‘Job (almost) done’, admits EHRC
Civitas, 12 October 2010
The Equalities and Human Rights Commission called for a moment of national mourning and teeth gnashing yesterday. They declared that progress towards closing the gender pay gap had ground to a halt. But the details of their triennial report reveals why this is so. It is because a discriminatory gender pay gap no longer exists.
In the executive summary to the main report, the EHRC claimed that ‘the pay gap between men and women remains significant, and progress to eliminating it may have stalled.’ However, they acknowledge that the gap varies according to age and lifestyle characteristics:
‘[It] is lowest for the under 30s, rising more than five-fold by the time workers reach 40. It is influenced by a number of factors: lower pay in sectors where women are more likely to choose careers, the effect of career breaks and limited opportunities in part-time work.’
In the report itself, the EHRC provides a bit more of a clue as to what makes the real difference:
‘… it is hard to separate out the effect of career breaks. Importantly, the influence of motherhood on the gender pay gap is apparent well before women become mothers.’
They even provide a neat little graph that shows that the pay gap is negligible before around the age of 27 on page 413. This says enough to indicate that it is likely the decision to have a child (not the characteristic of being a woman) that is associated with statistically lower pay. They could have gone a bit further and cited this recent Office of National Statistics study that showed that, if anything, unmarried non-cohabiting women earn just a little bit more, on average, than their male counterparts.
From the perspective of an objective observer, this is excellent news. There is no (or hardly any) overall discrimination against women in employment. That is not to say that there aren’t still plenty of sexist workplaces that do treat women unfairly. But we can suggest that, in the aggregate, such workplaces aren’t collectively managing to reduce opportunities for women to work.
Yet, in the hands of the EHRC, this is still bad news. They seem to think that deciding to have and look after children either doesn’t, or should not, come with any opportunity costs. Unfortunately, they do and they are pretty much unavoidable. As a society, we might decide that looking after children is sufficiently important that mothers need additional financial support (for example, by rigorously enforcing a father’s obligation to support the mother of their child). But it is going to be impossible, in many cases, to allow a child-rearing parent (regardless of gender) to maintain the exact same level of productivity in a workplace as someone who is not bringing up a child. To claim otherwise is to deny the intrinsic energy and time intensive nature of child rearing.
So overall, this indicates that if women want to concentrate their time and energies on work, the rewards are similar to those of men who do the same. If that good news weren’t enough, consider this other positive aspect of the report (p. 428):
Evidence indicates that overall, when data are broken down into generations, the ‘second generation’ of ethnic minority men and women (those born in Britain) have
made substantial progress compared to the first generation. Second generation ethnic minority men and women in employment have similar chances (after allowing for age and qualification) of working in professional and managerial job) as White British workers.
This means that it only takes one generation from an immigrant family arriving (with potentially very limited human capital) before they are close to participating on equal terms in the British workplace. This indicates that Britain’s reputation for fairness and tolerance is fairly well deserved. Of course, we will never here the EHRC emphasize these aspects of a report. Some people might start thinking we could do without it.