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https://www.london.gov.uk/who-we-are/what-london-assembly-does/london-assembly-press-releases/gender-pay-gap-continues-impact-women-housing

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The London Assembly is urging the Mayor to carry out a review of the London Living Rent to ensure women in London can afford to live in decent homes within the capital and to reduce inequalities associated with the gender pay gap.

One of the Mayor's affordable housing products is London Living Rent, where rent is based on a third of average local household incomes and adjusted for the number of bedrooms in each home.

The London Assembly Housing Committee met in July 2022 where they heard real-life experiences from women in London and the challenges they face with housing costs.

At the Committee meeting, there was a discussion about whether rent policy for London Living Rent could take account of the gender pay gap. Women earning the women's median wage need to spend 63% of their earnings to afford the median private rent in London, compared to men needing to spend 49% of their earnings.

The Committee has today published a report with 13 recommendations for the Mayor and Government to reduce inequalities in housing for women in London. The recommendations include:

The Mayor should review London Living Rent and consider changes to the rent setting policy to have regard to the gender pay gap, for example whether some rents could be set at median women's incomes rather than general median incomes.

The Mayor should expedite plans to deliver his manifesto commitment to launch a cross-sector policy forum to coordinate efforts to advance gender equality.

The Mayor should work with local authorities to deliver support to women in need of housing, such as tenancy guarantees and help finding longer term housing. He should support local authorities to develop clear and detailed communications to women on housing waiting lists who are being discharged into the Private Rented Sector.

The Government should: a) respond to the findings from the Mayor's cost-benefit analysis of removing the 'No Recourse to Public Funds' policy; b) state whether the policy is to be continued; and c) if the policy is to be continued, explain the justifications for its continuation.

Chair of the Housing Committee, Sem Moema AM, said:
"Improving the quality of housing for Londoners is rightly a key priority for the Mayor and there are opportunities for him to begin to level the playing field for women. "The London Plan's explanation of affordable housing states that annual costs housing costs should be no greater than 40 per cent of net household income. "Research shows that women are currently, on average, having to spend 63 per cent of their earnings on housing, and this simply is not sustainable. "The gender pay gap causes significant challenges to women in London. We firmly believe that if the Mayor takes the appropriate steps, through our recommendations, there could be a significant improvement in women having the opportunity to rent or own their own home in London."
Follow us @LondonAssembly.

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Gender pay gap continues to impact women in housing

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The London Assembly Housing Committee has published a report with 13 recommendations for the Mayor and Government to reduce inequalities in housing for women in London.

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https://www.pay-equity.org/info-time.html#:~:text=Since%20the%20Equal%20Pay,77%20cents%20to%20men's%20dollar.

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The Wage Gap Over Time:
In Real Dollars, Women See a Continuing Gap

Since the Equal Pay Act was signed in 1963, the wage gap has been closing at a very slow rate. In 1963, women who worked full-time, year-round made 59 cents on average for every dollar earned by men. In 2010, women earned 77 cents to men's dollar. That means that the wage gap has narrowed by less than half a cent per year!

Over the past 40 years, the real median earnings of women have fallen short by an estimated $700,000 to $2 million.

Economist Evelyn Murphy, president of The Wage Project, estimates that over a lifetime (47 years of full-time work) this gap amounts to a loss in wages for a woman of

$700,000 for a high school graduate

$1.2 million for a college graduate

$2 million for a professional school graduate.

Based on its research, the Institute for Women's Policy Research estimated in 2015 that women won't receive equal pay until 2059.

