Perceptions are that men and women have different skills. And it goes back as far as time. In prehistoric society, men were hunters while women were gatherers. So men became associated with the killer instinct leadership roles require, while women became known for home care, nurturing, and meal prep.
Thousands of years on, these biases are still deeply ingrained and they’re a major cause of the gender pay gap.
We’re going to unpack the current gender pay gap in the UK, what’s causing it, and what we can do to close it.
What is the current gender pay gap in the UK?
The gender pay gap is defined as the difference in the average wage between men and women. Some organisations look at this more granularly. For example, they track gender pay gaps across their organisation, across locations, and even across seniorities.
Currently in the UK, among full-time employees, the gender pay gap most recently sat at 7.9%, which was a slight rise from the year before (7%). but there is a general downward trend.
Why is there still a pay gap?
You might be thinking, since the 2010 Equality Act states that ‘men and women in the same employment performing equal work must receive equal pay unless any difference in pay can be justified’, this means gender pay gap shouldn’t exist.
In theory, you’re right. However, in practice, because of this terms ‘men and women have to be performing the same jobs, in the same circumstance’, employers could argue that differences can be justified if a male employee and a female employee are working in different locations, or have different benefits such as increased flexibility.
Male-dominated professions usually have better pay
Here we face the first major hurdle when we look at gender pay gaps. Men and women work in different professions, and often the professions with more men tend to be better paid.
In the UK, 90% of engineers are male, while 83% of primary-school teachers are female.
Our industry salary data shows engineers earn on average £43,670 whilst a primary school teacher earns £29,946. As these careers progress, the salary differences are even more substantial in terms of average salary. For a director of engineering, the average wage is £54,902 while for a primary school head teacher it is £38,190. Between these two professions at both seniorities, around a 30% salary gap exists consistently.
Deep-rooted gender prejudice prevails
The problem is deep-rooted in our perceptions of what men and women are good at, not IQ or education.
Interestingly, within our education system, gender bias favours young women, who are more likely to excel at school than boys. When girls leave school, they are 35% more likely to apply for university than their male peers and 2.2% more female A-level students achieved A and A* grades than boys this year.
So the problem does not lie in academic merit or access to higher education.
Gender roles play a huge part, and these begin early on. Take stereotypical childhood toys as an example. Young girls have tended to be encouraged to play with dolls, enhancing ideas around caring as well as peaking interests in fashion, hair, and makeup. Boys on the other hand are given tools, and encouraged to build, design and make things.
Segregation into traditional gender roles isn’t even a conscious decision we make but is informed by these social pressures that shape us from a young age.
The skills that women have are perceived by some as the 5 Cs:
Cleaning
Again this goes back to the toys we have from a young age. Toy hoovers as well as playhouses encourage the perception that housework is within the female domain of skills. Professional cleaners earn £25,940, 36.5% below the national average for full-time work.
A lot of these roles are also not full-time. Around a third of the cleaning roles advertised by Adzuna are part-time only and there will be many more roles advertised elsewhere that are casual and cash-in-hand. This instability adds even further to the gender pay gap.
Catering
Similar to cleaning, cooking and catering again fall within the perceptions that the home is the female domain. This means that catering roles, paying an average of £26,616 are dominated by women.
What’s really interesting is when we look at chefs separately. 77% of chefs in the UK are male, in the restaurant and hotel sector. Unsociable hours and lack of flexibility could be huge factors here. This could also be down to the TV chefs over the decades, who are often male with larger-than-life personalities.
On the reverse, substantially more women are waiters, again, placing women in lower-paid jobs.
Clerical
Administrative roles are dominated by women, despite the days of Mad Men being very much over.
There are more women in associated roles such as Office Management, HR, and Recruitment. Although many of these roles float somewhere near the national average, lower-level administrative assistant roles demand an average salary of £25,307.
Cashier
Cashiering, or retail roles tend to be part-time and casual, which means they lend themselves to people with caring responsibilities at home (more on that later).
We also tend to perceive women as friendly and therefore good at customer service. Again, cashiering roles pay less than the national average, the average full-time pay nationwide is £25,307.
Childcare and Caring
We’ve touched on why women are considered more caring briefly already. In short, this has a lot to do with our perceptions of who should bear the majority of childcare responsibilities, and in later life who should look after the previous generation.
Care is an industry in crisis. It’s a hard, often manual job, with long hours and generally low pay rates.
