Seventy-five percent of females in the workplace consider gender pay equality to be a major workplace concern compared to just 53 percent of men.
Equal pay for equal jobs is a major issue that impacts both men and women and the economy as a whole. Despite the Equal Pay Act in 1970, The Women’s Equality Party states that women still earn just 81p of every pound earned by men.
In fact, as you are reading this, women are effectively working for free until 2019. Equal Pay Day signifies the last day in the year that women get paid to work because of the gender pay gap.
In addition, our survey found that when the prospect of promotion is added to the equation, the gap between men and women narrows, as 67 percent of men consider equal promotional opportunities a highly important issue in comparison to 61 percent of women.
While men often don’t see equal pay as a major issue (they may not know it exists), they readily agree that equal promotional opportunities are important. Our survey clearly highlights the fact that many men and women (but particularly men) simply assume they are being paid equally. This is often driven by the fact that a culture of pay secrecy in the workplace, encouraged by HR teams, allows this discrimination to thrive.
After looking at the Wildgoose survey results, Catherine Mayer, co-founder of the Women’s Equality Party (co-founded with Sandi Toksvig) took at look at the survey results and told us exclusively: ‘It’s not enough for businesses to report the gap, they need to do much to address it. A lot of this is around transparency. The Women’s Equality Party calls for organisations with a pay gap greater than 5 percent to be required to publish their recruitment, retention and promotion rates of women compared to men.
This would help the organisations, including the men in them, to understand the realities, mechanisms and impacts behind that gap. And reporting requirements should move to smaller companies (with over 50 employees). In addition I’m in favour of increasing transparency not just around aggregate figures but actual salaries. It was the publication of the salary bands of the BBC’s top earners that really galvanised the debate.’
In addition, our survey found; ‘Zero tolerance of discrimination’ was deemed more important to 62 percent of women compared to 46 percent of men. Our results also show that over 50 percent of UK employees feel disability inclusion is most important.