The Wage Gap Over Time

Updated September 2020

Year Women's Men's Dollar Percent
Earnings Earnings Difference

2019 $47,299 $57,456 $10,157 82

2018 $45,097 $55,291 $10,194 81.6**

2017 $41,977 $52,146 $10,169 80.5%

2016 $41,554 $51,640 $10,086 80.5%

2015 $40,742 $51,212 $10,470 79.6%

2014 $39,621 $50,383 $10,762 78.6%

2013 $39,157 $50,033 $10,876 78.3%

2012 $37,791 $49,398 $11,607 76.5%

2011 $37,118 $48,202 $11,084 77.0%

2010 $36,931 $47,715 $10,784 77.4%

2009 $36,278 $47,127 $10,849 77.0%

2008 $35,745 $46,367 $10,622 77.1%

2007 $35,102 $45,113 $10,011 77.8%

2006 $32,515 $42,261 $9,476 76.9%

2005 $31,858 $41,386 $9,528 77.0%

2004* $32,285 $42,160 $9,875 76.6%

2003 $30,724 $40,668 $9,944 75.5%

2002 $30,203 $39,429 $9,226 76.6%

2001 $29,215 $38,275 $9,060 76.3%

2000 $27,355 $37,339 $9,984 73.3%

1999 $27,208 $37,701 $10,493 72.2%

1998 $27,290 $37,296 $10,006 73.2%

1997 $26,720 $36,030 $9,310 74.2%

1996 $25,919 $35,138 $9,219 73.8%

1995 $25,260 $35,365 $10,105 71.4%

1994 $25,558 $35,513 $9,955 72.0%

1993 $25,579 $35,765 $10,186 71.5%

1992 $25,791 $36,436 $10,645 70.8%

1991 $25,457 $36,440 $10,983 69.9%

1990 $25,451 $35,538 $10,087 71.6%

1989 $25,310 $36,855 $11,545 66.0%

1988 $24,774 $37,509 $12,735 66.0%

1987 $24,663 $37,389 $12,726 65.2%

1986 $24,479 $38,088 $13,609 64.3%

1985 $23,978 $37,131 $13,153 64.6%

1984 $23,453 $36,842 $13,389 63.7%

1983 $22,961 $36,106 $13,055 63.6%

1982 $22,367 $36,224 $13,857 61.7%

1981 $21,830 $36,854 $15,024 59.2%

1980 $22,279 $37,033 $14,754 60.2%

1979 $22,446 $37,622 $15,176 59.7%

1978 $22,617 $38,051 $15,005 59.4%

1977 $21,743 $36,901 $15,158 58.9%

1976 $21,738 $36,114 $14,376 60.2%

1975 $21,297 $36,207 $14,910 58.8%

1974 $21,419 $36,456 $15,037 58.8%

1973 $21,397 $37,381 $15,984 56.6%

1972 $21,185 $36,614 $15,429 57.9%

1971 $20,691 $34,771 $14,080 59.5%

1970 $20,567 $34,642 $14,075 59.4%

1969 $20,156 $34,241 $14,085 58.9%

1968 $18,836 $32,389 $13,553 58.2%

1967 $18,241 $31,568 $13,327 57.8%

1966 $17,874 $31,055 $13,181 57.6%

1965 $17,852 $29,791 $11,939 59.9%

1964 $17,368 $29,362 $11,994 59.1%

1963 $16,908 $28,684 $11,776 58.9%

1962 $16,587 $27,972 $11,385 59.3%

1961 $16,272 $27,463 $11,191 59.2%

1960 $16,144 $26,608 $10,464 60.7%

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The Wage Gap Over Time: In Real Dollars, Women See a Continuing Gap Since the Equal Pay Act was signed in 1963, the wage gap has been closing at a very slow rate. In 1963, women who worked full-time, year-round made 59 cents on average for every dollar earned by men.

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https://overland.org.au/2023/05/the-gender-pay-gaps-grim-legacy-homelessness-among-older-women-in-australia/

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My mother is among those at highest risk of becoming homeless in this country. If you grew up in a single parent household, there's a chance your mother is, too.

The 2016 census showed that the number of women over 55 experiencing homelessness increased by 31 per cent compared to the 2011 census. This was more than double the rate of homelessness increase in the general population. A more recent study reports that there are now more than 405,000 women over forty at risk of homelessness in Australia. The situation continues to worsen, especially in the wake of Covid-19 and the havoc it has wreaked on health, employment, and housing.

These figures are alarming, and raise the question of how we have let down our mothers and other women who, regardless of their parental status, have been continuously disadvantaged by a system that works against them. Women in this age group are particularly susceptible to financial and housing insecurity due to lifelong discrimination.

I'm sure in your family, like in mine, similar stories have been shared over a few wines at Christmas. The aunt who was fired or forced to resign for getting married or pregnant. The friend of your nan's who never married, so never stood a chance of owning a home, and now lives in a housing commission flat (she's one of the lucky ones, according to these statistics). Many women over forty-five have worked part-time or casually for many years; they lack sufficient superannuation; they have taken large unpaid periods off work to raise children or care for loved ones; and, of course, they have been subject to the gender pay gap.

My mum was born in 1966, three year before the government introduced the principle of ' equal pay for equal work ' in an Arbitration Commission decision. I'm sure my grandmother felt that significant change might come in her daughter's lifetime. She was a single mum, too-a widow. However, progress in closing the gender pay gap has always been slow and inconsistent.

While the current pay gap is 13.3 per cent (the lowest it has ever been), women are still paid on average $253 less than men each week. The Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet's 'Status of Women Report Card' for 2023 states that on average women do nine hours more unpaid labour per week than men. Single women make up the majority of rent assistance payments. There is a 55 per cent drop in earnings for mothers in the five years following childbirth, while men's pay remains unchanged. And, women approaching retirement have 23.1 per cent less super than men. It's easy to see how these figures stack up to a bleak housing outlook for single older women who don't own a home.

My mum took her first job in 1980, when she was fourteen. In my childhood, she worked as a medical receptionist. For every hour she worked, she was almost certainly paid less than a man in a job of ' comparable value '. For every curtailed pay check, there was a lower superannuation benefit, a lower amount left for savings at the end of each week and, inevitably, a lower amount to put towards a house deposit.

We never owned a home, but instead relied on the volatile rental market. We moved a lot-once from Queensland to Tasmania to take advantage of the lower cost of living. For a short period, we slept in a friend's garage. I never thought of us as homeless but, looking back, my mother was at risk even then. While it might be argued that a woman in a similar position now is better off than she was, I think she'd still be on the same trajectory. Given the rental crisis that is expected to continue for years to come, maybe even worse off.

It's easiest for me to conceptualise my feelings on this subject by relating them to my mother. Yet this probably also minimises the problem in some ways. It makes it feel like if I can just keep a roof over her head, then all of these hundreds of thousands of women (and the many more heading in the same direction) stand a greater chance.

The number of older women in the private rental market doubled in the 2016 census and continues to rise rapidly. If these women are no longer in the workforce and receive government benefits, the numbers are even more against them. The Rental Affordability Snapshot shows that only 0.5 per cent of properties on the rental market are affordable to a single person on an aged pension. This results in many women resorting to unstable housing such as living in vehicles, staying with friends and family, or trying to move from one house sitting gig to the next. All of these options can be stressful, but many older women who are currently homeless don't self-identify this way, so don't seek support. They often have a stereotypical view of someone homeless as a man who sleeps on the streets. Usually, they blame themselves for their situations, despite never having experienced homelessness before. It's clear that the fault lies not with them, but with a long-broken system.

For those women that do recognise their homelessness and seek help, there aren't many options available. While there are over 1,500 homelessness services nationwide, only three of them receive funding to provide specialist services for older people.

