Page | 1
Older women, the labour market, and
the gender pay gap
Submission to the Women and Equalities Committee
Enquiry into the Gender Pay gap and Older Women
From
Sheila Wild
Sheila Wild
http://www.equalpayportal.co.uk/
Older women, the labour market, and the gender pay gap
Executive Summary
Introduction
Page | 2
Mapping the legislative advances towards equality over the past fifty years against age
cohorts [see Annex A] shows that:

Legislative moves to equalise opportunities for women have been late in arriving,
and slow to mature. Rather than seeking from the outset to rebalance opportunities
between men and women, Britain has tended to rely upon an expansion of the parttime labour market, an expansion which has had the effect of restricting the choices
available to working women, thereby reinforcing gender inequality.

Throughout most of the past fifty years, women and men have entered the labour
market on different terms. This has not been a free choice (for either women or
men), but a response to how the labour market has been structured.

A woman has to be over 40 to have benefitted from even the most basic advances
towards equality.

Only women in their 20s will have benefitted from all the advances in equalities
legislation and employment protection. These women have the potential to occupy
the labour market on equal terms to men, but only if a more equal sharing of family
responsibilities becomes a reality and not an aspiration.
The implications:

The explanation that the gender pay gap experienced by women over 40 is due to
“the choices women make” once they have children is overly simplistic. Given both
the length of time it has taken Britain to introduce a comprehensive system of
support for workers with family responsibilities, and the British economy’s heavy
reliance on low-paid, low skilled part-time work, women have had little option but to
be the primary carers.

In addition to varying between age cohorts, women’s experiences will also vary in
respect of factors such as the level of intra-familial support for their careers and the
infrastructure of the local economy.

There is nothing in the measurement of the gender pay gap that will encourage
employers to narrow the gender pay gap for older women. This could happen only if
the metric being introduced were sophisticated enough to capture the intersection
Sheila Wild
http://www.equalpayportal.co.uk/
of age with gender and with hours and patterns of work (and, indeed, ethnicity –
different age groups manifest different working and earning patterns according to
their ethnic group), and employers were required to analyse the data and act upon
the findings.
Page | 3
The challenges:

To redress the structural inequities experienced by women in the 45+ cohorts

To ensure that women in the younger age cohorts do not suffer from similar
structural inequities, i.e. that the ‘equal sharing’ model becomes a reality
The potential solutions:

Introduce a national strategy to upskill, and thereby improve the pay, of older
workers, and in particular, those working part-time. This would entail working with
employers in those industries where older women are clustered, such as the public
sector and the caring and leisure industries. The strategy should include support
for older women and men to stay in work while providing care for others.

Introduce a consolidating Act of Parliament that brings all of the labour market
provisions relating to workers with family responsibilities into one place. The aims
of this legislation should be to:
o Foster an equal sharing of family responsibilities between men and women
of all ages
o Make it easy for employers to accommodate agile working trajectories
which match the needs of the workers and of the business

