The Pay Slap
Worth-less?
Not only are women more likely than men to work part time, they tend to do different jobs. And the jobs that women do are generally less well paid than the jobs that men do, even when they involve equal levels of skill, experience and responsibility. One study compared nurses and police officers and concluded that both jobs involved equal levels of skill, stress and responsibility. The only reason they could find why one was better paid than the other was that nursing had traditionally been seen as a ‘woman’s job’ and had been paid less than policing, a ‘man’s job’. Jobs done by men have been more likely to be unionised, and pay rates were often set on the basis that a man had to support a family. ‘Women’s jobs’ were often assumed to be for ‘pin money’, even when women’s income was vital to the family budget. We might like to think these attitudes are long gone, but the assumptions about how much jobs are worth still remain.
Look around
Even where men and women work side by side in a mixed workplace, men may be earning more than women. Because we tend not to ask colleagues how much they earn (in some workplaces it can be a disciplinary offence to talk about salaries), we may not know how much the man sitting next to us is getting paid. Women who have always assumed that they were judged and paid on equal terms with their male colleagues sometimes get a nasty shock when they find out just how much more some of the men are getting paid.
Some of these women have won compensation in high profile equal pay cases, and the Equal Pay Act does give women the right to equal pay, including equal pay for work of equal value where they are doing a different job, but one of the same value to the employer. But the law is complex, cases can take many years and without backing from their trade union, or groups like the Equal Opportunities Commission most women can’t afford to take their employers to court.
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