ALMOST half a century ago, in 1975, a piece of legislation described at the time as “radical” came into force in the UK. The Equal Pay Act banned employers from paying women less than their male counterparts for doing the same job. A basic right that few would deem revolutionary in 2020. Yet despite this legislative and ideological shift, equal pay is something we’re still fighting for. 

Why? Because the gender pay gap, like a fiscal Ken Barlow, stubbornly endures. Technology has advanced to the point where a woman can open a banking app with her face, but on average she’ll be staring down a pay packet that’s 17.3 per cent smaller than a man’s. Good thing my phone still recognises me when I’m greeting.

New research published last week by the Fawcett Society and the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership at King’s College London found that compared with other countries, the UK is “unique in its light touch approach” when it comes to asking employers to create an action plan to tackle any disparity in earnings between men and women. 

Since 2017, businesses with more than 250 employees have by law had to publish their gender pay gap data. But none are required to show how they intend to fix the inequity, should it exist. The Government just pats them on the head and says ‘Cheers for doing that, see you next year mate’.

Except we won’t see many results in 2021, because the legal requirement for companies to report gender pay gap information has been temporarily lifted this year in light of the broader challenges posed by Covid-19. While some companies, such as Shell and Lloyds, have continued to file, nearly half of all eligible employers have gleefully let it go. It’s a disgrace. 

If you think we shouldn’t be troubling ourselves with such matters in the midst of a global pandemic, you’re dead wrong and (presumably) in a position of privilege.
For years the pay gap has been closing incrementally at roughly the saunter I adopt to walk to the gym, but experts now fear the impact of the virus could reverse this trend and widen the chasm. This is a dangerous time for equal pay to be slipping even further down the political agenda. And the damage has already begun.

Women have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic-related redundancies currently sweeping the workforce; we dominate some of the industries most severely impacted by job cuts, from hospitality and retail to beauty and fashion. Working mothers are 14% more likely to have been furloughed than fathers. If my WhatsApp chats are anything to go by, those still in a job with a husband and family are juggling more domestic duties than ever. Men are by most accounts “unique in their light touch approach” to housework and childcare. 

A key cause of the pay gap is the motherhood penalty; women have to take more time off work to look after their kids, and a lack of flexible working options either forces them to work part-time or eschew paid work altogether due to the exorbitant cost of childcare. Although shared parental leave is an option, only 2% of eligible couples took it last year because the statutory pay is garbage. Perhaps if paternity leave was a more financially viable option, we’d make some headway here.

For this to happen, we need more women in influential positions – not only in government but in business. In many companies the majority of top executive jobs are occupied by men, who frankly can’t be relied on to make this type of policy reform. In a previous job, I sat with a company director and listened in disbelief as he told me he was in the process of examining the overall culture of the business and he “hadn’t actually thought” to put gender on the agenda. When I sent a follow-up email to ask what was being done about the company’s considerable gender pay gap, it went ignored.

We’ve long been peddled the myth that women are too timid to raise issues like this, too modest to make the case for a pay rise. This is b******s. Several of my female pals were denied a wage increase last year when they requested it. Do I just happen to know an unusual number of confident women who recognise their worth, or are women more likely than men to be knocked back when they ask for more money? I suspect it’s the latter.

And what happens when we go on to apply for new jobs? As someone who was recently made redundant, I’ve learned during my job search that in the UK it’s perfectly legal for a company to ask what your previous salary was. Doing this only serves to reinforce gender pay inequality and we might look to the US state of Massachusetts, which two years ago banned employers from this practice. Since then, 27 more states have followed suit. 

Even if we did that over here, though, there’s no getting away from the fact that women’s work is on the whole considered less valuable than men’s. Nurses, care workers and teachers don’t get paid anywhere near what they should. High street retailer Next was back in the headlines this week over accusations it destroyed documents relating to an equal pay claim being brought by store staff. You may remember that the mostly female shop workers raised the issue after discovering male colleagues in warehouses were earning between £2 and £6 more than them per hour. A job that arguably now carries far less risk than those in customer-facing roles.

Covid-19 isn’t so much causing new problems in the sphere of financial inequality as it is exacerbating and illuminating pre-existing issues that could and should be addressed by our government with haste. 

If it’s not taken seriously, the coronavirus crisis could set us back decades in a race we weren’t even remotely close to catching up on in the first place.