Ensure that pay and reward systems are equitable as between women and men of
all ages, and are transparent. This would entail:
o Making it the norm for equal pay audits that include an analysis of rates of
pay by age as well as by gender to be carried out on a regular basis, say,
every three years, and to ensure that any actions arising out of these are
embedded in the organisations’ overall pay and reward strategy.
o Sharing information about the gender pay gap in all its dimensions, with
employees.
o Consulting with employees and putting in place an action plan to tackle the
gender pay gap at workplace level.
Sheila Wild
http://www.equalpayportal.co.uk/
Older women, the labour market, and the gender pay gap
Introduction
1. Annex A to this submission (Legislative standards impacting on the treatment of
women and men in the labour market) charts the legislative framework governing Page | 4
women’s labour market participation; it shows that throughout most of the past fifty
years women have entered the labour market on different terms to men. This has
been most evident in the channelling of women into part-time work, an option
which continues to be presented not as a labour market construct, but as ‘a choice
women make’.
2. This differential treatment will have led to different outcomes for older women, not
only as compared to men, but also as compared to younger women. If we want to
redress the enduring nature of the disadvantages experienced by older women, then
we need to target them directly.
The legislative advances
3. The legislative advances have been not only in employment, but, most importantly,
in education. Without girls having access to the same educational opportunities as
boys, there can be no equality in employment and pay. However, the present cohort
of 55 year old women will have been 15 by the time the Sex Discrimination Act 1975
made discrimination in education unlawful, and will not therefore have had the
same educational opportunities as men of the same age, or as younger women.
4. Also relevant is the age at which a woman has her first child. A woman born in 1975
who did not have a child until she was 40 will have had access to a year’s maternity
leave, to childcare, to employment protection when working part-time, and a right
to request flexible working. In addition, her partner will have been able to take a
short period of paternity leave. In contrast, a woman born in the same year, but
who had her first child at the age of 20 will have had access to none of these
provisions. Did the woman who, back in 1995, became a mother at age 20 really
choose to work part-time, or was this the only option available to her at the time?
5. The decades after the implementation of the anti-discrimination legislation saw a
massive expansion in the part-time labour force, and by the mid-1980s part-time
employment accounted for 22 per cent of total employment and 45 per cent of
women’s employment. And where women were employed in part-time work, they
tended to remain in it, in contrast to men, for whom part-time work was a transient
phase either at the beginning or end of their working lives. One commentator has
remarked that the development of a large part-time sector was “part of a
deregulation strategy with costs advantages to employers, lack of employment
Sheila Wild
http://www.equalpayportal.co.uk/
protection, uneven patterns of demand and tasks that require limited qualifications
and limited hours to complete. Thus, part-time employment in Britain has acted as
the main channel for women’s integration into the labour market, but it has also
contributed to producing or reinforcing gender inequalities.” [Solera, 2009]
6. Part-time work was inherently disadvantageous, for it was not until the mid-1990s Page | 5
that part-time workers became eligible for the same employment protection rights
as full-timers, and then only after legal action taken by the Equal Opportunities
Commission. That such employment protection included the right to return to work
after a period of maternity leave severely constrained the choices open to those
women who are now in their 50s and 60s.
7. Also slow to come on stream were measures enabling parents to share the day-today responsibility for their children, a transformation in the balance of parental
responsibilities that is essential if women are enter the labour market on equal
terms to men. Included in this is the fact that the UK did not introduce a national
childcare strategy until 1998, meaning that only women who became mothers after
that date will have had access to the good quality affordable childcare necessary to
enable them to remain in the labour market and maintain their human capital.
8. It is also important to recognise that during the period in question, there have been
regressions as well as advances, with measures aimed at enabling women’s labour
market participation occasionally becoming a political football. In the 1970s and
early 1980s, for example, successive administrations increased or decreased the
period of time a woman had to work before she became eligible for maternity leave.
This was not only disadvantageous in itself, but it gave a clear message that a
woman’s labour market participation was subject to the permission of others. A
similar message was given when in the mid-1980s employer provided childcare was
deemed to be a taxable benefit. This added an estimated £1000 a year to a working
woman’s tax bill, and made the opportunity cost of remaining in employment higher
for mothers than for fathers.
The societal and demographic changes
9. The labour market behaviour of women in the 40+ age cohorts will also have been
influenced by the demographic make-up of their immediate family and the level of
intra-familial support for their careers.
10. In 1975, when the Sex Discrimination and Equal Pay Acts were introduced, and the
current cohorts of 55 and 60 year olds were in secondary, or tertiary, education,
society expected men to be the breadwinners and women to look after the family.
Both the benefits system and the workplace were structured around such
expectations, and the stereotypes proved hard to shift. As late as the 1980s, for
Sheila Wild
http://www.equalpayportal.co.uk/
example, a major high street bank settled an equal pay claim only when presented
with the minutes of a meeting showing that, in recognition of their breadwinner
role, the company had previously given a pay rise to the men with whom the women
were claiming equal pay.
11. The majority of women in the 45+ cohorts will have been subject to these Page | 6
stereotypes, and many will have had to battle for a place in the labour market, not
only at work, but in the home. Some girls will still be subject to such intra-familial
stereotyping, and it is still the case that when their first child is born, men and
women tend to grow more traditional in their gender attitudes towards parenthood.
The reason for this may lie in the way in which, in organising work, we perpetuate
structural barriers to involved fatherhood. Whether you are male or female, you
have to be very confident and persistent to achieve an equal sharing of parental
responsibilities, and it is likely that older women, having grown up in a world where
the stereotyping was the reality, may have been less able to achieve this.
12. A key demographic change since the 1970s is the ageing of the UK’s population. This,
coupled with an available pool of women already working part-time has resulted in
many older working women carrying a ‘double burden’ of working while caring for
parents and/or grandchildren, a balancing act which can substantially limit the type
and hours of work they can undertake. 58 per cent of carers are female and 42 per
cent male. It’s also important to recognise that caring affects men and women at
different times in their lives. Women are much more likely to care in middle age,
with 1 in 4 women aged 50-64 having caring responsibilities, compared to 1 in 6
men.
13. Finally, but most importantly, for some women, particularly those living in rural
areas, the infrastructure of the local economy can be a key determinant of labour
market behaviour: not the birth of a child, or the need to care for an older relative
per se, that results in a reduction in hours worked, but the limitations imposed by
inadequate public transport, and/or an absence of childcare or eldercare.
The implications
14. The legislative framework has been slow to mature. The implication of this is that
only women now in their twenties will have benefitted from the full range of
opportunities and protections provided by equality and employment protection
legislation. To say, as too many commentators do, that the gender pay gap for
women over 40 is due to the fact of motherhood, is to do these cohorts of women a
gross disservice. They had no option but to enter the labour market on terms very
different to those enjoyed by their male contemporaries, and they are still feeling
the effects of this.
Sheila Wild
http://www.equalpayportal.co.uk/
15. It also misunderstands what the measure known as the gender pay gap actually
represents. The gap is not a measure of whether women’s earnings equal those of
men; it is a measure of labour market disadvantage, and it is therefore not surprising
that the gap is wider for older women who have experienced a much longer period
of disadvantage than have younger women.
Page | 7
16. It follows from this that there is nothing in the current proposals on measuring the
gender pay gap that will result in employers being able to narrow the gender pay gap
for older women. This could happen only if the metric being introduced were
sophisticated enough to capture the intersection of age with gender and with hours
and patterns of work (and, indeed, ethnicity, for different age groups manifest
different working and earning patterns according to their ethnic group), and
employers were required both to analyse the data, and to take remedial action.
17. Even this might not be enough, for there is evidence to show that the earnings and
working patterns of older people vary by gender, but we do not know how these
variations are going to play out in the future. Older women workers, especially those
over 55, behave in a particular way because their options have been limited, but it is
reasonable to expect that as younger women age, they will behave differently
because they have had more options available to them.
The challenges
18. The challenges are thus:

