Equal Pay and the Gender Pay Gap
Debate between Jess Phillips and Stephen Phillips(9 years, 5 months ago)
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Stephen Phillips (Sleaford and North Hykeham) (Con)
It is an enormous pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Stirling (Steven Paterson), who has made an excellent maiden speech. I fully echo the tribute he paid to his predecessor, Dame Anne McGuire. Hers are big shoes to fill, as he knows, although I suspect that his shoes will not be the same type and will have a somewhat smaller heel.
Before you took the Chair this afternoon, Madam Deputy Speaker, there was what can only be described as a form of daughter inflation, at least on the Government Benches, at the start of this debate. My hon. Friend the Member for Richmond (Yorks) (Rishi Sunak) and my hon. Friend the Member for North Dorset (Simon Hoare) appeared to be competing to establish who had the greater number of daughters. I declare at the outset that I have two daughters and one son, like my hon. Friend the Member for Faversham and Mid Kent (Helen Whately), although I should perhaps make it clear to the House that they are not the same two daughters and one son.
Joking apart, there is of course a serious point: the issue of equal pay and the gender pay gap, which has rightly been brought before the House by the hon. Member for Ashfield (Gloria De Piero), affects all of us. It affects fathers of daughters, husbands and sons, and it also affects all of us as members of an equal civil society in which we want everyone to rise and use their abilities without regard to gender, disability or any other characteristic which is irrelevant to their ability to do a job for which they are fitted.
There is much good news and, rightly, there is a great deal of common ground across the House. The gender pay gap is now at the lowest level on record. As a result of changes in the law that have received support from across the House in the last few decades, no woman can any longer be paid less than a man for the same job, for that is rightly illegal. I must, however, say to the Opposition spokesman, the hon. Member for Cardiff South and Penarth (Stephen Doughty), that that distinction has evidently eluded the drafters of the motion. The legal requirement for equal pay, which is well enforced, is very different from the gender pay gap. That gap arises as a result of any number of structural features from the moment of birth, and it is now the mission of society to tackle that gap.
It falls to us to tackle the subtle differences in pay between the genders—largely, it has to be said, for those over the age of 35—not the overt discrimination of yesteryear that, rightly, we have largely consigned to the history books. That battle has been won. Many factors affect women over the course of their school and working lives with which men simply do not have to deal, not least, as every male Member of the House ought to recognise, the gender imbalance in most families when it comes to children and childcare.
Some of that has been addressed, or at least it has begun to be addressed. For example, the gender pay gap used to have strong roots in educational attainment. The traditional boys’ science subjects used to lead to more lucrative careers, while girls were steered into studying arts and the humanities, and thereafter worked in the less profitable roles into which they were too often pushed by careers staff focused on gender stereotypes. Even when I was growing up, boys did better at school, received degrees more valued by employers and saw that translated into more pay over their career lifetimes.
The dominance of boys at school and of young men at university is largely no longer apparent. An OECD report in March found that although boys’ dominance just about endures in maths, it is no longer present in science subjects. As everyone who has both sons and daughters knows anecdotally, girls are racing ahead in literacy. In all 64 countries and economies in the OECD study, girls outperformed boys at reading, with the mean gap equivalent to an extra year of schooling. Since literacy is of course the foundation of further learning, that gap means that teenage boys are 50% more likely than girls to fail to achieve basic proficiency in maths, reading or science. I hope that the House will have equal time to debate that subject, because if equality means anything, it must mean equality for both sexes.
Equally, girls’ educational dominance now persists after school as well as at school. Until a few decades ago, there was a clear male majority at university almost everywhere in the world but, as higher education has boomed, women’s enrolment has increased faster than men’s. In the OECD, women now make up 56% of students enrolled at university, which is up from 46% in 1985. Women who go to university are more likely than their male peers to graduate and they typically get better grades.
