#somethingtosay

In January this year, Professor Jordan Peterson discussed the gender pay gap with Channel 4 News’ Cathy Newman, an interview that has been watched more than seven million times online. It wasn’t her finest hour and that detracted somewhat from the massive flaws in his argument. In it he argues that whilst prejudice may exist he does not believe it is the major factor.  Accepting that women are segregated from men in the labour market in both horizontal and vertical ways he explains this segregation and the ensuing pay differentials as being  largely a natural reflection of differences between men and women.

He also maintains that the dominant explanation put forward by others (particularly feminists which he says with an emphasis denoting disapproval) for the gender pay gap is that it is caused by oppression and the oppressive patriarchy .  First things first. No one who works in this area thinks that there is a single cause of the gender pay gap. I agree as he says so often particularly when he gets a difficult question – it’s complicated. He also fails to understand that patriarchy as a concept describes a system of social relations that enables men to dominate women … not that all men do this or that all women are victims. In short he displays a poor understanding of the history of women’s employment and feminism.

Now Professor Peterson is incredibly influential and has a huge following among young men.  These young men seem hungry for the kind of advice on life Professor Peterson is dishing out. Much of it is common sense and hard to disagree with e.g. the kind of things a good parent would say, like clear up your bedroom and take responsibility for yourself. If young men lap up his views on life it is important to hear what he is saying about men and women. It is also important to challenge him. I will only discuss the gender pay gap in this post but his explanation for this reveals his attitudes to gender relations more widely.

Those of us in the business and all those who worked so hard to measure the pay gap for their reports know full well that it is a fairly basic measure of a complex picture. And it is being discussed in the media  as if it is the be all and end all of equality in the workplace. It isn’t. It is a useful tool to analyse the position of men and women at work using specific organisational data.

My main criticism is that Peterson draws  on psychology to provide his explanations and his approach lacks a historical and cultural context.  Explaining men and women’s differences in their position in society and the workplace through the discourse of psychology and biology fails because it leaves out power and the social and cultural impact of men’s power over women since time began.

Firstly Peterson accepts the concept of work as being neutral. There are neutral workplaces and men and women go into them. But huge amounts of research have shown just how gendered the very concept of work is as well as workplace cultures.  (Hearn 1992, Collinson and Collinson 1989, Rutherford 2011) We cannot look at the gender pay gap without acknowledging that men and women are situated differently in the labour market as well as in wider society. The public world of work has been developed around men’s lives and has largely remained unchanged despite women entering the workforce in huge numbers over the past forty years.

A second criticism following this is, as I wrote above, his lack of historical and cultural context.  His mistake is to assume that men and women started out at the same place and that the natural order or biology  makes men do certain jobs and women others and that is why the pay is different.  But women have only had the vote for one hundred years.   Women have only been allowed to graduate from universities for a similar amount of time. Women were barred from all the professions until the 1920’s and were only allowed on to the Stock Exchange floor in 1973.  Virginia Woolf wrote about women’s exclusion from the public world fifty years ago. Working class women  had to work to survive and different rules applied. But middle class women, once they were allowed to work, had to give it up when they married.  The marriage bar was not removed in certain professions until the late 1950’s and teaching until the early 1960’s. If anyone has any doubt about the resistance to women entering the workplace it is worth reading some of the accounts in Parliament at the time. What jobs women do and don’t do, can and cannot do has less to do with what they choose and more to do with the development of a labour market that has exploited their availability and lower social status. Let’s not forget that in 1970 before the implementation of the Equal Pay Act in 1975 it was legal to pay a woman less than a man for the same job… so the gender pay gap then was 48% – does Professor Peterson put this down to women’s choice?

Because Peterson argues that the uneven distribution of men and women in the workplace is a  matter of choice – ““Men and women won’t sort themselves into the same categories if you leave them alone to do it of their own accord. We’ve already seen that in Scandinavia. It’s 20 to one female nurses to male… and approximately the same male engineers to female engineers,” he explains.”

