Women and work
The building of a fair and family-friendly labour market where
everyone has the opportunity to develop their skills and experience
is an economic necessity. For our economy to grow, we need to draw
on and develop all the available resources to increase productivity
and to give our economy a competitive advantage. But this is also
important for us as individuals, as we are all entitled to fairness
and to have the opportunities to fulfil our potential and achieve
our aspirations; and it is important to our society, because an
equal society where there is genuine mobility is more cohesive and
at ease with itself.
There are now more women working in Britain than in almost any
time in our history, and women increasingly hold influential
positions. However, our labour market is still failing to make the
best use of people’s talents. In particular, pay levels for women
while improving still do not reflect their qualification
levels.
It is difficult to quantify the resulting loss to the economy of
this under-utilisation of women’s skills; however, in 2006 it was
estimated that removing barriers to women working in occupations
traditionally undertaken by men and increasing women’s
participation in the labour market, could be worth between £15 and
£23 billion pounds or 1.3 to 2.0 per cent of GDP.
Gender Pay Gap
The Office for National
Statistics collects data on earnings through the
Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings which it uses to calculate
gender pay differences. There are a number of different ways of
calculating the gender pay gap, one of which compares the pay of
all men and women in work (full- and part-time) and looks at the
median. By this measure, the gender pay gap is 22.0 per cent.
GEO has undertaken research into the
causes of the gender pay gap. This found the key factors
explaining the pay gap were as follows:
- 10 per cent of the overall pay gap can
be attributed to occupational sex segregation. Having 10 percentage
point greater share of men in an occupation is associated with 2
per cent higher average hourly wages;
- 12 per cent of the gap is due to the
industries in which women work;
- 21 per cent of the gap is due to
differences in years of full-time work;
- 16 per cent of the gap is due to the
negative effect on wages of having previously worked part-time or
of having taken time out of the labour market to look after family;
and
- 5 per cent of the gap is due to formal
education levels
But a significant proportion (36 per cent) of
the pay gap could not be explained by any of these factors,
suggesting discrimination may be an important factor
‘Women & Work Commission: Shaping A Fairer
Future’, July 2009