We all know the gender pay gap exists, yet not everyone knows exactlywhat it is, or who it affects the most. It is very frustrating for us women tobe a part of an unfair and stereotyped issue. In presentday, women are faced with a big problem in the business world. Overall, 57percent of men earn £50,000 or more annually, while only 42 percent of womenearn the same. A huge issue is presentthat should be addressed, my goal is to inform you about this problem andpersuade you to make a change as a community. By confronting this problemtogether, we can stay united and make a real change. We want equal pay if wework the same jobs.
There are no statistics and no proof that women work lessthan men and should get less money for the same effort input in job. Does the gender pay gap matter?Women in theUK are now more highly educated than their male peers and this should berewarded in employment and wages, but expectations about women’sresponsibilities in the home and the type if jobs that are most suitable, meanthey do not participate in the workforce on equal terms with men. The genderpay gap also means women have less superannuation than men at retirement,leaving many vulnerable to poverty in old age.So what is the gender pay gap?The genderpay gap refers to the difference in earning between women and men. This valueis calculated using the Office for National Statistics average weekly full-timeearning data.
For the past two decades the gender pay gap has been stuckbetween 15 and 19 per cent, in early 2017 it was 16 per cent. That means theaverage full-time weekly earning of women was 16 percent lower than that ofmen. That’s about £260 less each week, and that’s just the average.
There are bigdifferences in the gender pay gap across industry groups. The smallest is aseven percent gap for employees in public administration and safety, thoseworking in jobs like local government or the police force. But in financial andinsurance services the gap widens to 31 per cent. The genderpay gap also differs between public and private sector employment.
Women in theprivate sector face a much bigger gender gap than those who work in the publicsector. Inequality also varies across occupations too. UK Tax Office data showssome of the biggest pay gaps are between women and men employed as barristers,financial traders and surgeons. So why is there a gender pay gap? In the UK, women and men tend to congregate indifferent types of occupations. Women dominate retail, education, healthcareand social service jobs. These have been traditionally viewed as low skilledand attract much lower wages than male dominated jobs that are defined asskilled, jobs like mining and engineering. There is an important link betweenoccupational segregation on one hand and the undervaluation of feminized workon the other. Women also tend to be concentrated in lower level jobs in frontlineservices, where incomes are less than those paid to managers and executives, positionsthat are disproportionally dominated by men and this has a really big impact onthe gender pay gap.
Even when women are CEOs and other key management jobs,they earn less than men in similar positions, on average almost 27 per centless. Another contributing factor to the gender pay gap is that women do farmore unpaid domestic work than men, especially if they are mothers. Genderinequality and unpaid work underwrites many of the inequalities by women in theworld of paid work. A new law inthe United Kingdom, requires companies with 250 or more employees to publiclydisclose details of their gender pay gap. Some big companies admit to have agender pay gap either accidentally or on purpose but some decline the existenceof such a thing.
One of these examples is the airline EasyJet, which confirmedthe existence of a 50% pay gap between women and men. Overall, men account for89.3 per cent off all employees in the highest pay quartile at theairline in the UK, while women account for 68.9 per cent of all employeesin the lowest. The mean gender pay gap calculated by hourly rate of pay is51.7 per cent while the median is 45.
5 per cent. For bonus pay, the gaps are43.8 per cent and 32.2 per cent respectively. Low-cost airline EasyJet hasbecome the latest corporation to publish figures on its gender pay gap,admitting that it awards its average UK-based female employee a salary that ismore than 50 per cent lower than what it pays its average UK-based maleemployee, largely because so few pilots are women.
This is justone of the examples where a company actually confessed that women are gettingpaid less than males, yet no real reason is given, it is something that isstereotyped and something that is always considered to be the right thing to doby male CEOs. I am looking forward for women and men to unite with me toaddress this issue. In the last50 years there was progress in this field as more and more women got hired forand jobs got permission to be CEOs and representatives of big companies, thisis a big improvement but the problem is that the female CEOs aren’t gettingpaid as much as male CEOs. My questionabout this issue is who decided things should be this way, why are all womenstereotyped as being week and unable to do any job, but just be a housewifewithout making any impact on a global society. This is a global matter thatshould be taken in consideration more seriously and changes should be affectedimmediately,