To redress the structural inequities experienced by women in the 45+ cohorts

To ensure that women in the younger age cohorts do not suffer from similar
structural inequities i.e. that the ‘equal sharing’ model becomes a reality
19. What is needed is to recognise the different labour market experiences of different
cohorts of women and to target remedial action at the most disadvantaged groups:
those over 55; those working part-time; those caring for elderly relatives; those
living in rural communities and those still coming up against outmoded stereotypes
about a woman’s role.
The potential solutions:

Introduce a national strategy to upskill, and thereby improve the pay, of older
workers, and in particular, those working part-time. This would entail working with
employers in those industries where older women are clustered, such as the public
sector and the caring and leisure industries, to encourage them to provide full access
to training opportunities to older women, and where appropriate, changes to job
Sheila Wild
http://www.equalpayportal.co.uk/
design and working hours to accommodate caring responsibilities. The strategy
should include support for older women and men to stay in work while providing
care for others, and awareness raising amongst employers of the barriers facing
older women, and of the need to tackle these in the light of the raising of the state
pension age – older women are in future going to be far less likely to exit the labour Page | 8
market in their late fifties and early sixties, and more likely to want to seek
opportunities for quality employment.

Introduce a consolidating Act of Parliament that brings all of the labour market
provisions relating to workers with family responsibilities into one place. The aims
of this legislation should be to:
o Foster an equal sharing of family responsibilities between men and women of
all ages
o Make it easy for employers to accommodate agile working trajectories which
match the needs of the workers and of the business

