in Company Training services

Today the Equality Commission publish a major report into the gender pay gap in the financial services industry. You can download and read the full report here.

To an extent pointing out the ways in which the industry discriminates against women is like shooting fish in a barrel, but I am still disappointed by the content of the report. While all of the headlines are about the gender pay gap, it is clear from the report that the key issue is occupational segregation. I don’t doubt that female hedge fund managers face a culture of discrimination, but too much of this report is about comparing male hedge fund managers with female admin workers or cashiers. Not enough account is taken of how a very few incredibly highly paid employees can distort the overall average.

S0 the part of the report I wanted to focus on was the section dealing with ‘in-grade’ pay gaps. What the report says is this:

3.16 The company data showed that in-grade gender pay gaps exist in 95 per cent of cases. In only five per cent of cases were there no job grades/categories with a significant gender pay gap. In 63 per cent of cases, more than half of all job grades/categories exhibited a significant gender pay gap. The prevalence of in-grade pay inequality suggests that the pay gap may not simply be a consequence of vertical occupational segregation but also reflects a failure to ensure equal pay for equal work.

The trouble with this is that the report is assuming that people on roughly the same grade are doing roughly the same job. We don’t know that that is true - and the table given in the report is really sketchy. In a bank, the top grade might be Senior Vice President - and that grade could encompass both a major fund manager bringing in huge amounts of revenue and the Head of HR who, valuable though that role is, does not. I was hoping that the report would really go into detail about specific jobs rather than reasonably obvious generalisations, but unfortunately it doesn’t.

There is also a certain naivety in suggesting that more flexible working options should be considered. Flexible working is a vital way of improving the lives of employees and of increasing equality but at some point reality intrudes. There are some jobs that require huge commitment and sacrifice. They take up most of the employee’s waking moments and the employee lives or dies by results. Most people would not last five minutes in such a job and the people who succeed in them are extraordinary (not just in a good way).

As long as such jobs exist they will attract extraordinary reward. At the moment women are less likely to have such jobs than men - but it is worth remembering that actually very few people, male or female, are in the market for that sort of role. Trying to reconcile jobs like that with a fulfilling family life is a pretty futile exercise in my view and it may be that women will always be less likely than men to take on such roles. I can’t bring myself to think it matters hugely.

What does matter is the discrimination that occurs at other levels in the organisation where normal people might want to work and the anecdotal parts of the report are of value here in terms of the culture of organisations and the pattern of recruitment. However that is drowned out in the coverage by focusing on a neat percentage representing the ‘gender pay gap’ - and. But the report does not nail down anything specific here. If the Commission thinks that reports like this will justify its continued existence to an incoming Conservative admininstration, they may be mistaken.