The cultural attachments of work as male and female are incredibly powerful but they too can and do change and vary from culture to culture.  Women are now bus drivers – unthinkable only a matter of twenty five  years ago. When their work was required during the First World War women took over all manner of male jobs only to be pushed out of them at the end of the War. Men were secretaries before women were allowed to work. In India low caste women work in construction on the roads. There are some jobs which require physical strength which may suit men more than women but many of our ‘divisions’ today are pretty artificial and are more to do with cultural meanings and historical hangovers  than any real rational reason.

Skills are not neutral either, they are gendered and we value some over others.  So if we gauge  value by how much people are paid, in this country we value refuse collectors and train drivers more than we do cleaners and nurses. Why is this? Peterson seems to accept that being an engineer is a higher status job and therefore better paid than nursing but doesn’t ask why?

Why, if men and women are actually drawn to different types of work, is it  that men’s work is almost always better paid than women’s. Is it that women’s lower social status attaches itself to work which then assumes that lower status? When women enter highly prized areas of work dominated by men in great numbers, the status of that work will usually go down. 

What the gender pay gap did rather well was break down the quartiles making visible how heavily male the top of almost all organisations were. Professor Peterson suggests this is also a choice and  that women do not want to rise to these levels. How does he know this? Why is he accepting that long hours are a necessary part of the work itself and not just a cultural barrier which does a good job at keeping women out? In the 1970’s and 1980’s long hours as such didn’t exist like they do now but then there were other barriers more structural to keep women out of well-paid management positions.

Our working patterns have developed around the lives of men who had and still do have the ‘other side of life’ looked after for them. Women’s choice to have a family or a good career is not a choice. It is presented as one because the terms of the discourse have been set by men. Senior men can only do these jobs if the ‘other side of life’ is picked up by their partner or wife. If a woman has a partner who takes main responsibility for family and domestic life then she really does have a choice.

He also cites women’s predisposition to agreeableness, one of the  Big Five personality traits as a reason they are not in more senior positions at work. He sees this agreeableness  as conflicting with organisational hierarchies where people (men) with less agreeableness are better at negotiating and demanding higher paid and more powerful positions. So women remain in lower positions in an organisation.

There is another way of looking at this.  Peterson  says that women’s nurturing instincts which required her to be on demand and agreeable twenty four hours a day  for the first nine months of a baby’s life possibly tuned her nervous system which whilst suitable for the unspoken demands of a baby  made her less suitable for the demands of business and dealing.

If we use the biology discourse then how about  we also say that a woman’s programming for looking out for her young may make her much better at multitasking, time management and forecasting  future risk in business, some things men are not so good at? Indeed there was a flurry of academic research on this particularly in the aftermath of the financial crisis. It was contended that women balanced out men’s tendency to exaggerate, be impulsive, be too blinkered and speculative.  I have argued elsewhere that the skills women learn at home are invaluable to being a good manager. Yet they are still rarely acknowledged or valued.

Academics  have questioned the value placed on status seeking and risk taking in business – masculinity here could be problematized as being an impediment to success, rather than women not fitting the mould.   Emphasising women’s difference to men is fraught with difficulties as it tends to be used to justify women’s inequality and leads to essentialism. In the end it is not about difference it is about what is valued.

I think women have changed more than men.  Today men are having to adapt to a world where women are  learning beside them, working beside them, competing with them and there seems to be some resistance. Instead of pandering to youthful  male insecurities which fans the flame of resentment  by blaming feminism,  Professor Peterson would help his young fan base so much more by imploring them to open up, talk about their  concerns and learn to embrace women as their equals.

 

This morning’s reaction to the poor excuses made by some of the FTSE 350 leaders as to why they had no or only one woman on their boards is a good reminder of how far thinking and action on gender in the boardroom has actually come. Some of the views expressed by leaders, which may have been  acceptable ten years ago,  have been condemned as pitiful, sexist and patronising.

I was lucky enough to become a non-executive director of a FTSE 250 company nearly fifteen years ago. So I recognise all the excuses in the report, as well as some that leaders would probably not utter to an interviewer today.

The timing of my appointment in 2003 was not a coincidence.  The Higgs Report on the Role and Effectiveness of Non-Executive Directors had been published the year before in 2002 and it recommended that companies cast their nets wider for their non-executive roles.

