Women working in the public sector will close the pay gap with their male colleagues in eight years, compared to another 57 years of unequal pay for women working in the private sector, according to a report published today.
Women's pay is increasing by 0.5% more than men's across all sectors, the report shows. However, the pay gap is closing much faster in the public sector, where women's take-home pay is increasing four times more quickly than men's. At the current rate, equal pay is within reach for female public sector workers in the next decade.
The report by the Chartered Management Institute (CMI) found that the pay gap for managers in the public sector is currently £6,837, with the gap existing all the way up from junior executives, with men earning on average £1,446 more at this level.
But this is significantly lower than the national picture, with the CMI finding that female managers earn on average £10,000 less than their male counterparts.
Across both the sectors, the gap is worse for women working in IT, who earn on average £17,736 less than men, while those in engineering face the smallest pay gap, earning on average £2,433 less than their male counterparts.
Experts have cited companies which link wages to length of service as an important factor in the continuing pay gap in the public sector. The Equality and Human Rights Commission has argued that this practice disadvantages women who take time out of the workforce to raise children and so do not have the same continuous length of service as men.
This follows a case in October 2009 when the commission helped Christine Wilson, a public sector health and safety executive, win a landmark case against her employers, arguing that the fact that she was being paid less than her male counterparts for doing the same job was unfair.
The commission is calling for greater transparency in reporting pay differences while the CMI's head of policy, Petra Wilson, has called for a "naming and shaming" policy to combat the inequalities. Under current laws, pay gaps can be reported voluntarily, but it is not mandatory for businesses to publish this information .
The CMI survey also raises concern over the implications of government cutbacks in the public sector and increased redundancies. The survey shows that across all sectors and levels, women are at greater risk of being made redundant, with 4.5% made redundant in the last year compared to 3% of men. This difference increases at director level.
The recent legal challenge by the Fawcett Society to determine whether the chancellor's emergency budget was unlawful because it didn't consider the impact on equality highlighted concern that job losses in the public sector will hit women harder than men.
From Flip Chart Fairy Tales
From Bubb's Blog
From Whitehall Watch
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