So the gender pay gap is the key indicator that we have for assessing women's equality
in the labour market and that's when we compare women's average hourly earnings with men's
average hourly earnings, and in Scotland the pay gap just now is 15% which means that for
every pound that a man earns on average per hour, a woman earns just 85 pence and if we
compare full time average hourly earnings with, between men and women, that reduces
slightly to 12% but when we compare women's part time hourly earnings on average with
men's average full time hourly earnings, the gap leaps to 34% which itself is illustrative
of the concentration of part time work in low paid jobs and sectors.
The pay gap is about more than just pay discrimination though and is caused by a multitude of different
factors. Women have a very different experience of the labour market to men. Gender norms
and stereotyping about women and men's capabilities and preferences results in women being concentrated
into low paid, undervalued jobs in sectors and men being concentrated into traditionally
male dominated sectors and jobs. So women are more likely to be found in caring work,
cooking, cleaning, admin and retail and these types of jobs are obviously also largely part
time and men are more likely to be found in technical and manual occupations; engineering,
construction, science. Women still do the majority of unpaid caring in the home and
coupled with lack of flexible working in many workplaces results in them having to seek
opportunities and jobs in the only part time work that is available and it tends to be in the female dominated
sectors that are the low paid and undervalued in terms of their skills.
That lack of flexible working and un-transparent and biased recruitment and progression practices
also contributes to women's under representation in senior levels which is more commonly known
at the glass ceiling. There is widespread discrimination in pay
systems across the labour market, and although this is usually not intentional and instead
it's based on the design of the pay and grading systems, whereby there are particular valued
judgements based on gendered assumptions, about how we reward particular jobs and particular
skills and who it is that does those jobs, men or women.
So, occupational segregation where men and women do different types of work is a common
pattern across every sector in the labour market. Men are concentrated, these are some
of the more starkly segregated industries with men dominating in energy, manufacturing,
construction, whereas women are more likely to be found in the public sector where they
make up two thirds of workers. Generally the pay gap overall is lower in the public sector
than it is in the private sector. There is overall better equalities practiced. You're
more likely to be able to work flexibly and your employer is more likely to have undertaken
an equal pay review. But women's employment is still concentrated
in a relatively small number of occupations. So again, the admin, the caring, retail jobs,
whereas men are very concentrated in trades, process, plant and machine operatives.
Where does all of this come from though? As opposed to it being innate gendered differences,
we know that children are significantly influenced by a range of different factors: by the people
around them, their peers, nursery teachers, teachers in school, their families and by
the media and by the opportunities that are available to them. So one example, there's
an advert for a dressing up box which includes a very exciting array of costumes for boys.
We've got a pirate, a firefighter, a knight, we'll not mention the red Indian I don't think.
For girls, not so much opportunity there. If you can tell the difference, there's a
bride, there's a, which is obviously very aspirational.
[Laughter] A bride, a princess, a model, a movie star,
and my own favourite is the belle of the ball which who wouldn't want to be that.
A flippant example but the message is quite clear that the marketing of goods and toys
to children and young people is insidious and creates very entrenched gender stereotyping
and norms. And with the result of that, is that when
children go to school and young people have to make choices around subjects and careers
that is when that gender segregation begins and we see girls and young women choosing
subjects such as biology, art and design, languages, care, going on to do teaching, whereas men
are more likely to be in, studying physics, maths, computing, construction and engineering.
These gender segregated subjects have different labour market outcomes. They result in women
receiving less pay overall and men receiving more pay overall.
So occupational segregation is a cradle to the labour market problem, and when we think
about the skills pipeline in relation to stems of science, technology, engineering and maths,
it's often characterised as being leaky with women detaching at various points along the
pipeline which contributes to the dearth of women in these occupations, and a particularly
astounding attrition rate, so 73% of women in Scotland with stem qualifications don't
work in stem related jobs. Women's employment in general is becoming
more precarious. It's been widely reported that the female employment rate is the highest
it's ever been post recession but women are still concentrated in low paid jobs and sectors.
