Thought for the week

time to rattle cages again 🙂

equal pay for equal work. There’s legislation to mean this is supposed to be so. Doesn’t really go far enough though, as it seems to me that there is still a vicious circle at work, as can be seen by looking at the results of the NHS Cumbrian pay review, where it was discovered that work traditionally done by women was paid less than work done by men, even when the work was, objectively speaking, of the same value. That’s illegal, but without enforcing that kind of review on companies/ organisations, you aren’t really going to change anything. And if you do enforce the review, then there’s the question of where the money for the backpay/ equal pay going to come from. Unsurprisingly, the ppl who were earning more aren’t usually up for just taking a pay cut, so the review isn’t a popular process.

And the thinking that underlies the situation is harder to combat – can’t wait for the value of doctors, barristers and so on to go down, given that you’ve now got more women training and graduating in those professions than men 😉

But in the first instance, it seems to me that there are two simple steps that could be taken. First of all, remove gender identifiers from application forms. No more Ms, Mr, Mrs on there, and only have the first initial rather than a full name. Of course, ppl like me who’d been to a Girls’ School would rather give the game away ;), but even that wouldn’t be insurmountable. It shouldn’t really be necessary to give the name of the school you went to anyway, and perhaps doing away with that would do away with some of the old boy network that surrounds some of the fee paying schools as well.

Secondly, do away with the culture of secrecy that surrounds pay at work. I’ve been thinking this for a long time, even since I moved from social work, where everyone knew pretty much what everyone was paid, as there was a tight payscale and you knew where everyone was on it. Then I started at the bank, where it was a disciplinary offence to disclose details of your pay award/ bonus. Always seemed to me that that could only work in the interests of the employer.

Slightly ashamed to say that in this area I’m right behind one David Cameron – it’s not offend that I find myself cheerleading the head of the conservative party, but when he makes speeches like this one I’ve got to say that I think he’s talking sense.

So, remove gender identifiers from applications forms, and in case you think it isn’t relevant, take the example of an IT recruiter recently who wanted to add one to my cv, as otherwise you couldn’t tell. And why precisely would you need to know whether your prospective programmer was male or female? Yes, I know there are some jobs when it’s relevant, but we currently have legislation in place to take care of that, so I don’t see that being an issue.

Secondly, have companies publish pay information. Not quite sure what form that needs to take, but I’m sure it’s feasible.

The third aspect, of doing pay audits on gender basis would take longer to implement, but I still think it’s something we should be moving towards.

I’m aware none of this is groundbreaking stuff, but I wanted to talk about it, so I did.