More funding and services are a clear necessity to even begin to deal with this growing concern. Addressing rental affordability is another obvious one. The National Older Women's Housing and Homelessness Working Group have made further suggestions for how these issues can be addressed. At the policy level, this includes developing a National Homelessness Strategy specifically targeting older women and implementing a Federal Government Strategy to address financial insecurity among this group. This would be a good start, but it seems clear that more needs to be done to start unravelling generations of systemic oppression.

Primarily, we need measures to address the lack of superannuation among women at retirement age. Surely, a government that loves to deal in averages could top up women's super-levels to the equivalent of a 'comparable' male. Perhaps more realistically, The Housing for the Aged Action Group and Social Ventures calls for a tax incentive or subsidy that could leverage off capital from institutional investors, such as superannuation funds. They also present other practical and implementable measures such as ensuring women who are not yet homeless but lack appropriate housing can access emergency accommodation, and establishing services in other States based on the successful early intervention Home At Last model from Victoria.

The statistics presented here serve as evidence that much is still unknown about the flow-on effects that the gender pay gap will have on women as they age. The imperative is the same now as it has been for decades: we need to address this inequality. Not only in terms of the current overall percentage of pay discrepancy, but also its legacy.

Staring at decades of data is a reminder of how many have struggled, and how many more will. Unlike our mothers, who had no way of measuring the injustices faced by their own mothers, at least we know the magnitude of the struggle. I can only hope that this will be a step towards lasting change.
If you'd like to support older women experiencing homelessness you can donate to the Housing For the Aged Action Group Image: Pawel Czerwinski here.
Related articles & Essays

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The gender pay gap's grim legacy: homelessness among older women in Australia - Overland literary journal

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My mum took her first job in 1980, when she was fourteen. In my childhood, she worked as a medical receptionist. For every hour she worked, she was almost certainly paid less than a man in a job of 'comparable value'.

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50 Years after 'Equal Pay' the Legacy of 'Womens Work' Remains

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50 Years after 'Equal Pay' the Legacy of 'Womens Work' Remains

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https://theconversation.com/50-years-after-equal-pay-the-legacy-of-womens-work-remains-118761

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June 19, 2019 is the 50th anniversary of Australia's industrial relations system endorsing the principle of "equal pay for equal work".

Yet, five decades on, a gender pay gap remains.

The 1969 decision was a breakthrough, but also highlighted the problem of putting principle into practice, given a legacy of past decisions being based on clear notions of "male" and "female" jobs.

While various factors contribute to the overall gender pay gap, about 30% is due to gender concentrations by industry and occupation.

Read more: Will the real gender pay gap please stand up?

Decisions dating back a century have contributed to the unequal wage patterns we still see today, with female-dominated jobs clustered at the lower end of the pay spectrum.

ABS Census of Population and Housing 2016, and ABS Average Weekly Earnings 2018 (Cat No. 6302.0)., Author provided

It's difficult to untangle today's gender pay gap from the pages of history.

A living wage, but based on men

A gap between men's and women's pay was effectively established early in Australia's centralised wage-fixing system.

In 1907, the first landmark decision of the new Commonwealth Court of Conciliation and Arbitration set down the principle of the "family" or "living" wage.

In the Harvester Case (stemming from a pay dispute at Sunshine Harvester, a Victorian maker of farming equipment), the court decided 7 shillings a day was the minimum pay needed by an unskilled labourer - on the basis that the labourer was male and needed to provide for a wife and three children.

The decision laid the foundation for a national minimum wage, but also left female workers out of the picture.

Equal pay, but only for men's work

The underlying presumption that a woman didn't need to be paid as much as a man was confirmed by Justice Henry Bourne Higgins, the president of the Court of Conciliation and Arbitration, in the Fruit Pickers Case of 1912.

In this, the court's first explicit ruling on women's pay, Justice Higgins declared women should be paid the same as men - but only when they did jobs predominantly performed by men (such as blacksmiths) or were "in competition" with men (such as fruit-picking). This was out of concern that allowing a lower pay rate for women could put men out of work.

In jobs undertaken only or mainly by women, such as packing fruit, it was a different matter. A woman's wage could be lower than a man's, Justice Higgins said, under the assumption that women "have to find their own food, shelter, and clothing; not food, shelter and clothing of a family".

It was men, he explained, who had the obligation to provide for their wife and children:

How is such a minimum applicable to the case of a woman picker? She is not, unless perhaps in very exceptional circumstances, under any such obligation.

Justice Higgins set the minimum pay for fruit-packing jobs - "in which men are hardly ever employed" - at 75% of that for fruit-picking. In the Clothing Trades Case of 1919, more concern about costs led him to decide the basic wage for women should be 54% of men's.

This gender discrepancy in pay narrowed to 75% with World War II, when women stepped into jobs vacated by men and special regulations were enacted. This 75% rate was accepted as the standard in the 1949-50 Basic Wage Case.

Accepting equal pay, in principle

As social attitudes evolved, the 1950s and 1960s saw more women joining the paid workforce. Pressure grew to match international conventions on equal pay. Unions led by the Australasian Meat Industry Employees Union, with a young Bob Hawke serving as their lead advocate, took up the cause.

In the 1969 Equal Pay Case, the Conciliation and Arbitration Commission (which had replaced the Court) finally accepted the principle of equal pay for equal work.

It tempered this acceptance, however, by acknowledging that putting the principle into practice would be complex:

While we accept the concept of "equal pay for equal work" implying as it does the elimination of discrimination based on sex alone, we realise that the concept is difficult of precise definition and even more difficult to apply with precision.

The "mere similarity in name of male and female classifications", the commission said, "may not be enough to establish that males and females do work of a like nature".

This meant the principle only immediately applied to women doing exactly the same work as men, and employed in predominantly male occupations. Fewer than one in five working women benefited from the outcome.

