The Gender Pay Trap

For many of us, salaries are negotiated. Here’s the first problem: our survey of over 5,000 UK workers found that women’s salary expectations are significantly lower than men’s.

On average, men ask for 20% more than women when they start a new job.

So you’ve negotiated and you’ve agreed upon a salary with your employer. But unbelievably, many companies in the UK are still paying women 15% less than their male counterparts for the same work.

And it doesn’t stop at salaries. There are gaps across pay rises and bonuses, too.

Although the same number of men and women received pay rises (43% of men and 44% of women), men received an extra £454 (or 32% more than women).

It’s even worse for bonuses. Not only are men more likely to receive a bonus than women (25% vs 19%), a man’s average bonus is likely to be £526 bigger than a woman’s.

The bonus gap has shrunk by £283 since 2019, as everyone’s bonuses have got smaller - maybe due to the pandemic. But men’s bonuses are still 40% larger than women’s.

Equal pay has been part of UK law for over 40 years and was written into the Equality Act 2010. So how come we haven’t made more progress?

It all comes back to negotiation. Unfortunately, pay rises can be a bit like salaries: don’t ask, don’t get.

Most of us don’t feel comfortable asking for a pay rise. And guess what? Women feel even more uncomfortable than men.

The results from our survey reveal that gender inequality is still very much at work. But just how fluent are we in the language of this complex issue?

4 in 10 of us have heard of the ‘gender pay gap’. But only 1 in 10 can define it.

Gender inequality isn’t just a problem for women, it’s a problem for their employers too. Feelings of being short-changed plus a company-wide lack of equality can be a double-dose of unhappiness for female employees. And unhappy employees don’t stick around.

For many of us, job (dis)satisfaction goes hand in hand with salary (dis)satisfaction. If you feel you’re being paid unfairly, you’re more than twice as likely to be unhappy at work.

An unequal workplace can be a very unhappy workplace. People who believe they work for an employer that doesn’t pay everyone fairly have even lower job satisfaction, with nearly 5 in 10 unhappy working there.

And failing to pay everyone equally could cost a company their employees. Even in the midst of a pandemic and widespread job insecurity, 1 in 2 women would quit their job if they discovered that colleagues of the opposite gender earned more for similar work.

And it’s not just women that feel this way – 29% of men agreed too.

This can often feel like it’s impossible to challenge from the inside. So a solution for workers is to move on. But the job hunt holds its own dangers...

It’s likely that many women quit because of the gender pay gap. They’re searching for equality. But it’s harder to find than you think.

Why? Because job ads themselves are loaded with hidden gender bias.

Gender stereotypes mean we subconsciously label certain words as ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’. You know, words like ‘aggressive’ and ‘nurturing’, for example. And when this happens in job ads, it can influence who applies for these roles.

A 2011 study by Duke University and University of Waterloo found that job ads for male-dominated industries had more ‘masculine’ wording than female-dominated industries (they didn’t find the same in reverse).

It’s a self-perpetuating mechanism that fuels gender inequality. When job ads contain more masculine words, people perceive more men within these occupations. And crucially, women find them less appealing. So fewer women apply, and these industries remain male-dominated.

It doesn’t stop at industry either. We found that job ads for senior roles were also more male-biased.

Could this be the glass ceiling? An invisible barrier that prevents women from progressing to the top, built from gender-biased language.

Consider this: among chief execs of Fortune 500 companies, it’s easier to find a man named James than it is to find a woman. It’s no wonder that women are put off applying for top roles.

The Duke University and University of Waterloo study found that a sense of belongingness impacted job appeal.

Representation – seeing people similar to yourself – is a crucial part of feeling like you belong. Especially when it comes to leadership positions. When the highest ranking roles have the most male-biased job ads, they’re less likely to appeal to women. So the representation gap continues.

We don’t have all the answers. But because much of this influence exists in the subconscious, it helps to make ourselves more aware of it. One way of doing this is calling out the hidden bias in our language.

So, you battle through the maze of gender-biased job ads to find the one for you. You apply...