Report on widening gender pay gap shows that for every pound ($1.60) a man earns, a woman gets only 81 pence ($1.30)
By Magdalena Mis
LONDON, Nov 4 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - British women, you're working for free for the rest of the year.
That's the conclusion of a report on the widening gender pay gap, which shows that for every pound ($1.60) a man earns, a woman gets only 81 pence ($1.30).
Published on Tuesday, the report by the Fawcett Society, a campaign group that promotes women's rights in the labour market, said that women working full-time take home about 5,000 pounds less a year than men.
It also said this year's Equal Pay Day -- which marks the day after which women "work for free" due to the gender pay gap -- has come three days earlier than last year.
"It is disgraceful that in 2014, women in the UK still effectively work for free for nearly two months of the year relative to men, and deeply concerning that last year the gap widened again for the first time in five years," Eva Neitzert, deputy CEO of the Fawcett Society, said in a statement.
In 2013, the gender pay gap rose to 15.7 percent from 14.8 percent in 2012, the report said.
It blamed the lack of women in senior roles, the culture of paying men more than women for doing the same job and the "motherhood penalty" - mothers taking more flexible but lower paid jobs after having children - as some of the reasons for the gender pay gap.
Austerity measures introduced after the financial crisis also fed into the widening of the pay gap, said the report.
During the recovery, the six fastest growing sectors have either been female-dominated low-paid industries such as the care sector, or high-paid male-dominated such as real estate.
Fewer jobs in the public sector and more jobs in the private sector, where the gender pay gap is much higher, have also deepened the pay divide, the report said.
Research carried out for the report found that raising the 6.60 pounds per hour national minimum wage to 7.65 pounds would reduce the gender pay gap by 0.8 percent and increase the pay of nearly 1 million more women than men.
Britain dropped out of the top 20 countries for gender equality in the World Economic Forum's annual Global Gender Gap Report released last week. It went from 18th place to 26th.
The World Economic Forum report said it would take 81 years for the world to achieve gender equality in the workplace. It ranked Iceland, Finland, Norway, Sweden and Denmark as the most gender-equal societies in the world, while Yemen ranked worst. (1 US dollar = 0.6251 British pound) (Reporting By Magdalena Mis; Editing by Katie Nguyen)
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