UK Gender Gap: Why do women still get paid less than men?

“Women get pregnant, they go on maternity leaves, and so they are less of an efficient asset for the business.”

This is what Nikhil Menon, first-year Management student, said when asked about the reason why men were favoured in the workforce. But he is not the only one to think that way. In fact, women’s commitments as mothers are often stated as the main cause of their disadvantage on the labour market.

“It creates a bias in employment because employers will want to keep their staff there and not have to look for a replacement,” even added first-year Biomedical Sciences student Ellie Mildred.

Women still seem to have more difficulty than men in reaching higher positions and in earning higher wages. In fact, a woman still earns £2.53 less per hour than a man in the UK in 2014, and the situation is getting worse with time. The UK dropped from 18th to 26th on the Global Gender Gap Report’s ranking.

One of the main reasons for this wage gap seems to be that women tend to get lower positions than men. There are undeniably more female secretaries and more men CEOs. William Thompson, first-year Computer Science student thinks that this is due to the fact that “women choose subjects in university that prevent them from reaching higher positions.”

It is true that degrees such as Computer Science and Engineering are more popular among males and others such as Languages and Media Studies are seen as more feminine choices. It is also true that the “masculine” fields have higher salary potentials.

However, some women get into these fields and get to higher positions. But and even then, their salaries are still 35 percent lower than those of their male counterparts.

Some blame it on the women’s lack of audacity in asking for a raise, others just put the responsibility on men bosses discriminating against women and valorising men.

“I just think it is a social convention that always existed that males are superior. So therefore, they have been the ones to get the better jobs and the higher positions. Women use to be housewives, so I think that at the moment, they are still at the stage where they are proving that they are capable of being more than that,” says Summer Rana, first-year Politics and International Studies student.

But what can be done to improve the situation faster? The UK passed and Equality Act in 2010, stating that men and women are entitled to equal pay and conditions if they are doing the same job, if they have equivalent jobs or if their work requires similar effort, skill and decision-making. But this Act has not lead to a long lasting, relevant improvement in women’s situation in the workforce.

To protest against the gender pay gap, different countries hold an “Equal Pay Day”. Equal Pay Days vary from one country to another and from one year to another. It marks the number of extra days that women need to work to achieve the same wages that men earned in the previous financial year.

In 2014, in the UK, this number is still at 57 extra days…

photo:http://notenoughgood.com