Responding to a survey by the Chartered Management Institute (CMI*) that said the pay gap between men and women in the private sector was getting wider and could take a century to close.
Michael Slade, Managing Director of employment law specialist Bibby Consulting & Support, said: “It would be sad news indeed if the pay gap was getting wider because businesses should always choose the best person for the job, regardless of their gender, and it clearly isn’t the case that women doing a job aren’t worth as much as men doing the same job. Women are not less well qualified, less well capable, less intelligent or less flexible than men, so if they are in the same roles they should receive the same pay.” However, Slade pointed out that the CMI survey found that, overall, male executives’ pay increased by just 2.3 per cent last year compared with 2.8 per cent for females, while women in junior executive positions were paid around £602 more than their male counterparts, so the pay gap there was the other way around. Looking behind the headline figures, he said: “What tends to happen is that many women in lower executive positions take a career break, so when they come back to work they have missed a couple of years of pay increases and career development opportunities. This could also explain why there are fewer women in boardrooms because men who don’t take breaks will continue up the scale to senior executive positions.
“Also, more women tend to work in senior human resources (HR) positions because there is no glass ceiling there but these are not as well paid as similar posts in finance, marketing and IT – so it often isn’t about a pay gap between men and women but pay differences between sectors or business functions where men and women tend to work. “This means that both male and female executives in HR could be earning less than men and women in identical positions in finance or marketing. But because there are more senior roles in HR for women it can look like a significant pay differential when the overall figures are looked at.”
* The CMI survey looked at 34,158 executives in the UK and found that between 2010/11 the overall pay gap between men and women had widened to £10,546, compared with £10,031 the previous year.
