Equal Pay

Late in 2015, time was given over to looking at how well the other parts of the public sector were doing in delivering Equal Pay and closing the gaps.

The Equality Here, Now research from then found :

Having had over 40 years to embrace the work required to deliver equal pay for women, the reality is that for most of Scotland’s other public bodies making equal pay happen appears to be something which was not taken seriously until the last 4 years.

In the same way that most of the last 40 years have witnessed a lack of enthusiasm or willingness for closing the pay gaps, so too is that underlying indifference to eliminating gender discrimination reflected in the all too common absence of any timescales set out by any of the other public bodies by which their equal pay gap will be closed, and permanently.

The absence of such timescales simply passes the problem parcel that is equal pay gaps into the future where it will languish until such times as government stops pretending that the current sheet music of equality it plays will deliver anything more than a few bum notes.

Alongside this lukewarm enthusiasm for closing the equal pay gap in anyone’s lifetime is the emerging visibility of the substructure of organisational pay gaps, where the most common causes are identified in reports as the preponderance of women in low paid and/or part time work. When the public body which claims to show the rest of this sector how to mainstream equality explains its pay gap with :

“it is inevitable that the proportionately larger numbers of female staff in lower grades will skew the data and will influence the representation of the complete gender pay profile”

the absence of a common understanding of the cultural, historical and political elements which created and sustains institutional discrimination in relation to gender is cruelly exposed.

Until that understanding is widespread, openly acknowledged and used in any analysis of pay gaps, it is unlikely that the women working in this part of Scotland’s public sector will find their pay gaps closed in their lifetime.