Quote:
Originally Posted by downquark1
OK so this is a true story. A few years ago Theresa May ordered companies to publish their wages gaps. So the HR departments in universities went to work to calculate their wage gaps. To their horror they found a large wage gap.
So it seems that the highest paid positions (Professors) skew male and the lowest paid positions (cleaners) skew female. How could this be? Could they be relentless bigots? Could the labour markets be skewed, it matters not, the wage gap does not care when the results are published. How to fix this? You can't sack the professors, that would be illegal and leave you with no university. You can't pull a load of female professors from no where. So what to do?
Well what some Universities did was remove the cleaners from the payroll and hire an external company to do the cleaning.
So by one form of analysis they shrank the wage gap which they can now brag about at cocktail parties and feminist award ceremonies.
By another form of analysis all they did was sack some working class women and call it a victory for equality.
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I call "shenanigans"...
The Universities that have outsourced cleaning also usually outsource the maintenance, porters, and security work (all low paid, but most maintenance, porters, and security staff are mostly male, so balances out the cleaning staff) - also, most Universities' Gender Pay Gap & Equal Pay Report is also by pay grade and staff category, not just the overall gap; for instance, see
Strathclyde's report
Quote:
Our overall pay analysis by gender indicates that the University has a marginal gender pay gap within grades. Only Grades 4 and 5 have a difference in pay between the average male salary and the average female salary which is above 1% (in these cases, the pay gap is 1.5% and 2.3% in favour of females). Since our last Equal Pay Audit, the equal pay gap at Professor/Director level has reduced from 4.8% in favour of males to 0.5% in favour of males. This reduction is primarily a consequence of the introduction of a zoning system for our professorial staff during 2016/17.
Despite there being equal pay within grades, there is still an overall gender pay gap as a result of occupational segregation; within the University there are significantly higher proportions of females than males at junior levels, in particular in Grades 1, 4 and 5, and, conversely, higher proportions of males than females at the more senior Grades 9, 10 and at Professor and Director level. Between 2017 and 2019 there has been a reduction of more than three percentage points in the overall gender pay gap (the percentage difference between men’s average hourly pay (excluding overtime) and women’s average hourly pay (excluding overtime), irrespective of Grade) and the University remains commited to taking appropriate action to further reduce this gap.
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btw, I worked at 3 different Universities over a 10 year period (at a senior level) and never saw, or attended, a cocktail party - bit of inverse grading snobbery occurring in that jibe, methinks...
