No Pay Day

Women earn an average of 17% less than men – for women on the average wage this means being £4,000 a year less than a man. It’s the equivalent of women only being paid until October 30th while men are paid until the end of the year.

Women graduates are also affected by unequal pay. Within five years of leaving university women graduates earn 15% less than male graduates. With student debt predicted to rise to between £20,000 and £30,000 following the introduction of top-up fees, this will mean women take an average of 19.5 years to repay their student debt, compared to just 15 years for male graduates.

This week we held a ‘No Pay Day’ campaign, as part of a national initiative organised by the Fawcett Society. We held a stall outside the University’s careers fair where we handed out leaflets educating women students about unequal pay, and encouraging them to ask employers at the careers fair what steps they were taking to address pay discrimination in their companies.

Women’s committee also spoke to a number of employers asking them what steps they had taken to ensure equal pay. Unfortunately the most common response was ‘I don’t know…I’m sure we’re doing something though...’ but still better than one employer who suggested that as his company didn’t employ many women graduates there was no need to address the issue of unequal pay!

With attitudes like that it’s no wonder that progress on closing the pay gap has stalled – meaning that stronger government action is needed to ensure that this discrimination against women is challenged. The pay gap isn’t inevitable – many European countries have made far more rapid progress than Britain in reducing the pay gap, so now is the time to lobby the government to take meaningful action to end unequal pay.
Fawcett have created an online petition to the Prime Minister calling for stronger action to be taken to end the pay gap. Please take two minutes to sign the petition at http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/paygap/ and email it around to your friends to sign.