An enlightened headhunter had heard about me and approached me for a position. To be honest at the time it wouldn’t have crossed my mind as I certainly didn’t  have the ‘right’ sort of career path to get on to a board. So I was grateful to Derek Higgs, the timing and of course the lovely headhunter. But I was also lucky that the small board I joined were welcoming and appointed me despite my ‘different background’.  There was a risk in that and I know that the headhunter worked very hard in persuading the directors that I was going to be an asset to them.  My research has showed that men’s attitudes to sharing power with women is an important factor in determining how many women can progress in an organisation.

The headhunter  warned me about why I may not get a position and it wasn’t my lack of management experience. ‘You will be  considered too  young, and too pretty,’ and another  ‘Luckily you are married as they don’t want anyone who is divorced’. I had to keep very quiet (even to the headhunter) as I was about to embark on a very messy divorce at the time.  I certainly heard a member from my own board when recruiting another non-executive, say ‘we don’t want another different person’ clearly meaning they already had one! And then he looked across at me rather apologetically as he realised what he had said!

I don’t hold any grudges at all.  At that time I and other women were  breaking into a cosy all male club which isn’t comfortable for either side. I understood that. I learned from them and am extremely grateful for the experience.

The Davies Review, which introduced targets and the threat of quotas if they were not met by 2015 has resulted in boards finding women who were invisible to them before.  Importantly since 1999 there has been a consistent annual monitoring of women on boards  by  Professor Susan Vinnicombe’s team at Cranfield School of Management aka the Female FTSE 100 Report.  This keeps the pressure up and we know that what gets measured gets done.

Today’s report says that 10 of the FTSE 350 companies still do not have a single female board member. However this is a vast improvement since the Davies Review on Women on Boards published in early 2011 when  over one half of them had no women in the boardroom at all.  In 2011 only 7.8% of all main board directors were women and this increased to 21% last year. Acknowledging progress is as important as highlighting areas that still need improvement. Attitudes take a while to change but in this area I would say that they have changed pretty quickly. The executive  positions are a different matter and quite rightly attention is being turned to improving figures there.

 

Professor Jordan Peterson faced little opposition to speaking at the Oxford Union last week. In fact by all accounts he was welcomed  at Oxford University despite his very public and consistent criticism of aspects of trans activist ideology . This is in stark opposition to leading feminists who have been no platformed in other universities for similar views. And to the violent protests that met women meeting in Oxford recently just to debate the consequences of any changes to Gender Recognition Act.

Professor Peterson has been in trouble at his own university in Toronto, Canada because of rejecting a rule forcing him to use particular pronouns of someone’s choice. In fact it was this suspension that made him something of a global star. He argues pretty persuasively that we do not choose our identity – it is something that is negotiated in society and is constantly in flux. Using gender identity as a social category rather than sex has led to 31 different gender identities being recognised in the state of New York and he says it is absurd and unworkable. And that it is undemocratic for a tiny percentage of the population to impose changes in language which everyone else is forced to  use. He sees it as an attack on free speech.

Yet even questioning the right of biological men to claim to be a woman (self ID) ‘I am a woman because I say I am’ has been enough for a number of well-known feminists to be barred from speaking publicly about anything!  Germaine Greer, whose work was life changing for many women of my generation,  faced fierce opposition to  speaking at Cardiff University and still faces abuse because of her views (she is speaking though at Oxford Union next month) ; Julie Bindel, a campaigner against male violence was no platformed by Manchester University  and  Linda Bellos, a lifelong feminist activist was banned from speaking at Cambridge University. All three are critical of the transgender ideology, particularly of self ID. Why  is that  Professor Peterson, who  is  dismissive of  feminism, was applauded almost unreservedly  at Oxford yet women who have been activists and done huge amounts to promote the equality of women are being silenced because of views that they actually share with Peterson? Is it because he has an adoring fan club of mostly young men?

 

The last minute and presumably reluctant release of their gender pay gap reports earlier this month by the majority of companies with over 250 employees warned us that there would be some difficult reading.  No doubt hoping theirs would be buried in the swamp of thousands of others if they left it to the last day shows that leaders know full well some of the inequalities that still exist in their organisations. I know that in some instances PR consultants as well as lawyers have been hauled in to restore any brand reputational damage.

