How much does being a woman cost you? Mary-Ann Stephenson tells it like it is.

We all know that women earn less than men, but most of us would be shocked to think that over our lifetimes we might earn just under a quarter of a million pounds less than a man with the same skills and qualifications. According to research by the Government’s Women’s Unit that is the difference in earnings between men and women educated to GCSE level over a lifetime. For those with degrees the gap is smaller, but it is still £143,000. And that’s before you take into account the cost of having children. The difference in earnings between a man and a mother of two children is as much as £482,000 for those without qualifications and £161,000 between women and men with degrees.

Short shrift
We’re supposed to have had equal pay with men since the 1970s, so what’s going wrong? The Women’s Unit talks about the difference between the ‘gender gap’ (the amount you lose simply by being a woman) and the ‘mother gap’ (the cost in earnings of becoming a mother). The ‘mother gap’ might be explained by time out of the workplace looking after children, and the fact that when women return they often return at a lower grade, or into a part-time job. Part time work doesn’t just pay less per week than full time work, it tends to pay less per hour too. Women working full time earn 80p an hour for every £1 earned by a man. Women working part time (and just over half of women in paid work, work part time) earn less than 60p for every £1 earned by a man.

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.

So what can you do about it?