Equal pay. . . after I’m dead

I suppose the good news is that equal pay for equal work is becoming a reality, slowly but surely. In England, new data published by the Chartered Management Institute (CMI) shows that at the current rate of increase women will celebrate equal pay in almost 60 more years!

The 2010 National Management Salary Survey shows that “female salaries climbed by 28 per cent during the last 12 months - compared to just 23 per cent for men”. That sounds great, but consider that men at a management level make on average $15,709 more than women managers. All things staying the same, that’s 57 years until equal pay is truly achieved in spite of the passage in 1970 of Great Britain’s Equal Pay Act.

The discrepancies occur in other places as well. Also during the last year, 4.5% of the female employees were laid off compared to 3% of men. As far as voluntary resignations go, again women resigned their positions at the director level 7.7% compared to 3.6% of men. For women, that’s up from 5.3% last year.

CMI’s Head of Policy (a woman!) Petra Wilton, said, “Girls born this year will face the probability of working for around 40 years in the shadow of unequal pay. The prospect of continued decades of pay inequality cannot be allowed to become reality. We want to see Government take greater steps to enforce pay equality by monitoring organizations more closely and name and shaming those who fail to pay male and female staff fairly.”

Is 57 years too early to start planning the party?

Source: Chartered Management Institute, Work Place Law