The Angry White Man

[DanaC]

In answer to your question: partly it is because firms get around the equal pay laws by giving their male employees different titles. Partly it is due to a lack of eforcement where firms are blatantly paying different scales for the same job (where workers negotiate individual remuneration packages rather than having a firmwide payscale) and partly it is due to the continued gender assumptions which direct girls towards certain fields and direct boys towards others. The trouble is that areas which are historically considered 'female' attract lower payrates than areas which are historically gendered 'male'. The historical basis of this goes back to the medieval period when the concept of a separate rate of pay for 'women's work' was enshrined in law under the Labourers act. It continued through to the industrial revolution where women's pay was less even if doing the same job as a man because she was not considered the main breadwinner.

These attitudes informed your own culture as well. The idea of paying women less has only very recently been regarded as unfair, even by women. Consequently jobs traditionally associated with women (communications, caring and cleaning: the Three C's) have always been paid at a lower rate than those associated with men. The market has no need to increase those payrates to take account of newer attitudes and women are still predominantly employed in these industries because that's the way the education system sends them, or because those are the jobs that play to women's strengths (the caring roles and communications). As long as jobs which predominantly attract women are undervalued compared to 'male' jobs there will be a pay disparity.

Added to that are the differences in female and male lifecycles. Women are the ones who tend to take extended time out from their careers to have children. Though this is changing and women are more likely to return to work soon after the birth of their child, there is still enormous societal and biological pressure for women to take time out for the first year or two of their baby's life. The workplace does not take great account of this, seeing it as an inconvenience rather than a societal necessity and women are therefore penalised within their career for being active carers of their children. Women are more likely than men to become carers of elderly parents. Again the workplace deems this an inconvenience rather than a societal necessity and women are again punished in their careers.