Three years later, the 1972 Equal Pay Case expanded on the 1969 principle to encompass "equal pay for work of equal value", with a single rate for a job, regardless of gender.

But with women and men often finding themselves in different types of work - and the nature of that work often differing vastly - the dilemma of figuring out how to measure "work of equal value" remained. It persists to this day.

Finding a 'comparable' male job

Today's Fair Work Commission has inherited the legacy of its past judgements.

To agree a low wage rate in an occupation dominated by females is an issue of gender inequality, Australia's Fair Work Act requires identifying a "comparable" male occupation.

This means pointing to a job chiefly performed by men that is similar to the female job in skill requirements and job responsibility but higher paid. History shows finding such a " comparator" occupational group has been hard to achieve.

It's a problem faced by those arguing for higher wages in occupations such as childcare.

It leads us to ask: how can we meaningfully measure and compare the value of jobs that are so different in nature?

Read more: How skills and personality traits contribute to the gender pay gap

It's an especially important question for jobs in areas such as childcare, schooling and health services - which generate society-wide benefits but are not necessarily well-paid.

When the wider benefits of a job are not reflected by the market wage, this creates what economists call a market failure. It spells a role for governments to step in and correct it.

One innovative approach could be to use occupation-targeted lower income tax rates for jobs with high societal value.

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50 years after 'equal pay', the legacy of 'women's work' remains

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June 19, 2019 is the 50th anniversary of Australia's industrial relations system endorsing the principle of "equal pay for equal work". Yet, five decades on, a gender pay gap remains. The 1969 decision was a breakthrough, but also highlighted the problem of putting principle into practice, given a legacy of past decisions being based on clear notions of "male" and "female" jobs.

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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/jun/01/1968theyearofrevolt.gender1

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Forty years ago, a group of women sewing machinists at the Ford Motor Company plant in Dagenham saw red. They discovered that men who were doing the same work as them - making the car seats for Cortinas and Zephyrs - were being paid 15 per cent more.

The women walked out of the plant on 7 June 1968 in support of a claim that would not only pay them the difference but that would recognise their skills and put them on a higher grade. Many of them were former dressmakers and took pride in their work which they felt was going unrecognised. They wanted to be put on the same pay level, grade C, as the paint spray operators in the plant. As this was the group of machinists responsible for making all the seat covers their action rapidly brought production at the plant to a halt.

One of them, Violet Lawson, recalled last week: 'At that time we had men night-work machinists and they were getting paid more than us. And we said, "Well, we want C grade if the men are getting it. We want equal pay".'

After three weeks of a very high-profile strike, they settled for 92 per cent of the C grade rate. Barbara Castle, the formidable Labour employment minister of the day, was brought in to help negotiate a settlement.

But the impact of the walkout was far-reaching. It hastened the government to bring in the Equal Pay Act in 1970, which for the first time made it illegal to have a separate pay rate for men and women. It also set out the concept of 'like work' so that those whose work was rated as equivalent to another job, but were paid less, could go to a tribunal.

Forty years on, many campaigners are asking why it is that men and women are still paid such different rates. The UK is one of the worst in Europe in terms of the gender divide, with women in full-time work being paid, on average, 17 per cent less than their male counterparts. When it comes to part-time work, the figures are much worse. The gap is enormous - a 36 per cent gap between the sexes.

There has also been a huge rise in the number of legal cases. Last year, 44,000 equal pay claims were brought before the courts, more than double the number in 2005. Very few make it through to an employment tribunal - some women give up and many others settle out of court, with companies often demanding that employees sign a confidentiality clause.

The full-time hourly gender pay gap of 17 per cent appears to rise to 22.3 per cent in the private sector (compared to 13.4 per cent in the public sector), according to the Office of National Statistics. Although there has been a tiny decline of 0.3 per cent between 2006 and 2007 in the pay gap, there is enormous frustration that companies are not doing more to narrow it. One of those most involved in trying to push forward the issue is Trevor Phillips, who chairs the Equality and Human Rights Commission.

He told The Observer: 'At the current rate, it will take at least another two decades to close the pay gap. Women who work full time will earn on average £330,000 less than a man over their working lives - that's the price of a family home. It's amazing we still think this is something that a decent society can live with.'

He said: 'First, we need to attack the secrecy over pay, so woman aren't forced to take legal action just to find out if they're being treated fairly. Second, we need to get the creaking tribunal system working again so that women can get some justice right now, instead of having to wait decades.'

But Phillips would also like to see more women realising that they can bring claims and that there are laws and organisations to support them. He said: 'The sewing machinists paved the way for equal pay legislation that brought welcome change for thousands of women. Forty years ago job advertisements regularly featured different rates for men and women. This is now unthinkable. The women remain an inspiration to us today and we need to retain that spirit.'

Thousands of cases now centre on women doing predominantly female jobs comparing themselves with men doing traditional male work at a similar level, or of a similar value. One of the reasons for the pay divide is that women who have children go into lower paid work such as catering or childcare, even though it is of equal value to traditionally male jobs such as drivers or street cleaners.

Ministers, deeply aware that there is growing anger among women at the pay gap, will soon be producing the long-awaited Equalities Bill. However, there is concern among campaigners that there will be very little in it about strengthening the case for equal pay. A combination of factors, such as a worsening economy and new rights for agency workers, have made it less likely that the equalities minister Harriet Harman will push for strong measures, such as an obligation on companies to carry out mandatory pay audits.

A government spokeswoman said: 'It is unacceptable that the gender pay gap still exists nearly 40 years after the Equal Pay Act. We need to improve transparency so that women can know if they are paid fairly and so we can see where more needs to be done. Final decisions are yet to be made, but we are closely considering a number of strong measures for the Equality Bill.'