They're still more likely to be in insecure and temporary work. There's more women than
men on zero hour contracts and the number of, the number of women reporting to be under-employed
has doubled. So twice as many women are working part time but report that they want to be
working full time hours. Public sector spending cuts impact disproportionately
on women because they make up the majority of public sector employees and we see that
manifesting in forced reduction in hours, pay and recruitment freezes, redundancies, refusals
of flexible working requests. Two thirds of workers earning below the living
wage are women and 40% of those women work part time. Women have less income, less access
to resources, assets and financial independence than men. They have less savings and if we
consider pensions for example, women are less likely to be in work which means they are
less likely to be contributing to a pension and of those who are in work, many are in
low paid work which means they are less able to contribute to pensions. They're also more
likely to have breaks in service, which again affects your income in retirement, and what
that means for female pensioners, it means they're more likely to be living in poverty
and they, on average, have lower occupational pension payments and lower state pension payments.
The gender impact of so called welfare reform is well rehearsed. Researched by the House
of Commons Library has found that 85% of the £26 billion worth of cuts have come from
women's incomes. That's because women are twice as reliant on social security than men
because of their propensity to be in low work, but also because they're more likely to be
carers. But when we talk about work, the focus of
a discussion is always very much on the paid labour market, but let's take a moment to
think what is actually work from all the different tasks that everyone does during the day. So,
for example, caring for patients in a hospital, that's very obviously work, right, but caring
for a family member or someone that's sick at home, is that not work, is that something
else? Similarly, if you are a private sector board
member and you're writing a letter as part of your role, that's work, but if you're on
the board of a third sector organisation and you're writing a letter in that role, is that
not work? These are very similar types of work. The system of national accounts, which determines
the measurements that we use for calculating economic output suggests that when you're
doing childcare, when you're tidying your house, when you're cleaning the bathroom,
when you're emptying the dishwasher that that's not work, that's leisure, which is not the
sort of leisure that I would certainly want to be having. Main stream economic model
that is dominant, is the neoclassical approach and that approach is based on the assumption
that individuals make choices that are free from the constraints of social, cultural,
and environmental influences. So in other words, women, when they choose to participate
in the labour market, that is free from the constraints or the structural influences such
as the disproportionate share of unpaid caring, such as a lack of flexible working. That they
are choosing to participate in the labour market on an equal basis but we know that's
not the case because the labour market doesn't take account of disproportionate share of
unpaid caring, of a lack of flexible working, of discrimination in workplaces.
So the unpaid work that goes on in the home in the community, this isn't' counted, it
isn't valued and it isn't counted, and it isn't accounted for in GDP. So the ONS household
satellite accounts, experimentally measures different types of domestic and reproductive
labour and gives a value to it and in 2010 they looked at childcare and they determined
that informal childcare is worth £343 billion to the economy, equivalent to 23% of GDP,
and the OACD said that one third to a half of all valuable economic activity is not counted
for in traditional measures of economic performance, in other words GDP, and it's that hidden work
that enables the wider economy to function. So economists will say that there's no value
to unpaid work but there may be no cost attached to women doing it in their own homes, but
if they stop doing that work, the cost to replace those services is enormous.
So what the point of that is that the impact of women's unpaid work such as their disproportionate
share of unpaid caring, impacts significantly on women's ability to participate and progress
in the labour market on an equal basis with men. When we take into account domestic labour,
childcare, care for adults, the emotional labour, all of these are done mainly by women
whereas men, most of their time is taken up with the formal labour market, but we don't
value the different types of labour that women do.
Why does all of this matter? It matters because what is women's work isn't valued, and it
isn't counted. Occupational segregation restricts women's and men's choices and girl's and boy's,
because it means that not everyone is doing what they want to do. The gender pay gap most
obviously is an impact to women's incomes which contributes to women's higher levels
of poverty and therefore child poverty. We know that when women's income is reduced that
spending on children goes down, and lower incomes for women also affects local economies
because women are more likely to be spending in their local areas. Female pensioner poverty,
higher levels there. But it's not just women and their families
that are affected. Employers are missing out on women's skills and talents, because
so many women are in the wrong jobs for their skill level and that's a great waste.
Going back to traditional measures of economic output, occupational segregation is a market
failure. It contributes to this under utilisation of women's skills, contributes to skills shortages.
The sectors which have the highest skills shortages, it's no coincidence that those
are the ones that are most acutely segregated, so looking at stem industries for example.
But occupational segregation is a labour market failure. It's what economists call allocative
inefficiency because the market is failing to allocate workers to the correct jobs and
training places based on their skill level and the effects of that is high. The drag
on economic growth is worth more than £17 billion to Scotland's economy, equivalent
of 12% of GPD. So reducing occupational segregation, closing
the pay gap and advancing women's equality is good, not just for individual women and
their families, but it's good for employers and it's good for the wider Scottish economy.
Thank you. [Applause]