Career Advice
Two Thirds of UK Working Women Would Shun Employers over Lack of Equal Pay
Joe Wiggins
Joe Wiggins, Author & Career Expert at Glassdoor | 23 Mar 2017
A new survey* from Glassdoor shows that companies that fail to pay men and women the same will struggle to recruit female talent in the UK, but that a focus on diversity, gender balance in senior leadership and women’s networks could attract both female and male job candidates.
Figures from also reveal that a significant proportion of employees (44 percent) mistakenly believe that workplace discrimination is the main cause of the gender pay gap. In actual fact, only around one-third of the gender pay gap** in the UK is down to factors such as workplace bias and discrimination, whereas two-thirds can be explained by differences in worker ‘characteristics’ or the way that men and women tend to enter different jobs and industries.
Employees Want Transparency
Glassdoor’s report shows that the working population was found to be supportive of greater transparency around pay. More than half (58 percent) of people said they think the Government should force employers to reveal employee salaries, in order to combat unequal pay. Furthermore, two-thirds (65 percent) of people believe that employers which embrace salary transparency can help eliminate the gender pay gap, and that more than a third (38 percent) of men believe that the gender pay gap will not close until parents share the role of raising children more equally.
Understanding and Negotiating Pay
More than one in four (27 percent) of working adults say that they do not have a good understanding of how people are paid at their company, and almost half (49 percent) of people wish they knew what was fair pay for their job. In addition, forty-one percent of people think that they will need to get a new job in order to get a pay rise.
Only one-third (33 percent) of working adults wish that they had negotiated harder on salary when they started their job. When broken down by gender, the differences are surprisingly small: 35 percent of women expressed this view, compared to 31 percent of men.
Appealing to Job Candidates
Fifty-one percent of employed women (and 37 percent of men) would be more attracted to work at a company if it had a strong diversity programme. Forty-eight percent of employed women (and 24 percent of men) would be more interested in a company if it had a professional development network for women. Finally, forty-four percent of employed women (and 23 percent of men) would be more attracted to work at a company if the Senior Leadership Team was at least 30 percent female.
*Survey by OnePoll carried out among 2,000 adults in full or part-time employment from 01/02/17 to 06/02/17
**Study published 23/03/16 by Glassdoor Economic Research, examines the gender pay gap using a unique dataset of hundreds of thousands of Glassdoor salaries shared anonymously online. Study estimates the gender pay gap for the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Germany and France.
Joe Wiggins
Joe Wiggins, is an expert career author for the Glassdoor Blog. Read about Joe Wiggins' experience and latest published articles on their author profile.
Tags:Diversity & InclusionSalary NegotiationWomen
