For corporate gender fairness, grand sweeping gestures are not good enough

By Nisreen Malik

No woman goes into the City expecting an easy time of it. The hours are obscene, the political manoeuvrings ubiquitous and you are always in a minority. The higher up the corporate ladder a woman goes, the more other women fall by the wayside whether to become full time mothers or opt for less high maintenance positions in order to preserve a better work-life balance. This constant attrition means that although there are more women in the workplace, especially the private sector, there have never been enough to form a mass critical enough to naturally drive wages upwards on a par with men.

The gender pay gap is always a sensitive subject but the argument that we should heavy handedly legislate for equal pay and leverage public sector contracts as a tool to coerce private sector companies is a cul de sac. A top down approach will not trickle down and is unlikely to be transparent as the retreat on mandatory private sector pay audits demonstrated. What is frustrating however, is that the climb down would never have been necessary if the statist, populist approach was not mooted in the first place. Harriet Harman now looks like she has been intimidated by the ‘old boy’s club’, when the truth is that it was just a counterproductive and expensive idea.

There are several underlying endemic issues which need to be recognised and tackled before sweeping grand gestures are suggested. The prohibitive cost of childcare is the first thing working women need to negotiate and it is the single most important hurdle I anticipate in my professional life. Talking about the cost of maternity leave and cover and how it can be offset is another taboo. In addition, the inimical assumption that there is some discriminatory cabal of men that will only address pay gaps unless they are forced to is erroneous, old fashioned and offensive. As the Institute of Economic Affairs has published, the ideal of equality of pay is predicated on an unrealistic duplication of a multitude of conditions.

As a female working in the private sector I would much rather feel supported by a more nuanced fundamental approach to inequality issues than be a patronised pawn for Labour’s grandstanding. As is the case with Sir Fred Goodwin, Harman et al should stop pandering to ”he court of public opinion’ and avoid looking embarrassed by trying to bully the horse back into the stable after it has bolted.