Positive thinking

Geraldine Healy, Queen Mary University of London and Mostak Ahamed, University of Sussex   Despite huge amounts of publicity and government efforts to tackle the gender pay gap, it remains a serious issue. It affects women in most industries : from artists and academics to journalists and doctors. We’ve researched some of the particular problems facing the UK’s finance industry when it comes to the gender pay gap. Across finance as a whole, women earn 27.2% less than men an hour, on average. When it comes to bonuses the gap is nearly 50%. Our research shows how this plays out at different levels of the finance industry. Progress on gender pay issues in this sector has been too slow, fragmented and uneven over the past ten years. The UK government introduced legislation requiring employers with more than 250 employees to report annually their gender pay gap publicly beginning April 2018. The principle is that greater transparency will reduce the gender pay gap, but...

Ernestine Gheyoh Ndzi, University of Hertfordshire   The gender pay gap has been around for as long as woman have been in the workforce. No matter the reasons that get put forward as to why men get paid more than women, it generally comes back to the fact that women take on more child rearing and caring responsibilities than men. The gender pay gap in the UK stands at 18.4% in favour of men for full-time and part-time workers, according to the Office for National Statistics . But what the ONS fails to account for is the number of women on zero hours contracts. If it did, the gender pay gap would be even worse for women. Gender pay gap regulation, introduced in 2017 requires companies that employ 250 employees or more to publish annual gender pay levels in their organisations. But zero hours contract workers are not considered as employees under the law. This means that those on zero hours contracts – a group of which women make up a bigger share – are left out of...

   Barnali Choudhury, UCL and Martin Petrin, UCL The UK is introducing new legislation t hat will require companies to publish the ratio of what they pay their CEO compared to the average worker’s salary. The move follows a number of corporate governance reforms introduced by the government over the last year and a half as part of an effort to build a fairer economy . But if the government was truly committed to building a fairer economy, it would not rely primarily on companies to do its work for it. When Theresa May first became prime minister, she vowed to reform the UK’s economy to ensure that it would work for everyone . Reforming the way that companies operate is a key part of this vision. According to May, corporate governance mechanisms are the tools by which these responsibilities should be imposed. May is not alone in her views on the usefulness of corporate governance mechanisms to promote public responsibilities. Countries around the world, fro...

Alexander Baratta, University of Manchester The way we talk can reveal a lot about us and our origins – in terms of region, class and ethnicity. The UK has a wide variety of accents but not all are created equal – with some accents deemed to be more socially acceptable than others. Maybe it’s not surprising, then, that my research has shown that teachers in the UK often feel under pressure to change their accents. Based on four studies I have conducted since 2014, it appears that many teachers – notably those from the North and Midlands – are being told by mentors to adopt a more general (less broad) version of their accents to help construct a more professional identity. For some, this equates to linguistic prejudice (or certainly preference), yet it is disguised as being based on a need to be “better understood” by the children they are teaching. The Department for Education states that teachers in England must : Demonstrate an understanding of and take responsi...

Charlotte O'Brien, University of York - United Kingdom It has emerged that the team being sent to Brussels to lead on talks to take Britain out of the EU includes just one woman – out of nine named negotiators. This imbalance is not only embarrassing. It’s negligent. Failing to include women on the frontline of this incredibly important process jeopardises the quality of the negotiations. Men don’t know (or do) what’s best for women Having women on your team matters – and not just because of optics. It affects the quality of the laws that are made. The Equal Pay Act of 1970 and the Sex Discrimination Act of 1975 were both passed by parliaments that were 96% male and 4% female. Both pieces of legislation are great achievements on the surface but both were deeply flawed. The original equal pay rules required a job evaluation survey , effectively meaning that women had to seek permission from their employers (back then: men) to mount an equal pay claim. Unti...