The gender pay gap
The red top reports a poll conducted by Grazia magazine that suggests possible improvement in the rates of pay for women when compared to men.
The Claim
The findings from Grazia show that 30 per cent of women who responded to their poll earned a higher salary than their partners, while a further 19 per cent earned the same amount of money.
The Sun reported the findings of the poll under the headline ‘Gender gap closing’.
Of course, the Grazia findings do not claim to be anything other than a straightforward survey, but do the findings chime in with official statistics?
Analysis
Despite not being able to get any further information from the weekly women’s glossy as to the make up of their poll sample, the findings were, broadly speaking not too far removed from other studies.
Research conducted for the National Equality Panel suggested that 19 per cent of women earn more than their partner (as opposed to Grazia’s 30 per cent), while a further 25 per cent earn similar amount to their other halves against the 19 per cent reported by Grazia.
This leaves 45 per cent of women earning more or the same as their partners on the NEP figures, compared to the 49 per cent found by Grazia.
By this measures there has been significant movement over the decades, as in 1960 only four per cent of women earned more than their partner, the NEP research found.
However this is not the usual way of measuring the gender pay gap, and indeed the issue is frought with debate over methodology.
The Office of National Statistics (ONS) also publishes figures on the gender pay gap based on its Annual Salaries and Hourly Earnings (ASHE) data.
However rather than looking at whether women earn more than their partners, median hourly pay, excluding overtime is deemed the best general guide to the gender pay gap.
“There are different propensities between men and women to longer working hours and also higher proportion of women who work part time relative to men,” a spokesman told us.
“That’s why we look at hourly pay.”
Approaching the issue from this perspective a narrowing of the gender gap can still be seen, but by a relatively small amount.
The gap between average earnings for men and women in full time working fell from well over 15 per cent in 1997 to 12.2 per cent in 2009.
The part time/full time distinction made by the ONS is crucial because it is not used by the European Union, whose figures put the gap between male and female hourly earnings in the UK at over 20 per cent -well down the league table of member states.
However, as the ONS explained because of the high proportion of part time workers in the UK, and the high proportion of these that are women, the EU figures do not give a balanced picture.
Muddying the waters further still, the use of the mean as opposed to the median shows divergent results.
Full Fact spoke to the TUC who told us that calculating the difference between mean hourly rates for men and women produces a skewed (and higher) gender pay gap, due to vast wages at the top end of the spectrum.
Indeed the gender bias is reflected in the fact that the figure is skewed by the reality that men are most likely to be the top earners.
Whichever way the cake is cut there is evidence to back up the Sun’s headline that the gender gap is closing, even if only by a small amount on some measures,
Research conducted by the London School of Economics looked at not only ASHE data used by ONS, but information from the Labour Force Survey. The work also considered mean and median pay, as well as a number of other yardsticks.
By each measure there was some movement from the mid nineties to the middle of the last decade.
Conclusion
Despite a story that compares no time comparison, and figures based on a survey conducted by a fashion magazine, the Sun’s presentation of Grazia’s findings as showing the gender gap closing are backed up by official figures.
Whether this is by luck or meticulous research is unclear.
Nevertheless if the gender pay gap has closed somewhat, (and there are some who would dispute the existence of the gap) even Grazia’s figures show a majority of women earn a lower salary than their partners, and the official figures paint a less rosy picture.
As a TUC spokesman told us: “The survey finding that around three in ten women earn more than their partners shows that while progress has been made over the last 40 years, we are still a long way off finally closing the gender pay gap. It would be interesting to know whether these breadwinner women are earning as much as men doing similar jobs to them.
“Girls have been outperforming boys in education for over a decade but this advantage has failed to fully translate into the workplace.”
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