Yes the gender pay gap is a clumsy measure. To know that there are more men at the top of almost all organisations is nothing new to us, but it is still uncomfortable to see this uneven representation when it is laid out in statistics. And as well, to see this vertical segregation of men and women result in some huge pay disparities. But the exercise is useful because by looking closely at the figures we can also use them to see where more work or even some work needs to be done.

Vertical and horizontal segregation

The publication of the quartiles is revealing and these numbers are invaluable to companies in any gender audit. In the vast majority of organisations   women dominate the bottom two quartiles and it switches for the next higher two.  Looking at ways to promote women into more senior positions is on most companies’ to do diversity list and efforts can be redoubled. The missing statistic which I am sure companies may have themselves and should also look at it is in which divisions in the organisation men and women are working. Horizontal segregation is as important as vertical segregation. Who works where and what is the impact on gender pay differentials? Are women over represented in certain departments? Which departments are most valued? This should provoke a debate on the meaning of value and whether it is time to address some of the assumptions that dictate levels of pay.

A further line of questioning for organisations is this. Is there a correlation between the highly paid parts of an organisation and their cultures? Does the culture operate to exclude and/or marginalise women from the most highly prized parts of a company?  In my experience this is very often what happens and my survey is designed to capture this kind of exclusion / marginalisation.

 A useful measure of success of diversity initiatives

The gender pay audits can be used as a measure of success of gender diversity initiatives. Organisations are part of a wider labour market with its own inequalities and that itself is part of wider society where there is still gender inequality. So  there are limits on what can be done. But some organisations have worked hard over many years to achieve better representation of women throughout their organisations and it is interesting for these companies to see when and to what extent the work has paid off. Certainly a company like National Grid which has invested in many years of diversity work shows that even a numerically male dominated organisation can still achieve good results in gender parity.

Women at National Grid make up less than a third of the bottom quartile but are still nearly a quarter of the top quartile – a far less differential than in many female dominated companies. And the pay gap is much smaller than the average with women’s   median hourly rate being only 1.9% lower than men’s.

A female dominated company, Marks and Spencer also started implementing equal opportunities policies years and years ago like other retailers with predominantly female workforces.  Women’s representation throughout the organisation is fairly consistent and two thirds of the top quartile are women with 75% in the lowest quartile. The median pay gap is very low at 3.3% (mean 12.3%)

However some organisations have found it difficult to achieve good results despite a focus on gender equality and diversity. Goldman Sachs has been noisy enough about gender equality over the years. It has even won an Opportunity Now award a few years  for its initiative 10,000 Women  which  aimed to provide  microfinance for this number of women in Africa. However closer to home it is struggling to get women into senior positions. Only 17% of the top quartile are women whilst 62.4% of the lowest quartile are. Women’s mean hourly rate is 55.5% lower than men’s and median rate 36.4% lower.

The bonus gap

Almost everywhere I looked, whatever the size of the median hourly pay gap, the bonus gap was way, way bigger. Goldman Sachs, renowned for its huge remuneration packages, published a whopping 72.2% mean bonus pay gap (67.7% median).

And in organisations where the pay gap hourly rate figures were ‘good’, these were often not matched by similar size bonus gap figures. At Marks and Spencer  although more women  (76%)  than men (66%)  received bonus pay the bonus pay gap is vastly skewed in favour of the minority of men, with the gender gap shooting to 53% mean (15.9% median) lower for women. I do think the mean is important to look at when talking about bonuses because these large gaps mean the figures are being skewed by some very large numbers at the top, an important part of the story.

Ernst & Young, another organisation with an exemplary history of diversity and inclusion work, reported a 15% pay gap with 35% of women making up the top quartile. Yet when it came to bonuses a similar pattern emerged. Women’s mean bonus pay was 43.5% lower than men’s and women’s median bonus pay is 35.2% lower than men’s.

