Should the state enforce equal pay for women?

published 24 July 2015

Companies with more than 250 employees are to be forced to publish the pay gap between average earnings for male and female staff, which still stands at nearly 20%, following an announcement by David Cameron. The response of some of the employers' organisations was "mealy mouthed", says Andrew Hill in the Financial Times.

The average could be "misleading", said the Confederation of British Industry. Measuring pay gaps is "very complex", said the Institute of Directors. Rules should be flexible, urged the EEF manufacturers' organisation.

Such comments "bear the traces of the lingering, fallacious assumption that because there are multiple explanations" for the pay gap, firms can sort out the problem themselves. Yet it is employers who have created the problem, at job interviews, in pay talks, in maternity leave discussions in "countless back rooms where unconscious bias and outmoded assumptions persist". They need to stop "nit-picking" and act.

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There's a difference between equal pay and average pay, says Melanie Phillips in The Times. Equal pay for equal work has been UK law for decades. The fact that women still earn on average 81p for every pound earned by men is due to various factors, including the fact that women are less likely to work in highly paid careers or advance up the career ladder. The mistake is to assume this is because women are discriminated against. Some "undoubtedly are", but generally it comes down to choice.

Emily has worked as a journalist for more than thirty years and was formerly Assistant Editor of MoneyWeek, which she helped launch in 2000. Prior to this, she was Deputy Features Editor of The Times and a Commissioning Editor for The Independent on Sunday and The Daily Telegraph. She has written for most of the national newspapers including The Times, the Daily and Sunday Telegraph, The Evening Standard and The Daily Mail, She interviewed celebrities weekly for The Sunday Telegraph and wrote a regular column for The Evening Standard. As Political Editor of MoneyWeek, Emily has covered subjects from Brexit to the Gaza war.

Aside from her writing, Emily trained as Nutritional Therapist following her son's diagnosis with Type 1 diabetes in 2011 and now works as a practitioner for Nature Doc, offering one-to-one consultations and running workshops in Oxfordshire.