Jack and Jill could go up the hill and bring back one hundred apples between them. But Accounts Payable sends a nice £10 to Jack for his troubles, and a less-than-impressive £7 to Jill for the same amount of work. Those pesky XX chromosomes again!

Gender pay inequality is the biggest elephant in the office; we already know that we earn less than men, and we don’t like to say it out loud.

But did you know that, thanks to the fact that we are women, as of November 14th 2019 we’ll be effectively working the rest of the year for FREE?!

Luckily, we aren’t the only ones feeling more than a bit snubbed at the prospect of earning less than men for the same amount of work: tomorrow is Equal Pay Day 2019!

The Gender Pay Gap Percentage

Yes, it’s 2019, and we’re still an appalling 13.1% behind men when you calculate our salaries in the mean. Why is that?

Well, we could sit here and blame any number of factors:

Women take more time off!

Women go on maternity leave!

Women could earn as much as men, but they don’t ever stand their ground when they tell employers what kind of pay they expect! They back down too easily; not like men, who properly represent their worth!

But no matter what kind of excuse we come up with to explain away this outrageous excuse for “equality”, the biggest fact remains that…

You can’t equal anyone’s salary when you don’t know what anyone else is earning!

Pay Secrecy

Keeping individual salaries secret both protects the employee but also spoon-feeds gender inequality its strongest weapon. After all, you can’t argue your rights to earn as much as Jack when you’ve got no idea how much Jack earns.

Pay transparency is a bit of a dirty word over here in little England. While other countries and cultures may be more open and honest when talking to colleagues about their terms of contract, politics, religion and money are still the big three social taboos over here!

Nowhere else is this taboo felt as strongly as in the workplace. We have a culture of shame and silence surrounding our salaries. This money mystery keeps pay inequality out of plain sight.

At Maze, we say END IT!

How To End The Gender Pay Gap?

Eradicating salary secrecy would be both the easiest and most effective method of closing the gender pay gap for good.

No more ‘so, are you happy with your salary?’ whispers in office corridors, no more furtive side-glances when new contracts get passed out, no more ‘well, I don’t really know what Jill gets paid but she did get a raise last week..’

Let’s help to end pay inequality by ending pay secrecy. Contact Maze Training today for ideas and advice on how to avoid such bias in your workplace.