Dear Jo,
I'm seeing a lot of news about the gender wage gap and naturally, as a fully paid up member of the NAMC (Not All Men Club), I'm both appalled and outraged.
My question is simply: how can I help? Without actually giving up any of my wages, obviously. I'm saving for a boat.
Yours,
Anon
Dear Anon,
The reason you're seeing a lot about this in the news is that the government deadline has now passed requiring British companies to reveal the truth about the difference between what they pay men and women - nearly eight years after the Equality Act was passed - and the results are impressively bleak across many industries.
And so, like most women, I started today by sifting through the results incandescent with rage, sipping on a warm goblet of man-blood while scheming over how to bully you all into surrendering half your wages.
OK, this isn’t entirely accurate. But I would like you to consider how taking a cut would feel for a moment. You’ve got used to having a certain amount of money coming in, right? Certain privileges, certain improvements to your quality of life, certain freedoms? Maybe a taxi when you definitely could’ve got the bus, or a second lunch from Pret cos you already ate your packed lunch for breakfast (idiot). Now imagine that it hasn’t been snatched away from you, but that it was NEVER THERE IN THE FIRST PLACE.
To point out the blindingly obvious: everyone needs money. It gives us social mobility, dignity and pride in our self-sufficiency. I entered the world of work as soon as I had my national insurance number and, out of sheer obstinance, have always been blunt about pay. Pay, to me, is a transaction: you give me money for doing work. If I’m doing the same work as a man and to the same quality, then the pay should be the same. And if I’m giving you objectively better quality work, then the pay should reflect that also. Quick maths. But in every single job I’ve been in, from shitty shop work to my first career job, this has not been the case. And these rounds of reports finally prove it.
So what to do? The first step is a little taboo-busting. Thankfully, because our generation has been ritualistically shafted by the economy, men and women are slowly dropping the slightly Victorian concept that talking about money is oh-so-terribly gauche, but there is still some way to go.
When I’ve spoken about the need for salary transparency before, the go-to retort from men, I’ve noticed, is: "I’ll get in trouble with my employer". First of all, this fear is completely understandable. However, it’s also prudent to point out that it is not legal for an employer to punish you for talking about your salary. Secondly, times have changed, pal! The proverbial seal has been broken and women are vocal and fucking annoyed about lots of things, including our pay. Your boss dragging you into a disciplinary for innocently telling someone your salary? In this climate? Whew, sounds like a scandal to me!
Now, nobody is demanding you stand on your desk and invoke an “I’m Spartacus” moment, shouting your Christmas bonus while snapping your laptop in half. A simple “hello female co-worker, my salary is XX amount a year” will suffice. What is the point of this you ask? Many women get stuck trying to strike a delicate balance of not wanting to be too hardline for fear of scaring employers off, but also not wanting to be a doormat. Across all industries, women are treated less favourably for the same behaviour men are rewarded for. Where you're being labelled assertive, we're called abrasive.
This creates a catch-22 where you’re either too passive, e.g. “if you don’t ask, you don’t get”, or you’re a pitbull. The latter is far more widespread and damaging to the individual than you’d think. How many times have you unconsciously judged a female co-worker who was flippantly labelled “difficult”? All of this is exhausting, but your candour will help equip us for battle with real numbers to work with, as opposed to blindly cobbling together industry rates from Google.
If you’re prepared to go beyond this bare minimum and enforce tangible change, you can take cues from certifiably cool white lady, Jessica Chastain. In an adjacent dispute over pay discrepancies between herself and her black co-star Octavia Spencer on an upcoming comedy, Chastain managed to leverage fivefold Spencer’s original pay by contractually binding them both together, including her in all negotiations and enforcing transparency. She did all of this without fanfare: it only became news when Spencer tearfully recounted how much of a stone cold trailblazer Chastain is.
How does this translate to you, man-reading-this-while-biting-his-nails? For starters... fucking back us up. Actively bring us in on opportunities that you might not even notice we’re excluded from, shout when our work is good, start paying attention to not only your own but your co-workers biases and stop treating the subject of pay like it’s some cloak and dagger shit. Above all do all of this because you want to live in a fair society, not because you want a pat on the back.
Hope this helps, Anon. And good luck with the boat.
