Equal Pay Day2 min read

Did you know that since November 10th women effectively started working for free?

How is that possible? Thanks to the gender pay gap.

This day is known as Equal Pay Day and might change depending on the actual pay gap each year.

Fawcett Society, named after Millicent Fawcett, is a Charity campaigning for gender equality and women’s rights.

They released data on this day, showing how inequality and power imbalance directly affect the pay gap, amongst other things.

Women, since the start of their careers, earn less than men.

After years of declining, the pay gap for women in their 20s became wider, now being 5 times bigger than it was 6 years ago.

From 1.1% in 2011 is now 5.5%.

Pay gap is not only influenced by gender. It is affected by age; women over 40 earn a lot less than colleagues at the start of their careers.

Research by the Fawcett Society shows that women from Asian minorities face a pay gap at 26%, while it is at 24% for black African women.

It also depends on the location. London (20.7%) has the widest pay gap in the UK, exceeding by far the national average, while Wales (8.3%) has the lowest one.

The way progress is developing currently, it will take us 62 years to close the pay gap, which means that women working now or starting work now will be retired by the time we have equal pay. I say ‘us’ because it’s up to society and organisations to make sure that we put an end to inequality and sexism.

I only reported data regarding women because they are the ones who face the greater pay gap, but when you consider factors such as race you see that there is a greater disparity both for women and men.

Most of the women find themselves disadvantaged when they are dealing with a pregnancy or when they are in the aftermath of it. The same doesn’t apply to fathers, though.

We should be providing the right support for families to deal with this. It’s not fair that women have to choose between careers and family, while men don’t have to. This also brings out the problem of late pregnancies.

But we also have to think about support for single parents.

Whether they are mothers or fathers, gender pay gap shouldn’t be one of their main worries.

There are obviously more issues related to this inequality and it is important that we tackle them in order to make sure that we close the gap in less than 62 years.

The government issued a deadline for all companies with over 250 employees to provide the figures of their gender pay gap.

But we can do more to change this.

We can join campaigns such as #paygappledge with the Fawcett Society but also start having conversations about the subject to make people aware of the problem and the possible solutions.