A European ruling in 2004 entitled women who had been found to suffer pay inequality to six years' back pay, unleashing an avalanche of claims. Local authorities and other public sector employers now face massive increases in their wage bills and claims for back pay following legal rulings that affect thousands of low paid women who work in jobs such as cleaning or as dinner ladies.

One of those is Kathleen Cunningham, 44, who is still fighting her case against the council in Bury, Greater Manchester. She worked at a school as a cleaner and as a midday supervisor for six years until 2006, bringing home around £180 a month.

'I actually found out from a neighbour that there was a big issue around equal pay claims against the council,' said Cunningham. She is now fighting her case in the legal system, on the basis that her 'comparator' - a male street cleaner on the same grade - would be receiving an annual bonus of around £4,000 a year, which she missed out on for six years.

Sarah Veale, head of equality at the TUC, said the present system meant individual women bringing a case, rather than a ruling which helped the whole group. 'Low-paid women have to stand in a queue which can take years and, to my mind, it's a totally flawed way of dealing with it.

'The other problem of course, is that women's jobs are just paid at a much lower rate, so a car mechanic will typically be paid more than the woman who works in a nursing home. Because of the culture we have, women tend to put up with it, and it becomes a self-perpetuating system, so that women are also less likely to get on in their careers.'

The whole issue of equal pay in councils has already prompted strikes in Birmingham, and unions accept that there is a fine line between preserving pay and keeping jobs. A series of such cases is now clogging up the tribunal system. Some fear the estimated 50,000 claims waiting to be heard could soar to perhaps 150,000 by the end of the year.

Many of the cases that hit the headlines involve high-earning City workers who find they are discriminated against. In 2002, Julie Bower, a former Schroders analyst, won £1.4m for sex discrimination. A tribunal was told how her bonus of £50,000 was a fraction of those paid to male colleagues performing to a similar standard.

Last year, at one of the major investment banks, a 24-year-old female trader found out that she was being paid less than the man who had just been hired to sit at her desk.

Clare (not her real name) believed her bosses were not operating a level playing field. 'I wasn't paid a pay rise that had been promised to me, and I wasn't given a bonus I had earned, although they disputed this. I was working long days, and most weekends, and yet I was treated as a second-class citizen.'

But when she filed a grievance, they responded by bringing disciplinary charges against her. With the help of lawyers she won compensation, but is still finding it hard to get back into work. 'It does really knock your confidence to go through this kind of case. I think pay discrimination is probably widespread across the City, but there is this enormous secrecy surrounding salaries and bonuses. And if you complain, you are seen as a troublemaker and not one of the "boys".'

One of those who has been through the highly stressful situation of having to fight her corner is Bridget Bodman, a former accountant at manufacturing company API Group. She was appointed as a group accountant in 2000 and promoted to financial controller a year later. But she questioned the salary and benefits offered to her male replacement and asked the company to complete an equal pay questionnaire. It emerged that her successor was paid £8,000 more and received an £8,640 car allowance as well as additional benefits.

'The company didn't have many senior women, which I think was part of the problem,' said Bodman. 'There was absolute shock and horror that I could even suggest that there might be some form of sexism operating. They became very angry and very cross and then I had to decide whether to back down or carry on fighting.'

Bodman fought the case all the way to an employment tribunal and received £25,000 compensation in November 2006 in a case supported by the former Equal Opportunities Commission, one of the bodies to be merged into the Equality and Human Rights Commission.

The tribunal's ruling was important. It stated that 'the absence of both clear criteria and process for determining pay awards and bonus payments creates a climate where pay discrimination on gender grounds can operate, consciously or unconsciously, unsuspected, undetected and unchallenged'.

Bodman, who is now bringing up her children in New Mills, Derbyshire, said: 'I'm glad I fought the case, although it was very stressful. At first, when I realised there was this pay divide, I went through a lot of doubts - was I not good enough at my job, maybe there was a genuine reason. But then I realised that it wasn't right and that I had to make a stand. Hopefully it will set a good precedent for other women, although I find it amazing that in 2008 this kind of discrimination is still happening, and on such a wide scale.'

· This article was amended on June 8 2008. We used the term 'industrial tribunals'. They became employment tribunals in 1998. This has been corrected.
Topics

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Jo Revill: The fight for equal pay ... 40 years on

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Forty years ago, a group of women sewing machinists at the Ford Motor Company plant in Dagenham saw red. They discovered that men who were doing the same work as them - making the car seats for Cortinas and Zephyrs - were being paid 15 per cent more.

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Image of a Protest for Getting Pensions and Sick Pay, 1968

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Image of a Protest for Getting Pensions and Sick Pay, 1968

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The Long and Frustrating History of the Gender Wage Gap

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The Long and Frustrating History of the Gender Wage Gap

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https://www.fastcompany.com/90609641/the-long-and-frustrating-history-of-the-gender-wage-gap

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The long and frustrating history of the gender wage gap

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It's been a road fraught with sexism and discrimination, and some estimates suggest it will still take 40 years to close the pay gap between the average man and woman-and much longer if you factor in race.

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The History of the Gender Wage Gap in America

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The History of the Gender Wage Gap in America

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https://www.investopedia.com/history-gender-wage-gap-america-5074898

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The wage gap, also known as the "gender wage gap" or "gender pay gap," historically refers to the disparity in incomes between men and women for doing the same work. The wage gap is also used to describe pay disparities between White workers vs. Black and Latinx workers, as well as between workers in the United States vs. other countries. This article focuses on the wage gap as it relates to gender in the United States.

Early History of the Wage Gap

Though the gender wage gap probably dates to the beginnings of civilization, it emerged as a political issue in the United States in the 1860s under the rallying cry of "Equal Pay for Equal Work."

