Date published: 2008/02/09
The BBC says:
The government must "take more seriously" efforts to eliminate the UK's gender pay gap, a Select Committee report has said.
The Women and Work Commission was set up in 2004 to tackle the pay gap which stood at 18% among full-time workers and 40% for those working part-time.
However the MPs said that though the commission put forward proposals, not enough had been done to implement them.
Occupational segregation is largely to blame for the pay gap, the report says.
Most women work in a relatively limited number of occupations with lower pay, or in part-time jobs, it points out.
...
Among the key reasons for the gender pay gap was the lack of quality part-time jobs, the committee said, which calling for more spending to tackle the problem.
...
Recommendations of the report include:
- ...
- The government considering making audits of firm's pay by gender - currently done only in the public sector - also mandatory at private firms if the pay gap fails to decline more quickly.
The Fawcett Society, which campaigns for equality between women and men in the UK, said the report added to pressure on the government to adopt more radical approaches to achieving equal pay.
A typically useless report from the House of Commons. The fact that they believe that "more spending" (i.e. more government spending) is going to create "quality" part-time jobs just tells you how little they understand about the world. And they claim that "occupational segregation is largely to blame for the pay gap" but they want to force private companies to make audits of firm's pay by gender "if the pay gap fails to decline more quickly". So evidently private companies are supposed to magically sort out "occupational segregation" (hey, refuse to hire any women unless they are engineers, because obviously if they are secretaries they are betraying their gender). Needless to say, the House of Commons itself is one of the most gender biased organisations in the country. Let them sort out their own blatant "occupational segregation" before they lecture the rest of the country about the matter.
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