McKinsey has been consulting on and researching the benefits of gender diversity for a number of years now, publishing their reports Diversity Matters annually. The management consultancy had reasonably good statistics for women in the top quartile… 35% were women compared to the bottom quartile where 60% were women and the median hourly rate was a little below the average at 14.3%. However these relatively good figures get blown out of the water with the publication of their bonus figures.  Women’s mean bonus pay was 76% lower than men’s and 52.5% lower than men’s (median).

Whilst companies sought to explain differences in pay by the fact that there were not enough women in senior positions they were pretty silent on the bonus differences.

Comment

The pattern I see in these reported figures is consistent. It is that whatever the demographic of the organisation, or how evenly distributed men and women are throughout an organisation, there exists a top most senior group of predominantly men whose pay is so high it skews the figures dramatically (you can tell this from the mean averages of bonuses as against the median).

It is to be applauded that bonuses were included in the reporting requirements as one of the biggest obscurers of pay is the bonus culture. The accepted use of the bonus system to pay men disproportionately more than women needs to be challenged.

The glass ceiling is in fact very flexible… it shifts like cling film to protect the most elite, the most powerful and the best paid in any organisation. Yes, we are talking at this level about the kind of salaries few of us would dream of, but the exposure and analysis of this is important when addressing the lack of women in leadership roles.

Gender Pay Gaps –   further reflection on the BBC pay debacle

I have been spending time looking at some of the 2017 Gender Pay Gap Reports  in some detail and will be writing on them shortly but so far I have not found anything that has disappointed me as much as the huge gender pay chasm that was revealed in the publication of the BBC’s most highly paid stars last July.

However that may be because none of the companies have voluntarily published any actual earnings figures which is how what got the BBC into such trouble.  The interesting fact is that despite the BBC UK having a relatively low gender pay gap of 9% (published following its equal pay audit last year), and nearly half its employees being women almost throughout the organisation, this huge gender disparity of pay in the highly paid quartile can still occur. So we would probably be equally disappointed by actual earnings disparities if other companies did publish them.  Judging by the size of some of the reported pay gaps, these senior male executives must be paid very well indeed to skew the results so heavily, even in female dominated companies.

I bring up the BBC pay revelation of last year because it needs ongoing attention, shining a light on what may be happening elsewhere. I found the article written by Sarah Montague in the Sunday Times this week quite heart wrenching. On the face of it this was gender discrimination of the most odious kind.  This is not a cut throat profit driven investment bank but a publicly funded organisation that likes to think of itself as politically correct in every way. Complicated remuneration packages have made it very difficult to compare salaries, making inequality of pay hard to establish. But to sit side by side with someone ostensibly doing the same job for so many years only to find he is valued at nearly five times more than you are must be devastating. I will not reiterate her experience but I am glad she has written this   and as she says there will be literally thousands of women who are being underpaid compared to their male colleagues without them knowing. It is only by insisting on further transparency than the current gender pay reports require that any of us can know.

Postnote: BBC Worldwide (as opposed to just the UK) published their Gender Pay Gap Report  and the gap measured nearer 17%.

Diary of a gendered world – February 20^th 2014

I have in front of me two pieces of research on gender at work and the lack of women in senior leadership both published by large influential corporates. The first one is McKinsey’s latest  report, Moving Mindsets on Gender Diversity and the second one is  Winning Hearts and Minds – How CEOs talk about gender parity  published by Kings’ College and written by Elisabeth Kelan with the support of KPMG.

I have  also just  been listening to Radio 4 PM on the radio and hearing the horrific account of a twenty year woman in Northern India who has been gang raped by thirteen men at the request of a village elder. She is in an acute condition in hospital and of course there is discussion now in the media  about the high incidence of rape and sexual violence in India – a discussion that only really began eighteen months ago following the brutal gang rape and subsequent death of a young physiotherapist on a bus in New Delhi….

Much as I believe the sincerity of the two corporate reports and the desire for change within organisations, only when we as a society begin to make the link between these and the gang rape in India will any meaningful change take place….

 

postnote…I still believe this to be true. We must try to link the macro picture of women’s lives everywhere with the micro we focus on when it comes to working for gender equality.

Frances McDormand got right to the nub of it with her acceptance words last night at the Oscars in Los Angeles.  Asking every woman who had been nominated for an Oscar to stand up  and then saying to the rest of the audience… look, women have their own stories, give us the finance to make them!

