Harriet Harman- we salute you!

By Rowenna Davis / @rowenna_davis

I’m no party demagogue, but Harriet Harman, I salute you today. Few know it, but today’s exposure of an 80% gender pay gap in the city is to her credit. She may have climbed down on making companies publish their own salaries, but she clearly had other eggs in her basket – in 2006 she fought to give the Equality and Human Rights Commission the power to investigate private firms. The findings they released today were made possible by her campaigns.

The facts themselves are shocking. They don’t just show an 80% gap in performance related pay, but a bias that starts on day one of joining the financial sector. Eight out of ten women start off on a lower average salary than men – try explaining that inequality as the natural outcome of meritocracy. The City should be ashamed of such a gap, but out of all the top execs who have had access to these figures for years, less than a quarter are investigating why it exists.

This research proves something else feminists have long believed: free, public information advances gender equality. In the civil service, where pay gaps are compulsorily published, the gap is approximately 20% (although it is widening). The EHRC’s research is evidence to enforce what Harman always wanted – compulsory annual publication of salaries across the private sector. The Equalities Bill is set to go to the Lords for enactment in early 2010 – with these results in hand, we need to table an amendment to make this happen.

Without the constant challenge that comes with the publication of these figures, sexist outcomes can become “normal”. That’s why you get women like Melanie McDonagh writing for the Telegraph that men are probably just better at this kind of thing because of testosterone (although if the financial crisis is anything to go by, all city workers should be neutered), or because they don’t have to bring up kids.

Meanwhile, organisations like the CBI say things will improve naturally, but the Fawcett Society has documented the situation is getting worse as women are increasingly treated as sex objects rather than professionals in the workplace. Network events in lapdancing clubs, porno screensavers and sexual “banter” aren’t old problems that are working themselves out; they’re new ones that are being ignored. If such discrimination is to be changed, it must be exposed. The Tories won’t do that. But with a little bit more support, Harriet Harman might.

The picture is taken from the Fawcett Society’s Sexism and the City campaign.