Today marks "equal pay day": from this point on, women stop earning for the rest of the year relative to their male counterparts. Today's deadline falls just five days later than last year's. According to the Fawcett Society, the current overall gender pay gap for full time workers is 14.2 per cent. David Cameron said this year he would "end the gender pay gap in a generation," but there is still plenty to be done.
Despite years of progress for Britain's feminist movement, a gap in earnings between women and men remains stubbornly in place. Why is this, and why is it so hard to shift?
Women's work?
Women often do jobs which don't pay as well. For example, across the EU 80 per cent of people working in the health sector are women. In the UK, workers in this industry have been hit by government cuts and freezes, with some losing between a quarter and a third of their income in recent years. This division between men and women doesn't look like it's going away: according to the TUC, half of the growth in female employment in 2014 came from women moving to lower-paid, part-time jobs. At the other end of the scale, women are less likely to work in the best-paid jobs: women represent only around 17 per cent of board members in the biggest publicly listed companies within the EU, according to the European Commission.
Equal value
Where women are doing jobs of equal value to men, they often still aren't paid as much. According to the European Commission, "the (mainly female) cashiers in a supermarket usually earn less than the (mainly male) employees involved in stacking shelves and other more physical tasks," for example. Women also often struggle in securing pay rises compared to their male colleagues, with one survey this year finding only a quarter of women expected a pay rise in the next 12 months compared to 40 per cent of men.
Bringing up baby
Although this is slowly changing, women are still much more likely to take primary responsibility for looking after kids and other family members. As a consequence, only 65.8 per cent of women with young children in the EU are working, compared to 89.1 per cent of men in similar situations. That means women have to stop their careers more often than men do.
Wrong expectations
Various cultural factors can influence how likely women are to seek and get high-paid work. One example would be careers which require education or training in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) subjects. Negative stereotypes about female "geeks" can make women less likely to study these subjects, and according to Women in Science and Engineering, just 12.8 per cent of UK workers in the STEM sector are female.
