefits are enhanced. While some forward thinking (and more financially solvent) employers are enhancing other elements of parental leave, such as providing extended paternity/partner leave, I don’t think that a minority approach is going to significantly shift our pay gap. We need to see more dramatic government policy change to shift some of these entrenched cultural schemas. The continued focus on women as primary carers, continues to perpetuate the issues we see in our gender pay gap. We only need to look to Sweden to see an example of a more advanced approach to parental leave (Sweden currently offers 480 days of subsidised leave per child, which parents can share as they wish, with 390 paid for by the taxpayer at a rate of about 80 per cent of their salary.  At least three months of that leave is allocated to each parent on a “use it or lose it” basis.)

More work is also needed to understand the underlying causes of the ethnicity pay gap and the differences we see across different ethnic groups. Laurence Hopkins wrote an excellent piece for the Guardian recently reflecting on the findings of the UCEA study on intersectionality and pay. The UCEA report found that ethnic minorities earn systematically less than their White counterparts. It also identified significant differences between broad ethnic minority categories with Black staff systematically less than all other groups. To address these gaps, we need to look holistically across the underlying causes. Laurence reflects that one factor in the ethnicity pay gap is educational pathways prior to work, a clear sign that it's not enough to look at the under-representation of people of colour in our workforces and what we can do to influence career progression. We need to look beyond this as only an employment issue. Universities have a crucial role to play in narrowing the attainment gap between BME and white students, which could have a positive influence on future career progression and consequentially the ethnicity pay gap. (See https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/blog/Pages/Tackling-ethnicity-attainment-gaps-we-want-to-hear-from-you.aspx for a summary of an initiative, being led by the SOAS Director, Baroness Valerie Amos, and in collaboration with Universities UK and the National Union of Students to support and inform the sector's efforts to tackle the BME attainment gap.)

Pay gap reporting is a good first step. But it only makes visible the disparities we already know exist. More work is needed to dig beneath the numbers, understand the issues, and take real steps to address them in our wider culture and society.