Among the movement's most vigorous advocates were women's rights activists Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who made a case for bridging the wage gap in their newspaper, The Revolution, and in speeches such as "The Power of the Ballot to Bring Woman Equal Pay for Equal Work."

Women eventually won the right to vote in the United States with the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution in 1920. Nevertheless, the wage gap persisted.

The 1940s: A Failed Attempt to Bridge the Gap

In 1944, Winifred Stanley, a Republican member of Congress from New York, introduced a bill titled Prohibiting Discrimination in Pay on Account of Sex. It would have amended the list of unfair labor practices in the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 to include discriminating "against any employee, in the rate of compensation paid, on account of sex." Stanley's bill never made it through Congress.

The 1960s: Major Strides for Equal Pay and Civil Rights

The next major attempt to address the inequity on a national level came two decades later, with the passage of the Equal Pay Act in 1963. It prohibited employers from paying male and female workers different wages for "jobs the performance of which requires equal skill, effort, and responsibility, and which are performed under similar working conditions." However, it also allowed for several exceptions, including pay structures based on seniority or merit.

In signing the bill into law, then-President John F. Kennedy said that paying men and women different wages for the same work was "an unconscionable practice" and cited a statistic that "the average woman worker earns only 60% of the average wage for men."

A year later, in 1964, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act also addressed the wage gap, broadening the law to make compensation decisions based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin unlawful. As with the Equal Pay Act, there were multiple exceptions, again including seniority- and merit-based wage programs.

The 1970s and 1980s: A Call for Comparable Worth

In the 1970s and '80s, the concept of comparable worth, or pay equity, entered the national conversation. Its proponents called attention to wage gaps among workers in jobs that, while not identical, could be considered similar in terms of skills, responsibility, and value to the overall enterprise. Often, they argued, those gaps were a legacy of past discrimination.

"Many women and people of color are still segregated into a small number of jobs such as clerical, service workers, nurses, and teachers," the advocacy group National Committee on Pay Equity explained. "These jobs have historically been undervalued and continue to be underpaid to a large extent because of the gender and race of the people who hold them."

Eleanor Holmes Norton, chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission during the Carter administration, singled out comparable worth as "the issue of the 1980s." However, the Reagan administration, which came next, firmly opposed it. Then-President Ronald Reagan reportedly called it "Mickey Mouse, a cockamamie idea...[that] would destroy the basis of free enterprise." Pay equity and comparable worth made little progress on the federal level but did become law in several states.

The 2000s: Win Some, Lose Some

During the 1990s, there were no major changes in the laws around payment by gender. The gender wage gap continued to shrink, but not converge.

A 2007 U.S. Supreme Court case, Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co., led to the next major federal law. Lilly Ledbetter had sued her employer under the Civil Rights Act, alleging that it had underpaid her for 19 years. A jury awarded her more than $3.5 million, but Goodyear appealed, arguing that she had failed to file her suit within 180 days of when the discrimination first occurred, as prescribed by law. An appeals court reversed the original decision, and the Supreme Court also ruled against Ledbetter in a 5-4 vote.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in dissenting, suggested that it was now a matter for Congress to take up, which Congress soon did. The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, passed in 2009, expanded the period for filing a discrimination claim, making it easier for other women to sue employers that they believed had discriminated against them. It was the first piece of legislation signed into law by then-President Barack Obama just nine days after his inauguration.

The most recent major legislative proposal to address the wage gap is the Paycheck Fairness Act, first introduced in 2009. Among other things, it calls for greater enforcement of antidiscrimination laws and increased penalties for violators. The Paycheck Fairness Act initially passed the U.S. House but failed in the U.S. Senate. In the years since then, it has been reintroduced several times, most recently in 2021, when it again passed the House.

The Gender Wage Gap Today

Despite progress on the legislative front over the past 100 years, the wage gap has been slow to narrow. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, women working full time in 1960 earned about 60 cents for every dollar earned by men-the number cited by President Kennedy in signing the Equal Pay Act.

Though the numbers gradually inched up over the next 30 years, they didn't reach 70 cents until 1990. In 2019, the latest year for which data is available, women were earning just over 82 cents for every dollar earned by men, as shown in the graphs below from the U.S. Census Bureau.

The top graph shows how the female-to-male earnings ratio has increased to 82.3%. The bottom graph illustrates the annual earnings (in 2019 dollars) of male and female full-time workers. It shows that women earn $10,000 less on average than their male counterparts.

On the positive side, women's full-time earnings have increased at a faster rate since 2000. Full-time female workers earned a median income of $40,156 per year in 2000, while in 2019, they earned $47,299, an increase of almost 18%. Meanwhile, full-time male workers earned a median income of $54,471 in 2000, rising to $57,459 in 2019, only a 5% increase.

In addition to the rise in women's earnings, considerably more women are working full time today. The table below shows a 24.7% increase in full-time female workers since 2000, nearly twice the increase for men. Moving from part-time to full-time work also means that more women may now be eligible for employee benefits, such as health insurance coverage and retirement plans.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau

The Gender Wage Gap by Race

The gender wage gap also varies substantially by race. According to 2019 data from the U.S. Department of Labor, Hispanic women earned just 55 cents for every dollar earned by White non-Hispanic men, while Black women earned 63 cents, White non-Hispanic women earned 79 cents, and Asian women earned 87 cents.

The Gender Wage Gap Debate

Although these numbers are widely quoted, they are not universally accepted. Skeptics argue that the gender wage gap is actually much smaller, saying the numbers are distorted by, among other things, the fact that men tend to work longer hours.

It's true that more men hold full-time jobs than women (according to the Census Bureau) and perhaps put in longer hours as a result, which may lead to higher incomes. However, the nearly 25% increase in female full-time workers from 2000 to 2019 suggests that more women may be working longer hours as well, a change that appears to have had little effect on their pay.

