We will never have equal pay until we start valuing women’s work
It’s 50 years since the 1970 Equal Pay Act, but we still have not solved the gender pay gap. And we never will until we address the real issue — the devaluing of women’s work.
Those who argue the gender pay gap doesn’t exist often base their claim on the 1970 Equal Pay Act, which made gender discrimination unlawful. Those people conveniently forget that even in 1970, activists from the Women’s Liberation Movement to the Dagenham Ford Machinists were hugely dissatisfied with the Act.
So no, the 1970 Equal Pay Act did not remedy the issue. What it did was allow employers six years to make “adjustments”. In many cases this involved recategorising women’s work so they could keep paying them lower wages.
Let’s take Ford Dagenham as an example. Before 1970, women were on band D, which was women’s work. The Act made separate pay categories for women unlawful. So the women were placed in band C, which was unskilled. But from the beginning of the dispute, the women’s key argument was that their work was skilled. After all, they were required to pass a technical sewing test before they were employed. They also argued that during slow times they helped the men in their sections; the men were never sent to help the women out. They did not have the skills to do so.
It was primarily the devaluing of sewing as a trade that the women objected to. The 1970 Act did nothing to address that. So they kept on fighting. After 16 years of getting nowhere in round the table discussions, they went out on strike again. In 1986, the management finally relented, and the women got their jobs reclassified as band B, skilled.
It was a victory for the Dagenham women, but elsewhere the same discrimination continued. Even today, women struggle with this issue. There are currently a number of legal cases by women workers in supermarkets. They argue that their pay bands are lower than the men’s. So the cashiers, who are predominantly women, are paid less than the warehouse workers, who are predominantly men. Yes, I know, they are very different jobs. Yes, I know the warehouse workers operate in tough conditions, battling with the elements and heavy lifting. But the cashiers have to deal with customers all day; they must have sharpened communications skills to deal with complaints and verbal hostility. But so called soft skills like communications, which women traditionally excel at, are never valued as much as skills like strength and endurance, which men are known for.
That whole term, soft skills, is laced with prejudice. If you Google soft skills, you will get: creative thinking; emotional intelligence; communications and social skills. These are skills all needed in jobs like care work, teaching, work with children and the arts — sectors dominated by women, all at the lower end of the pay spectrum. But who decided that emotional intelligence was a soft skill? Understanding how people think and feel so that you can work and live together in a harmonious society seems to be a pretty essential skill to me. We have a man running the US who clearly has no emotional intelligence and is killing vast numbers of people as a result. Meanwhile, women like Ethel Froud, who was the first secretary general of the National Union of Women Teachers, is said to have been so successful because she could create harmony and a sense of unified purpose. In other words, she possessed a vital range of emotional and social skills.
The other issue we need to address before we can sort the issue of equal pay is childcare. The ONS say that one reason for the gender pay gap is that more women work part time. But why do they do that? Inadequacy in childcare provision, and continuing resistance by men to share the family burdens, cements the gender pay gap. Until we find equality in the home, we will never find equality in the workplace.
Pay parity will only be properly addressed when we solve the root problems, many of which have deep historical roots. They were born in an age where women were not wanted in the work place at all. They were firmly encouraged, or even shamed into staying in the home. It was only during the era of post war reconstruction that an acceptance emerged; perhaps the workforce and the economy needed women after all. So they were allowed in, but with strict boundaries on the work they did and what they were paid. And despite the recent progress of women into managerial roles and FTSE 100 companies, many of these attitudes linger on.
There is no quick fix to any of these solutions, but we must keep debating them. We must also learn about the history to understand where they come from. Division in employment roles is not a result of natural gender divides, but something that has been forced on women and used to keep her down.
A new five part mini series about the battle for equal pay begins on Friday 21st August on the Rebel Women podcast. Subscribe where ever you get your podcasts.
