Peter Christie, head of reward at global management consultancy Hay Group, calls for concerted efforts to address continuing gender pay inequalities.
The Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC) made front-page headlines recently when the organisation published a damning report warning that women are 'generations away' from pay equality.The report’s findings highlight the need for a fundamental shift in attitudes towards pay and gender in the workplace...
Despite 35 years of equal pay legislation, reward equality has been a painfully slow process, as organisations have viewed the issue primarily in terms of a low-scale legal risk.
Yet if pay equality is to be achieved, businesses must take an altogether different view of the issue, taking into account the business implications as well as their social and corporate responsibilities.
Organisations must face up to their responsibility to pay staff on equal terms for performing roles of equal value. Failing to do so is indefensible from a corporate socially responsible perspective.
Also, aside from the moral rights and wrongs, businesses will systematically fail to get the best from the talent among their staff if they elect to continually de-motivate half of the workforce by underpaying them.
Managers, therefore, need to prioritise equal pay as an issue that has to be addressed as a business as well as an ethical imperative. Strong, principled leadership is required if organisations are to correct the imbalance. Organisations should look to implement the following steps when addressing pay equality:
• Resources must be invested in ensuring that pay is equal at all levels and in all functions - not only for identical jobs, but also for different roles of similar size, scale and skills levels.
• Processes should be implemented not only to overcome pay gaps, but to prevent disparities from re-emerging in the future. For instance, promotion and career development opportunities need to be redesigned to overcome underlying discrimination.
• Attitudes and behaviours must change to ensure that equal pay is managed as a business and a corporate social responsibility matter.
Without concentrated efforts to ensure this is achieved, we may still be bemoaning gender pay disparities 35 years from now.