Sexual harassment is but a symptom of the core problem in the film industry which McDormand exposed last night. Power and money behind the scenes determine the movies, both in what is made and how it is made and who is in them.  And this background picture is very male. The concentration of this power in the hands of men has resulted in the abuse, exploitation and arguably over sexualisation and stereotyping of women in film. This is the #timesup story now.  Women need to make their own movies, tell their own tales.   A recent study conducted by San Diego State University, looked at the top 250 films at the US box office in 2017 and found that women make up only 11% of the directors. This has risen from a mere 7% in 2016. And 83% of all films had no female writers at all. For all its liberal polish Hollywood is still back in the dark ages when it comes to women’s equality.

Perhaps uniquely the film industry has the ability to contribute to ideology in a way few other industries can. What we see on screen not only mirrors but shapes what we see in society. It is almost always men’s standpoint we see when we go to the cinema no matter what gender the actors on the screen.   Only one woman director, Kathryn Bigelow has ever won an Oscar (The Hurt Locker). Greta Gerwig got the fifth ever Oscar nomination to a female director this year for Ladybird (in the award’s 90 year history).  Actresses with enough clout are now  producing their own films and TV series as  they find the choice of parts limited and/or stereotyped.   Recent female led productions like Big Little Lies, produced by Nicole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon and Margot Robbie’s I Tonya among others are telling stories through women’s eyes…   The celluloid ceiling is now being challenged and it is high time.

Further interesting statistics can be found here.

Other commentators have talked of men feeling victimised so it is not just Matthew Parris. I suggest that the discomfort that men and indeed some women are feeling about the current stories involving men’s behaviour to women is actually a profound discomfort with women’s anger.  Because the #MeToo and #Times Up movements are  not a joined up feminist campaign with a strategy but symptoms of women’s anger and women do have a lot to be angry about. I first discovered that it was ok for women to be angry when I read Mary Daly’s extraordinary polemic Gyn/Ecology at university many moons ago. I also learned quickly that angry women are punished culturally so it is not surprising that we have seen so little of women’s anger expressed in history… the suffragettes and the second wave feminists certainly but both were described/ dismissed as harridans, harpies and generally disgraceful examples of women at the time.  But in the face of how women and girls are treated at the hands of men all over the world is there any other reaction that is more appropriate than anger? This is righteous anger and because it has been repressed for so long sometimes it may not look pretty.  Women are not used to being angry and men are not used to seeing it.

Several years ago I took part in a group analytical weekend on Gender, Sex and Power. You can guess that there were not many men on it but those that were, were all supportive, pro-feminist men. On day three a woman recounted that she had been followed and threatened by a man on her walk home the evening before. This had the effect of bringing out comments from other women about men’s behaviour they found upsetting. The anger of women in that group was being expressed quite cautiously but was palpable. Of all places this was a therapeutic setting and should have felt safe. However the men were deeply unsettled and felt attacked (sort of like Matthew Paris). One man even jumped up and left the group, followed by a couple of others. The male facilitator lost control of the group and the women were left with their angry feelings now mixed with that familiar feeling of guilt at having caused men to be angry. Yes it is complex and difficult. I suggest that this is what is taking place today. We do not have sufficient language and experience of discussing these issues. I understand it must be hard as a man to hear how your own sex behaves towards women, and to want to distance yourself from it, but the lid is off and we know that blame can no longer be put at the feet of a few perverted men. Sexism and misogyny are enmeshed in the fabric of most cultures in different ways and must be worked through for us all to move forward.

I like Matthew Parris; I like a lot of his work even if I don’t always agree with him. He has got a bit obsessive over the Brexit decision which I can only think has tainted his usual intelligence and empathy. Or else feminism really has got an awful lot of work to do. It is worrying for women if a ‘liberal minded’ man of considerable intellect has failed to grasp even the basics of feminism. His particular complaint aired on the Today programme this morning is that there has been too much media coverage of women and women’s issues and many men like him are beginning to feel victimised. This is astonishing and particularly disappointing at a time when women are celebrating 100 years of having the vote. And to talk of being victimised in the light of readily available statistics showing that women are still murdered by their partners or ex partners at the rate of two a week, domestic violence is rife as is rape and sexual harassment – is frankly narcissistic as well as disrespectful.

