It’s 2024, and women are still fighting for equality.
The Equal Pay Act may have come into effect in 1970, but we’re still a long way off achieving this goal.
According to the Women’s Budget Group a woman’s median weekly pay is £490.60, compared to men’s £665.60 – a gap of 26%.
When it comes to annual pay the earnings gap worsens, with women getting an annual salary of £24,683 compared to men’s £34,810 – a gap of 29%.
The situation is so bad, that each year, the Fawcett Society, the charity which campaigns for gender equality and women’s rights at work, sets the date of ‘Equal Pay Day’, which marks when women, on average, stop earning compared to men, due to the gender pay gap.
And now, a new study has revealed the jobs which have the largest difference between the amount men and women earn, on an hourly basis.
Jobs with the largest gender pay gaps
- Barristers and judges 29.1%
- Financial managers and directors 28.8%
- Web design professionals 27.7%
- Production, factory and assembly supervisors 26.0%
- Assemblers (vehicles and metal goods) 23.5%
- Vehicle technicians, mechanics and electricians 22.4%
- Education managers 22.0%
- Nursery education teaching professionals 21.2%
- Production managers and directors in construction 21.0%
- Newspaper and periodical journalists and reporters 20.6%
The largest gender pay gap was among barristers and judges, where women earnt more than a quarter (29.1%) less than their male equals. It was found that women were pad £8.31 less per hour.
Next, in second place, were financial managers and directors. If you’re a woman in this industry, you can expect to earn 28.8% less than your male colleagues.
And, the third largest pay gap went to web design professionals, where women are paid £6.32 less an hour than men, or 27.7%.
The statistics, compiled by Claims.co.uk using ONS data, shows that it isn’t just traditionally male-orientated roles that reveal significant gender pay gaps, but there are large gaps in ‘prestigious’ roles too.
As Dr Mary-Ann Stephenson, director of the Women’s Budget Group, previously told Metro.co.uk, the burden of unpaid work means women are losing out.
She said: ‘Women do 60% more unpaid work that men, and most of that is work associated with caring. So when you have kids, you’ve got more housework to do, you’ve got more laundry to do, you’ve got to cook a proper meal, and so on. That leaves less time for paid work, so women earn less.’
And despite the government offering 30 hours of free childcare for children over nine months, it’s still not enough.
Mary explains: ‘The government made an announcement of a huge additional spend on early education and childcare but unfortunately, the amount of money that they’ve put in to pay for that expansion of free hours isn’t enough to cover those hours.
‘You’ve got large numbers of childcare providers saying they can’t afford to offer the hours or they can’t take on enough staff to provide the hours.
‘Women understandably thought, “I’ll be able to get a free childcare place for my child” but then discovered those childcare places don’t exist.’
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