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...

Karen Rowlingson, University of Birmingham Michael Sheen has just launched the End High Cost Credit Alliance . The actor has supported various charitable causes over the years and is now leading this effort to support alternatives to high cost credit which has increased in recent years, not least in his home town of Port Talbot. The alliance was formed in response to the fact that those on the lowest incomes pay the most to borrow money even where they are borrowing for essentials. This is compared to those on higher incomes who can generally borrow at lower rates for luxuries like holidays and high-end consumer goods. The alliance aims to debate the changes needed to deliver healthy credit, offer solutions, and provide the resources to test them out locally and at scale across the UK. It also collectively calls for changes to policy, regulation and practices to make credit fairer for all. This is a growing problem. Research by colleagues and myself at the Centre for ...