Pick up any mainstream media today and you’ll likely find another article about the gender pay gap. Media interest has been stirred up again because we have now passed the deadline for gender pay gap reporting to the government by employers. Many firms’ gender pay gaps are being brought into embarrassingly sharp focus and whether they can be justified or not is largely irrelevant; if you’re out of kilter, it’s going to ensure egg on faces and corporate embarrassment at the very least.
Just this week, the UK headlines included the news that the BBC’s twelve most highly paid presenters were all men. This ranked as less of an important story than the football (which I choose not to interpret as a sexist fact, but I’ll take your counsel on that). It was widely reported nonetheless. The BBC is conceding that they have got it wrong and are protesting that they are doing everything possible to remedy it. Not a great piece of PR for the BBC, but it demonstrates that rectifying this particular injustice is a concern for them.
While pay disparities by gender are being endlessly wrangled about, another legally protected characteristic is virtually ignored. I am not taking about sexuality, ethnicity or religion all of which are also protected characteristics and benefit from staunch lobbying and widespread public support.
I’m talking about age. Age is also a legally protected characteristic. Yet ageism is the last of the ‘isms’ to remain socially acceptable. For some reason there is little equality amongst ‘isms’.
Yet I’d argue that age is the most important of all the legally protected characteristics. Age is the most important characteristic because unlike gender, ethnicity, sexuality or religion, it applies to 100% of people all of the time.
Age and experience generally confer more not less skill and competence. Research has consistently shown that older employees are more reliable, more conscientious, better communicators and even more creative than their younger counterparts. And contrary to common myth, they are also less absent. While I’ve not found data proving that boozy late nights tend to diminish with age and maturity, I do have a lot of empirical evidence pointing to this as fact.
So something is just wrong when age discrimination goes unchallenged. It’s illogical.
Ageism manifests particularly in the area of recruitment and hiring. Whilst it is illegal to specify age as a requirement, it’s so easy to fudge that it happens almost universally.
Ageism in the workplace involves equality of opportunity being denied to millions of people. And in the west, where we have generally ageing populations, many compelled by their financial circumstances to work into their 70s, this economic exclusion is punishing people of all genders, ethnicities, sexualities and religions. It is also making older people more of a burden on everyone else, because they contribute less to the economy and society than they would otherwise do.
So why is so little attention paid to this and why is neither the law nor public anger mitigating against this greatest of all injustices?
The age and pay differentials are starkly different when we compare public and private sectors. First, the public sector pays significantly higher than the private sector at all ages except for a small age cohort between 40 and 50. In the private sector, pay peaks at around 45 years of age and declines steadily thereafter. In the public sector, pay is almost flat from the age of about 32 right through until 60:
This aggregate data conceals the fact that older workers below the highest positions in the private sector are earning much less than the chart suggests. That’s because their age cohort also contains senior people in organisations at the very highest levels of pay. These people may not be numerous but their exceptionally high levels of reward obscure the modal experience, by making the average pay for their age group much higher than it would otherwise be.
Ageism also compounds the gender pay gap. Whilst the gender pay gap has been steadily falling in aggregate, older women are especially disadvantaged. Ageism is punishing women more than men.
Prof Malcolm Brynin found in the 2017 study for the Equality and Human Rights Commission that:
“The pay gap widens with age: older women experience a larger pay gap compared with their male peers than younger women with their male peers. This is primarily because women are more likely than men to take time out of the labour market to care for children. This may slow career development. The statistical analysis found that women's shorter job tenure, a likely consequence of starting a family, is a factor driving the pay gap.
While younger married women earn more than unmarried women, this advantage reverses with age. From their 40s onwards, married women experience a pay disadvantage compared to unmarried women. This is likely to be linked with childrearing: the analysis found that having a child increases the pay gap considerably for women. Married men, by contrast, earn substantially more than unmarried men in all age groups. The ‘wage penalty’ for child-rearing, as a proportion of women’s pay, has increased slightly over time. However, as with the gender pay gap generally, the pay gap between men and women with children has also declined over time.”
The prevailing mainstream media narratives are obscuring the real injustices around work and pay and are not fit for purpose in the 21st century. Ideas such as a patriarchy bent on the economic exploitation of women by men might have been credible 30 or 40 years ago. But today they are past their sell by date. If we look at the data instead of the news headlines, this fact is in plain sight.
Applying the patriarchy conspiracy theory narrative to gender alone creates an illusion of social justice. The real injustices are not defined purely by gender. They are rather the unchecked growth in income inequality across all genders. The persistence of a mythology about youth trumping age and experience. The debt burdens placed on the young to secure university educations that deliver worthwhile careers to ever fewer of their number. And the unwillingness of corporations to invest in people at all stages of their working lives.
None of these structural failures of fairness in the world of work have anything to do with gender. They punish everyone more or less equally regardless of gender, ethnicity, religion or sexuality.
If you want to make a difference and lessen the injustices in the world, don’t default to the #MeToo bandwagon. There is a much bigger and more damaging discrimination going unchallenged. It’s ageism and it unites everyone, because everyone is or will be a victim sooner or later.
No comments:
Post a Comment