While the size and causes of the gender pay gap may be matters of debate, most politicians, pundits, and academics agree that the gap continues to exist. Closing it remains unfinished business in making the United States a more equitable nation.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The History of the Gender Wage Gap in America

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The wage gap, also known as the "gender wage gap" or "gender pay gap," historically refers to the disparity in incomes between men and women for doing the same work. The wage gap is also used to describe pay disparities between White workers vs.

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https://payjustice.co.uk/history-gap/

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Identifying the Roots of the Gender Pay Gap

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Identifying the Roots of the Gender Pay Gap

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https://www.stlouisfed.org/en/on-the-economy/2017/march/identifying-roots-gender-pay-gap

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While declining substantially since the 1960s, a gap still exists between what men earn and what women earn. An article in The Regional Economist examines the issues surrounding this gender pay gap.

To understand this disparity, Research Fellow Limor Golan and former Technical Research Associate Andrés Hincapié studied the evolution of the wage gap between women and men belonging to certain age groups. One age group was composed of white workers born between 1941 and 1950, while another group comprised those born between 1951 and 1960. ¹

Golan and Hincapié measured the ratio of women's median wage divided by men's median wage at different ages, starting at 20 and ending at 40. When the ratio increases, the gender pay gap is shrinking; when the ratio falls, the gap is increasing. (To see the charts for these groups, go to The Regional Economist article " Breaking Down the Gender Wage Gap by Age and by Hours Worked.")

Rising Pay Gap

For both age groups, the gap generally increased as workers aged.

"This fact is well-known, and one of the main reasons for this pattern is that men and women make different choices over the life cycle," Golan and Hincapié wrote. "As they get older, women are more likely than men to work fewer hours outside the home and have breaks in their labor force participation (yielding less accumulated experience and possibly fewer labor market skills) and are less likely to hold highly compensated jobs with promotion prospects."

Narrowing Pay Gap

Golan and Hincapié then looked at the same age groups (also called cohorts), but only examined the pay gap for those who worked full time continuously.

"It is clear that the gender wage gap is smaller for those who worked full time continuously than for all workers in general. This is true for all cohorts," they wrote.

For those born between 1951 and 1960, however, the direction of the trend was different for workers as they got older.

"The pay gap for those working full time continuously is not only smaller but decreases with age for the most part. This latter fact is in contrast to what is seen in the full sample," the authors wrote.

Why does this pattern look so different? After eliminating a couple other possible explanations, Golan and Hincapié examined whether the wage gap reflects discrimination, and discrimination of women who continuously work full time declines over time.

The Roots of Wage Discrimination

The authors noted that firms often have costs of hiring and training employees, so they're likely to seek workers who are less likely to leave the labor force or to reduce their hours substantially.

"While some women are more inclined to participate in the labor market and work full time, women in general are still more likely to reduce hours or leave the labor force, especially during childbearing years, relative to what men are likely to do," Golan and Hincapié explained. "This can lead to lower wages for equally qualified women."

The bias by employers may even hurt women who are likely to work long hours and are attached to the labor market as much as men.

"This type of discrimination is often called statistical discrimination because group affiliation and group averages adversely affect individuals in the group," they noted.

So why does the impact of this discrimination become smaller as the women in this demographic group get older?

"Over time, employers can typically observe work experience, whether individuals were working and whether they were working full time or part time. Therefore, employers can increasingly identify workers who are less attached to the labor market and, as a result, discrimination of the type described above goes down with age," they wrote. "Since this type of discrimination is more likely to be directed at women, the wages of women who work full time continuously may grow relative to the wages of men due to a decline in discrimination."

Notes and References

¹ The authors only looked at wages of white women compared to those of white men because there are other issues regarding pay gaps for nonwhite workers.

Additional Resources

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Identifying the Roots of the Gender Pay Gap

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
While declining substantially since the 1960s, a gap still exists between what men earn and what women earn. An article in The Regional Economist examines the issues surrounding this gender pay gap. To understand this disparity, Research Fellow Limor Golan and former Technical Research Associate Andrés Hincapié studied the evolution of the wage gap between women and men belonging to certain age groups.

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Gender and Income Inequality: History and Statistics

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Gender and Income Inequality: History and Statistics

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https://www.investopedia.com/history-gender-wage-gap-america-5074898#:~:text=Though%20the%20gender%20wage%20gap,Equal%20Pay%20for%20Equal%20Work.%E2%80%9D

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The wage gap, also known as the "gender wage gap" or "gender pay gap," historically refers to the disparity in incomes between men and women for doing the same work. The wage gap is also used to describe pay disparities between White workers vs. Black and Latinx workers, as well as between workers in the United States vs. other countries. This article focuses on the wage gap as it relates to gender in the United States.

Early History of the Wage Gap

Though the gender wage gap probably dates to the beginnings of civilization, it emerged as a political issue in the United States in the 1860s under the rallying cry of "Equal Pay for Equal Work."

Among the movement's most vigorous advocates were women's rights activists Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who made a case for bridging the wage gap in their newspaper, The Revolution, and other works.

Women eventually won the right to vote in the United States with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1920. Nevertheless, the wage gap persisted.

The 1940s: A Failed Attempt to Bridge the Gap

In 1944, Winifred Stanley, a Republican member of Congress from New York, introduced a bill titled "Prohibiting Discrimination in Pay on Account of Sex." It would have amended the list of unfair labor practices in the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 to include discriminating "against any employee, in the rate of compensation paid, on account of sex." Stanley's bill never made it through Congress.

