The Pay Gap

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.