How a Labour government could close the gender pay gap

Last week I wrote three blogs about the gender pay gap. One day after the other I wrote about different aspects of the disparity between men and women’s pay. It isn’t an issue I want to be writing about, and certainly not so often.

My first post concerned the global pay gap, as outlined by the World Economic Forum (WEF) which found that pay gap will exist for at least the next 81 years. I then wrote a piece highlighting how women will essentially work for free from now until the New Year as a result of the gap. Finally I wrote about the massive gap between the pay of our top male and female football players.

At the end of the month the England women’s football team shall play a friendly in Wembley; ticket sales have already out sold those for the England men’s friendly held last month and ticket sales are expected to exceed 50,000 before match day. The interest in women’s football has shot up in the last five years yet their pay hasn’t increased at the same rate. Why?

More than 40 years since the Equal Pay Act was introduced women are still earning less than men. Most worrying is that not only do women earn less but that gap is growing. For the first time in five years it grew by .9%.

Things couldn’t have been more different under the last Labour government when the gender gap closed by a third. Earlier this month the WEF published its annual report, the Global Gender Gap report. The raw data presented some terrible facts for the UK which not only failed to come within the top 20 countries in all four categories examined by the WEF’s annual survey which measures economy, education, health and politics- but the report found the UK had actually fallen in its ranking from 18^th to 26^th.

It’s depressing to write about, so I’m also interested in considering what the solution might be. How could a Labour government seek to achieve greater parity at work to close the pay gap?

One of the problems in the UK concerns how we organise our labour market and make our childcare arrangements. Women are disadvantaged in every way after having children. The burden of responsibility almost always automatically falls to women. A significant cultural change is required to redress the balance. However, there are so many more things that could be done at a legislative level in order to achieve a fairer more balanced market which doesn’t disadvantage women. Childcare responsibilities can be more equally and fairly distributed. A Labour government has promised to give 25 hours per week of free childcare to parents with 3 and 4-year-olds. That’s a good start.

Childcare aside, businesses need to be encouraged to look at their practices. Large companies’ should publically list their pay scales. It says little to future women leaders if we cannot get something as basic as pay right.

The Labour Party has said that companies should be required by law to publish full details of the difference in pay between men and women.

Currently the Party is calling for a vote to change the policy and to get big companies to publish their pay gap.

A Labour government promises to introduce the compulsory scheme for companies with 250 or more employees if it wins the next election. In addition to being forced to publish their pay scales, they should also be urged to publish targets which indicate how they intend to narrow the gap.

At a European level I have been working for some time to improve the opportunities for women on executive boards. Compulsory quotas for women on boards are necessary if we are to ever come close to narrowing the gap.

I long for the day when I no longer write three articles one after the other about the disparity of gender and pay. It’s not hard to work out – work of equal value should be renumerated in the same way, and women should receive greater support from employers, the government and partners to help them return to the workplace, and on an equal footing to men.

Mary Honeyball MEP labour’s spokesperson in Europe on women and gender equality.