The 1960s: Major Strides for Equal Pay and Civil Rights

The next major attempt to address the inequity on a national level came two decades later, with the passage of the Equal Pay Act in 1963. It prohibited employers from paying male and female workers different wages for "jobs the performance of which requires equal skill, effort, and responsibility, and which are performed under similar working conditions." However, it also allowed for several exceptions, including pay structures based on seniority or merit.

In signing the bill into law, then-President John F. Kennedy said that paying men and women different wages for the same work was an "unconscionable practice" and cited a statistic that "the average woman worker earns only 60% of the average wage for men."

A year later, in 1964, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act also addressed the wage gap, broadening the law to make compensation decisions based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin unlawful. As with the Equal Pay Act, there were multiple exceptions, again including seniority- and merit-based wage programs.

The 1970s and 1980s: A Call for Comparable Worth

In the 1970s and '80s, the concept of comparable worth, or pay equity, entered the national conversation. Its proponents called attention to wage gaps among workers in jobs that, while not identical, could be considered similar in terms of skills, responsibility, and value to the overall enterprise. Often, they argued, those gaps were a legacy of past discrimination.

"Many women and people of color are still segregated into a small number of jobs such as clerical, service workers, nurses, and teachers," the advocacy group National Committee on Pay Equity explained. "These jobs have historically been undervalued and continue to be underpaid to a large extent because of the gender and race of the people who hold them."

Eleanor Holmes Norton, chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission during the Carter administration, singled out comparable worth as "the issue of the 1980s." However, the Reagan administration, which came next, firmly opposed it. Then-President Ronald Reagan reportedly called it "Mickey Mouse, a cockamamie idea...[that] would destroy the basis of free enterprise." Pay equity and comparable worth made little progress on the federal level but did become law in several states.

The 2000s: Win Some, Lose Some

During the 1990s, there were no major changes in the laws around payment by gender. The gender wage gap continued to shrink, but not converge.

A 2007 U.S. Supreme Court case, Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co., led to the next major federal law. Lilly Ledbetter had sued her employer under the Civil Rights Act, alleging that it had underpaid her for 19 years. A jury awarded her more than $3.5 million, but Goodyear appealed, arguing that she had failed to file her suit within 180 days of when the discrimination first occurred, as prescribed by law. An appeals court reversed the original decision, and the Supreme Court also ruled against Ledbetter in a 5-4 vote.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in dissenting, suggested that it was now a matter for Congress to take up, which Congress soon did. The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, passed in 2009, expanded the period for filing a discrimination claim, making it easier for other women to sue employers that they believed had discriminated against them. It was the first piece of legislation signed into law by then-President Barack Obama just nine days after his inauguration.

The most recent major legislative proposal to address the wage gap is the Paycheck Fairness Act, first introduced in 2009. Among other things, it calls for greater enforcement of antidiscrimination laws and increased penalties for violators. The Paycheck Fairness Act initially passed the U.S. House but failed in the U.S. Senate. In the years since then, it has been reintroduced several times, most recently in 2021, when it again passed the House.

The Gender Wage Gap Today

Despite progress on the legislative front over the past 100 years, the wage gap has been slow to narrow. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, women working full time in 1960 earned about 60 cents for every dollar earned by men-the number cited by President Kennedy in signing the Equal Pay Act.

Though the numbers gradually inched up over the next 30 years, they didn't reach 70 cents until 1990. In 2020, the latest year for which data is available, women were earning just over 83 cents for every dollar earned by men, as shown in the graphs below from the U.S. Census Bureau.

The top graph shows how the female-to-male earnings ratio has increased to 83%. The bottom graph illustrates the annual earnings of male and female full-time workers. It shows that women earn about $10,000 less on average than their male counterparts.

On the positive side, women's full-time earnings have increased at a faster rate since 2000. Full-time female workers earned a median income of $40,156 per year in 2000, while in 2020, they earned $50,982. Meanwhile, full-time male workers earned a median income of $54,471 in 2000, rising to $61,417 in 2020.

In addition to the rise in women's earnings, considerably more women are working full-time today. The table below shows a 24.7% increase in full-time female workers since 2000, nearly twice the increase for men. There was an enormous layoff of both male and female full-time workers in 2020 due to the Coronavirus pandemic, which eschews the trendline and renders the data difficult to interpret. In fact, it was the single largest drop in full-time employees since the first year of comparable data in 1967.It is because of this complication that the table below does not include data from 2020.

Moving from part-time to full-time work also means that more women may now be eligible for employee benefits, such as health insurance coverage and retirement plans.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau

The Gender Wage Gap by Race

The gender wage gap also varies substantially by race. According to 2019 data from the U.S. Department of Labor, Hispanic women earned just 55 cents for every dollar earned by White non-Hispanic men, while Black women earned 63 cents, White non-Hispanic women earned 79 cents, and Asian women earned 87 cents.

The Gender Wage Gap Debate

Although these numbers are widely quoted, they are not universally accepted. Skeptics argue that the gender wage gap is actually much smaller, saying the numbers are distorted by, among other things, the fact that men tend to work longer hours.

It's true that more men hold full-time jobs than women (according to the Census Bureau) and perhaps put in longer hours as a result, which may lead to higher incomes. However, the nearly 25% increase in female full-time workers from 2000 to 2019 suggests that more women may be working longer hours as well, a change that appears to have had little effect on their pay.

While the size and causes of the gender pay gap may be matters of debate, most politicians, pundits, and academics agree that the gap continues to exist. Closing it remains unfinished business in making the United States a more equitable nation.

Correction-May 25, 2022: This article contained outdated labor information from 2019 and some portions have been updated to reflect the latest data.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The History of the Gender Wage Gap in America

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The wage gap, also known as the "gender wage gap" or "gender pay gap," historically refers to the disparity in incomes between men and women for doing the same work. The wage gap is also used to describe pay disparities between White workers vs.