Hon. Gentlemen on both sides of the House need to beware, for just as there are more women in this place, there are still not enough. It is clear that women are not only closing the gap, but doing so on merit and largely without any form of positive discrimination. To my mind, that is important. For the most part, we do not allow of positive discrimination in this country, despite what I understood the hon. Member for Ashfield to indicate in response to an intervention in her speech at the outset of the debate. That is important not only because all appointments should be based on merit, irrespective of gender, disability, race, sexual orientation, religion or any other protected characteristic, but because positive discrimination runs the risk of undermining the equality that we all strive to achieve. If appointments are made other than on merit, there exists the risk that those who are unsuccessful will point the finger, saying that so-and-so got their job only because of gender, race or whatever. To my mind, that is a dangerous and slippery slope that it is best to avoid.
Jess Phillips (Birmingham, Yardley) (Lab)
Does the hon. and learned Gentleman recognise that positive discrimination has existed in this country since the beginning of time immemorial—for white men?
Stephen Phillips
I acknowledge the hon. Lady’s point to this extent: she is absolutely right that, throughout history at least until now, white men, of whom I am one, have had a much easier ride in life. Even to this day, with all the laws that we have designed to ensure equality, women in every single walk of life have a much harder time than any man ever does.
To return to the university story, many women continue to choose courses in so-called traditionally female subjects such as education, health, arts and the humanities, but in mathematics, women are drawing level, and in the life sciences, social sciences, business and law, they have moved ahead. That means that women are moving closer to equal pay when they start their working lives. However, we still see a gap, which widens to a chasm when women reach the point at which they want to have children. No end of studies have shown the impact of motherhood on women’s pay, with hourly pay dropping relative to men’s. Just a few years ago, the Institute for Public Policy Research estimated that a woman with middling skills who has a baby at the age of 24 loses more than £500,000 in lifetime earnings compared with one who remains childless. That is simply unacceptable. It is far too often the case that women must see motherhood as a choice that will affect their entire careers—an irreversible move either to the mummy track or the career track.
Mothers’ average hourly pay recovers slightly by the time their children leave home, and their employment rate increases steadily as their children grow older, but it never returns to the level it would have been had they not had children, much less to the same level as a man’s. That is something of which all hon. Members should be aware, and something of which, as a society, we should be deeply ashamed.
Jess Phillips
To the best of my knowledge, the answer is no. I believe that the council is selling the family silver, including the National Exhibition Centre, to settle those claims. I will not criticise it for that. The council should have paid the women more in the first place.
The hon. Gentleman is right about overtime. The reason my husband earned so much more than me was that his overtime was paid, whereas mine was just part of my job.
To add insult to injury, the vast majority of unpaid work is done by us, the very much fairer sex. I sometimes fantasise about all the women in the country going on strike for just one day. They would stop doing everything that they do for free: caring for children, caring for grandchildren, and caring for relatives, friends and neighbours. Imagine the cost to social services if we withdrew our labour! Perhaps women’s jobs are paid so poorly because we forgot the bit of the business model that says, “You will devalue it if you give it away.” The constant rhetoric about hard-working families seems to forget that the hardest work of all is that which pays nothing. I challenge anyone to stay at home permanently with a couple of kids, delivering meals, care and company to a dying mother, and then tell me that that is not hard work. I have lots of caring responsibilities, and I can assure Members that coming to this place, or going to any work, is like being on holiday.
Having worked for years with women who have been beaten and abused because of their gender, perhaps I am less keen than others to herald how far we have come. I know that a good, honest and decent society we can all be proud of must value its women. There is a well-evidenced and reliable link between violence against women and their general standing in society. This debate is not just about money and pound signs; it is about value and worth.
We have a chance to do something good here today—to push companies and the country to place equal value on the work of half the population. We have a chance to show our mothers, wives, daughters and constituents that they matter and their rights matter. If we do that today, I will gladly stand on these Benches, or the chairs in the bar later, with any Member from any party, so that we can declare in unison that we are feminists.
Jess Phillips
I cannot afford to.
Should the motion not be passed, I shall know, like so many before me, that I should not have bothered to speak up, because, after all, “I’m just a girl.”