The Lib Dem MP Jo Swinson did all women proud with some brilliant responses to Matthew Parris’s complaints.  So engrained is our masculine bias in all things cultural that when women dominate any platform even once, it feels strange and can provoke cries of ‘unfair’ from men. But it is women now who are saying they are fed up with the years of domination everywhere and in many forms by men. It is not a coincidence that Today has a female editor, Sarah Sands and her touch on the programme’s content is evident and welcome.  I know that many men are threatened by the increasing independence and voice of women but I would never have counted Matthew Parris as one of them. We are only seeing the tip of the iceberg, so Matthew hang on to your hat, there is a lot more to come.

The gender pay gap  has rightly been in the news a lot recently, as companies, most of whom have been dragging their feet, have to report by April this year. Most of the big gender pay gaps reported so far including Easyjet, Aviva, Virgin Money are easily explained away by the fact that it is men who still hold the majority of well-paid and senior positions in organizations. It is not much of a surprise that senior managers are paid more than clerical workers, pilots are paid more than air stewardesses. Apart from encouraging more women into senior positions there is a limit to what companies can do to radically change. The outrage about the BBC’s publication of its figures was that, from an outside perspective, men and women seemingly doing exactly the same job were being made very different salaries. There was John Humphries and Sarah Montague sitting side by side on many mornings presenting the Today programme, and one was being paid more than three times as much as the other. That, if proven, would be illegal. The BBC argument boiled down so far is that there is just a far greater value placed on men than women. And this is the nub of most discrimination and hard for all of us to acknowledge today.

So what is very exciting and of real challenge to the gender pay gap everywhere is the news that female shop workers are taking their employer Tesco to court on an equal pay claim. They will be arguing that their work is of equal value to the male warehouse workers, who  are paid more per hour than they are, and receive better overtime pay.

The limits of equal pay legislation became apparent soon after its implementation in 1975. The fact that men and women were segregated into different jobs meant that direct comparisons then were few and far between and indeed still are. The Equal Pay Act was amended in 1983 and a new regulation which provides for claims of equal pay for work of equal value came into force in 1984. This has proved to be an invaluable (if lengthy and complex) route for women, challenging as it does the notion that skills and value are objective.

Equal pay legislation has been in place for over forty years. We must not forget that before then it was perfectly legal for companies to pay women half what they paid men. It seems incredible today but it was accepted that women were valued less than men in society and that followed them into the workplace. The hangover of women’s lesser social status is still with us. To put it bluntly, on the whole women’s jobs pay less than men’s jobs. Women are crowded into underpaid sectors of the labour market, sometimes known as the five C’s – caring, cleaning, clerical, cashiering and catering. These are structural labour market inequalities which we should all be questioning. Arguably we should be using these facts for pay demands rather than a simple public /sector private sector one.

As a society we really need to ask questions about value. Why should train drivers who are overwhelmingly male earn twice as much as highly qualified nurses overwhelmingly female? Do we as a society think that train drivers are twice as valuable?

The last big case of this kind was the case of the female Birmingham council workers who won their equal pay case based on work of equal value in 2010.

Nearly 4,500 women working in traditionally female dominated roles such as cleaning care and catering  for made individual claims against  Birmingham Council for which they worked, comparing themselves with male workers, such as grave diggers, street cleaners and refuse collectors.  During the seven week hearing the tribunal heard how a man doing the same pay-graded job as a woman could earn four times more than her. Under a bonus scheme male refuse collection staff sometimes received up to 160% of their basic pay. In one year a refuse collector took home £51,000 while women on the same pay grade received less than £12,000. The council appealed and lost in 2012 and is stilling paying out compensation to the women.

An early example of and equal pay for work of equal value claim (Enderby 1997) which affected a whole profession was the case of a senior speech therapist who compared her work (dominated by women) to clinical psychologists and pharmacists which at the time were mostly male. It took Professor Enderby eleven years but she won.