November is hardly anyone’s favourite month. The days are darker and damper. It’s colder. And for women, November is effectively the month we stop being paid.
Imagine going into a shop with two of your friends. You all pay £5 with a £10 note. When it comes to getting the change, only one of you gets the £5 owed to you. One of you gets half that, and one of you even less. No one would go into that shop, but it’s what’s happening when so many of us are getting shortchanged at the tills of the economy.
Equal Pay Day marks the point in the year when, because of the gender pay gap, the average woman’s pay effectively runs out compared with the average man’s. From then until the 31st of December, women are essentially ‘working for free.’
Averages are useful to show the big picture. The average gender pay gap is almost 13%. The problem with this is that there’s no such thing as an average person, and squeezing diverse people into groups like “women,” “BAME,” or “people with disabilities,” erases nuance within the stories which most urgently need to be told. Women of Bangladeshi and Pakistani backgrounds are paid almost a third less than men. Black women take home about three-quarters of what white men do, regardless of qualifications. Women with disabilities earn dramatically less across their lifetimes.
Being Irish, living in the UK can be a strange set of contradictions. All in all, we’re a popular group, but we still have things to weather in a country that hasn’t reckoned with its own colonial past. The days of anti-Irish police brutality and landlords putting “No Blacks No Dogs No Irish” signs in windows are in living memory, but over. We’re now one of the highest paid groups. This reminds me that things can change.
But change needs to speed up. As long as bias is allowed to influence how we’re paid, most of us won’t earn what we should. Accents, age, ethnicity, gender – there are so many ways that unfair systems can count against us.
“What were you paid in your last job?”
It’s the question we all hate. But some of us should hate it even more.
Anyone who has been out of work for a while is likely to have a lower number. Women are more likely to take time off to care for others; people with disabilities may need to take more time out to care for themselves.
You only need to be discriminated against once for it to follow you from job to job, a single scratch that leaves a lifetime scar.
According to one female engineer: “I used to give it but since going through an equal pay case about 5 years ago where the gap was over 30% (and took 2 years to resolve) I don’t give it anymore. It perpetuated my own pay gap for years across several companies.”
Banning questions about salary history works. In other countries, this simple step meant women were paid 8% more, and Black people paid 13% more. Here in the UK, 90% of people think it’s unfair, and over 100 businesses have backed our End Salary History Campaign.
“It is always said that women don’t negotiate hard enough but I did, I negotiated hard. But it felt completely futile when my current salary was used as a weapon against me.” – Shobaa Haridas, who started the grassroots campaign
It’s never just numbers. A pay gap means fewer options in every part of your life. It could mean not having enough to leave an abusive situation, or to pay your rent. Most food bank users are women. When I was with Ireland’s Pro-Choice movement before we overturned the abortion ban in 2018, the worst stories were always from people with the least money.
Pay gaps should not exist. They were built by prejudice, and allies can dismantle them.
As someone looking for or in a job, you have the right not to answer questions about your salary history. Sites like Glassdoor can show what similar jobs pay; if you’re offered less, ask why. If you can, support any wider EDI campaigns in your workplace, because it is all connected.
As an activist, you can support campaigns pushing for more honesty and transparency around what people are paid, write to your MP, and share stories, to make sure that the unfairness of the system is seen.
As an employer, you can stop asking salary history questions, publish salary bands, support flexible working, and make sure your company is somewhere everyone can feel safe to work.
Equal Pay Day reminds us to think about how we’re not treated equally. We need a future where we don’t need it in our diaries. We were getting closer, but progress has stalled over the past five years.
But once, it probably felt like those “No blacks, no dogs, no Irish” signs would be up forever. That LGBTQ+ people would allowed to live openly. In the years leading up to the 2018 referendum, I was told I was wasting my time because abortion would never exist in Ireland. We made all of those changes. We can make this one too.
