Can We Fix The Gender Pay Gap?

In the UK, women are paid around 10 per cent less than men, on average. One solution might be total pay transparency. Can it fix the problem and are we ready to talk about how much we earn?

- Moya Sarner

There is a revolution stirring. It’s taking shape in offices, around dinner tables and in newspaper headlines around the UK: people are talking about how much they earn. Keeping a polite silence around money is such a long-standing cliché of what it means to be British that for some, simply having these conversations cuts to the core of how we think of ourselves and our society.

On 5 March this year, almost 250 staff of the BBC – British by name, but no longer it seems by nature, in this respect at least – signed an open letter to the director general Tony Hall, demanding “full pay transparency”. This followed a review of the broadcaster’s pay last summer which found that only one-third of the 96 best-paid employees were women, none of whom were in the top seven. Then in April, large firms and public bodies were required to publish figures comparing men and women’s average pay, revealing that 78 per cent of them pay men more.

The BBC staff who signed the letter demanding pay transparency argue that it constitutes the “fastest, cheapest and fairest way to begin to tackle unequal pay,” and that it is the most effective way to uncover pay discrimination due to race, gender, age or class. The CEOs of those companies that have adopted the policy – so far low in number but high in enthusiasm – believe it is an improvement on the way we have always done things. But what is the evidence? Given we have laboured (quite literally) under pay secrecy for so long, what would such a dramatic shift do to our minds?