How the UK’s dearth of transparency around wages harms gender equality

Pandemic has ‘exposed the fragility of women's progress in the workplace’, expert tells Maya Oppenheim

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Equal pay legislation may have been in place for over half a century in the UK but the gender pay gap remains as persistent as ever. The Equal Pay Act, which was implemented in 1970, made equivalent pay for the same work a legal right, yet discrimination over pay is a persistent problem.

In a bid to tackle this, the Labour Party has called for equal pay laws to be “modernised” so women have the right to know the amount of money their male counterparts take home. The deputy leader and shadow secretary of state for the future of work, Angela Rayner, and the shadow secretary of state for women and equalities, Marsha de Cordova, also urged the government to urgently reinstate gender pay gap reporting as well as rolling out ethnicity pay gap reporting.

Rules obliging private companies that employ more than 250 people to release their gender pay gap figures were suspended by the government last spring due to pandemic upheaval. Labour’s call to tackle secrecy around wages is not a new one – with campaigners and MPs consistently calling for this for years.

In fact, fellow Labour MP Stella Creasy introduced a bill to parliament last Autumn that would allow women to ask their employer for data about a male colleague if they suspect they are taking home different wages for doing equivalent work. The MP for Walthamstow asked: “Why is it in 2020 people don’t get equal pay for an equal day’s work?”

Ms Creasy also addressed the frequently touted misconception that the gulf in wages pocketed by men and women is the result of the latter being less likely to ask for pay rises, with the MP noting women ask for a pay rise just as often as men, but men are four times more likely to receive one.

Felicia Willow, chief executive of Fawcett Society, a leading gender equality charity that has long been calling for the law around pay transparency to be overhauled, told The Independent that the pandemic had pushed back equality “by decades”.

“It has exposed the fragility of women’s progress in the workplace – from the unequal burden of childcare, to an Equal Pay Act that has not been workable for 51 years, to outright discrimination against mothers,” she said. “The time has come for serious, meaningful commitment to progress.”

A recent Women on Boards UK report revealed a troubling gender pay cap, at 20.2 per cent on average across the FTSE 350, which is higher than the 13.7 per cent national average. While the 2019 gender pay gap was 17.3 per cent, meaning women were paid an average of roughly 83p for every £1 men were paid.

Dr Wanda Wyporska, executive director at The Equality Trust, warned “better data will help us to identify the problem areas and we welcome the right to know what male counterparts are earning. We still have a long way to go”.

She added: “But of course, any measure is worthless if there is no enforcement, so we want to know how these measures will be monitored to ensure they have real impact in the workplace.”

While in the UK a woman must go to a tribunal to discover what her male colleague earns if she fears she is being unfairly paid, in some parts of the world it is much easier to find out about coworkers’ salaries. In Norway, for instance, everyone is able to learn how much another individual is paid by their employer because the information is freely available online.

In the US, the Paycheck Fairness Act recently passed the House of Representatives after the Democrats reintroduced the legislation in January. The bill, which strives to tackle the gender pay gap and bolster workplace protections for women, would safeguard employees from being punished for talking about their salary with colleagues. The US president, Joe Biden, has said this is a “critical barrier to equality given that pay disparities often persist because workers are kept in the dark about the fact that they aren’t being paid fairly”.