Tuesday, December 20, 2005

Worse than we thought

Latest numbers out suggest women in the private sector are paid 45% less than men. And people say the battle for equality is over!!

4 comments:

BigRedOne said...

I would like to know where they get those figures from. In every place I have worked so far in my (relatively) short career, the women have always been paid the same as the men, in England as well as in Germany.

Cruella said...

I've only worked in a few industries in my time and they've mostly been the classic ones for outright sexism but I've seen women passed over for promotion and treated as second-class citizens over and over.

Retail, investment banking, finance, comedy...

Helen_of_Romford said...

I think that it would be more useful to eliminate the upper quartile of both male and female salaries. These are the ones heavily skewed towards stratospheric bonuses.

You don't need more than a few hundred guys in patriarchal Financial and Advertising firms to rake in 7-figure bonuses to competely trash any comparative statistics. Numerically they're insignificant, but statistically they're ruinous.

Yea, it's unfair that women don't have access to these salaries opportunities, but most guys will never get a sniff of them either. So they shouldn't be counted.

Including them simply creates a false impression that is ultimately self-defeating.

By eliminating the top earners you are more likely to give a meaningful comparator of the likely experiences of most men and women

Cruella said...

Well I'd certainly be interested to see what the numbers looked like if you took those out. I don't think lower paid industries are much better though.

But also if the pay structure is that skewed, and women are entirely excluded from the top of it, we should be addressing why that is.