As the population ages, more and more carers will be required, yet in the last year, the number of empty care roles has risen by 52%.
Jobs done by women are undervalued
In the professions dominated by women that we have touched on above, all have one thing in common – low wages.
The skills associated with men are rewarded with more money, as often the roles dominated by men require higher education, apprenticeships, or further education.
More women work part-time
A lot of what we have looked at so far shows discrepancies in full-time pay. 38% of women in the workplace work part-time, compared to just 13% of men.
There isn’t just one reason why. As well as the burden of care often falling on women (for children and other family members) a lot of female-dominated roles don’t offer full-time as the norm, regardless of the situation at home.
Take the hospitality industry as an example. Someone working as a waiter is reliant on the hours of operation of their employer. If a restaurant only serves 5 days a week for 4 hours each evening, that equates to just 20 hours of work per week.
In fact, when we look at the waiter roles we have advertised 40% of them are advertised as part-time.
More men hold senior roles
About 30% of women are in the lowest-paid quartile, compared to 20% of men, while only 20% of women are in the highest-paid quartile (compared to 30% of men). So in other words, 10% more women are in the lowest income threshold, and 10% fewer women are in the highest.
A lot of this is down to the seniority that women achieve within their jobs.
In universities, more women are awarded bachelor’s degrees than men and they are also more likely to work in the sector. Despite this, fewer women lead in this industry than men. There are some improvements. Currently, 40% of higher education governing body members in the UK are women, and 27% of chairs are female. This has risen over five years from only 32% of all governing body members and just 12% of chairs.
There’s also been a rise in women as vice-chancellors, the absolute top of the pile within UK universities, as 29% of universities in the UK are now led by women.
As a sector, higher education has actively sought to bring about better opportunities for women to progress in the sector to bring equality to the top. This has been through a variety of schemes, training opportunities, as well as mentorship.
However, the pool of women in those mid-to-high roles is small. Less than 25% of professors in the UK are female, a prerequisite to reaching the most senior leadership positions.
What we can learn from this sector, is that to encourage women into top roles, sector-wide action is essential.
Women pay a motherhood penalty
As well as the perception that women are homemakers, we cannot avoid the fact that it is women who take on the overwhelming bulk of the childcare.
Women spend 77% more time than men on childcare and bore the additional brunt of these pressures during school closures during the pandemic.
No doubt, more easily accessible maternity leave packages for women have an impact here, as well as the perception that women should take this on.
And it’s not just childcare. Women are more likely to take on caring roles full stop, caring for ill and disabled relatives. It’s been estimated that the unpaid care provided by women in the UK each year is a whopping worth £77 billion per year to the economy.
All of this creates a motherhood / caring penalty for which women pay the price. Those with caring responsibilities simply have fewer hours in the day. This can mean either taking on only part-time work or not having additional hours to play with so that they can impress their boss. Even if a woman is working her contracted 40 hours per week, if a man has 15 additional hours at his disposal to graft, he’s far more likely to get his hands on that promotion.
Women are also more likely to have gaps in their CV, such as periods of maternity leave and may not know their market value when re-entering the workforce. Without salary transparency, they could be asking for well below the market rate after a period where their responsibilities have been elsewhere.
So what can we do?
Despite so many factors leading to a gender pay gap we also know that when companies go more granular, looking at locations and seniority, that pay gaps still exist when legally they should not.
Pay reporting has been shown to make a major difference.
For the big four accountancy firms, there is a trend in the pay gap being reduced year on year. For example, the pay gap at KPMG fell by 2% between 2021 and 2022, and the firm now reports a pay gap of 11.4%. PwC, also recorded a reduction of 2.5% from 10% to 7.5%.
Salary transparency is not just a vital tool for organisations, it’s also incredibly important for jobseekers who may be vastly underselling their worth.
At Adzuna, we’re calling on the UK Government to make salaries mandatory to reduce pay gaps and inequality, ensure businesses attract the best possible candidates, and save time for frustrated jobseekers. Our petition could reduce the gender pay gap substantially.
Salary transparency could also help to inform decisions earlier in life, pushing gifted school leavers into careers that pay, rather than roles that are considered more suited to their gender.
We recognise too, that stereotypical skills should not have a label of “male” and “female”, and that roles that are considered female and thus lower paid, should be more fairly rewarded. We need to work together to change our perceptions, and the perceptions we pass on to the next generation.
Ready to back our campaign for pay transparency? Find out more here.
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