The real reason women are paid less than men

Recent figures showed that the pay gap now stands at 17.2%, and a shocking 27% at senior management level. So why do women put up with this? asks Merryn Somerset Webb.

More figures out last week showed that women still aren't getting paid as much as men. Across the board the pay gap is still a much too high 17.2%.

The reasons for this have been much discussed and generally put down to motherhood the fact that we take career breaks and so advance more slowly - and that we take more low paid part-time jobs than men.

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Merryn Somerset Webb

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast -  but still writes for Moneyweek monthly. 

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.