Ensure that pay and reward systems are equitable as between women and men of
all ages, and are transparent. This would entail:
o Making it the norm for equal pay audits that include an analysis of rates of
pay by age as well as by gender to be carried out on a regular basis, say,
every three years, and to ensure that any actions arising out of these are
embedded in the organisations’ overall pay and reward strategy.
o Sharing information about the gender pay gap in all its dimensions, with
employees.
o Consulting with employees and putting in place an action plan to tackle the
gender pay gap at workplace level.
Sheila Wild, November 2015
Sheila Wild
http://www.equalpayportal.co.uk/
ANNEX A Legislative standards impacting on the treatment of women and men in the
labour market
Year
Age
cohort
1950 65+
Relevant legislation
Context
1958 Life Peerages Act enables
women to sit in the House of
Lords
No equality of
opportunity in education
1957 Article 119 of the Treaty
establishing the European
Economic Community provides
for equality of remuneration
without discrimination on
grounds of sex
1959 Labour Party Manifesto
commits to the right to equal
pay for equal work.
1955 60+
1960 55+
1965 50+
1970 45+
1975 40+
1967 UK applies to join the EEC,
which will mean making legal
provision for equal pay
1970 Equal Pay Act provides for
equal pay and gives employers
5 years to equalise pay.
1975 (February) EC Council
Directive 75/ 1 17/EEC provides
for equal pay for work of equal
value
1975 (December) Equal Pay Act
1970 comes into force, but does
not provide for equal pay for
work of equal value, and
therefore cannot address
unequal pay due to
occupational segregation.
Sheila Wild
Advances
Page | 9
Discrimination against
women applying for jobs
lawful e.g. banks
advertising for girls with
O levels and boys with A
levels, with differing
career trajectories
Full-time employment
the norm, e.g. availability
for full-time work a
requirement in order to
be classed as
unemployed
Different retirement ages
for men and women
No maternity leave
Little or no childcare
provision
Strong ‘male
breadwinner’ welfare
and tax regimes
Strong gender
stereotypes, especially
with regard to women as
the primary carers
Pregnancy discrimination
remains lawful
Women become
entitled to equal
pay for like work
and work rated as
equivalent.
Gender pay gap
narrows at its
fastest rate until
the introduction of
the national
minimum wage in
1998.
http://www.equalpayportal.co.uk/
Year
Age
cohort
Relevant legislation
Context
Advances
1975 Sex Discrimination Act
outlaws discrimination on
grounds of sex, but excludes
pregnancy, retirement age and
the armed services.
Women become
entitled to equal
treatment in
education and in
Page | 10
some, but not all,
areas of
employment.
First steps towards
a system of job
protection for
women as mothers.
1978 Employment Protection
(Consolidation) Act 1978
introduces right to up to 29
weeks maternity leave for
women with two years full-time
or five years part-time
employment.
1979
1980 35+
European Commission
commences infringement
proceedings against the UK
Government for failing to
provide for equal pay for work of
equal value
1981 Jenkins v Kingsgate ECJ Part-time employment
rules that a part-timer can claim accounts for 22 per cent
equal pay with a full-timer
of total employment and
45 per cent of women’s
employment.
1982 European Court of Justice
rules against the UK in respect of
its failure to provide for equal
pay for work of equal value
1984 Equal Pay Act amended to
provide for equal pay for work of
equal value
1985 30+
Sheila Wild
1986 Sex Discrimination Act
equalised retirement ages for
men and women
A part-timer can
claim equal pay
with a full-timer.
Women become
entitled to equal
pay for work of
equal value – equal
value is aimed at
providing equal pay
in situations where
there is
occupational
segregation.
Unequal retirement
ages become
unlawful.
http://www.equalpayportal.co.uk/
Year
Age
cohort
1990 25+
1995 20+
Relevant legislation
Context
Advances
1990 Dekker v Stichting
Vormingscentrum Voor Jone
Volwassen (VJV-Centrum) Plus
ECJ rules that discrimination
against a pregnant woman
amounts to sex discrimination
Pregnancy
discrimination
becomes unlawful.
1994 Regina v Secretary of State
for Employment, ex parte Equal
Opportunities Commission and
another, found that less
favourable treatment of parttime workers with regard to
qualification for employment
protection was unlawful.
1996 Employment Rights Act
Full employment
protection for parttimers has to be
introduced.
Page | 11
Employment
protection for parttime workers.
1997 EC Directive 97/81/EC on
part-time work
2000
Sheila Wild
1998 National Childcare
Strategy launched
Access to
affordable
childcare.
1998 National Minimum Wage
Act
National Minimum
Wage helps to
narrow the gender
pay gap.
1999 Employment Relations Act
provided up to 18 weeks paid
maternity leave and introduced
a period of parental leave
Introduction of the
possibility of men
sharing
responsibility for
children.
Discrimination
against part-time
workers outlawed.
2000 The Part-time Workers
(Prevention of Less Favourable
Treatment) Regulations outlaws
less favourable treatment of
part-timers
2002 Employment Act
introduced a right for parents of
children under 6 to request
flexible working
Right to request
flexible working
introduced.
http://www.equalpayportal.co.uk/
Year
Age
cohort
2005
2010
2014
Relevant legislation
Context
2003 Paternity and Adoption
Leave Regulations gives men a
right to one or two weeks
paternity leave
2007 Right to request flexible
working extended to carers of
adults
2010 The Additional Paternity
Leave Regulations entitle
fathers to take up to 26 weeks of
paternity leave
2014 Shared Parental Leave
Regulations entitle parents to
share parental leave between
them
Advances
Paternity leave
introduced.
Recognition of
caring.
Recognition of role
of the father.
Recognition that
parenting is a
shared
responsibility.
References:
Beck, V. (2013) 'Employers' use of older workers in the recession', Employee Relations, 35,
3: 257-71.
Carers UK (2015) Briefing, Facts about Carers 2015
Maitland, A (2010) Working Better: the over 50s, the new work generation, Manchester:
Equality and Human Rights Commission.
Metcalf, H. and Meadows, P. (2006) Survey of employers' policies, practices and preferences
relating to age. Department for Work and Pensions Research Report no. 325. Leeds:
Corporate Document Services.
Smeaton, D. and Vegeris, S. (2009) Older people inside and outside the labour market: a
review. EHRC Research Report no. 22. Manchester: Equality and Human Rights Commission.
Smeaton, D., Vegeris, S. and Sahin-Dikmen, M. (2010) Older workers: employment
preferences, barriers and solutions. EHRC Research Report no. 43. Manchester: Equality and
Human Rights Commission.
Solera, C (2009) Women in and out of paid work: changes across generations in Italy and
Britain, ISER, Essex
TUC (2013) Older Women and the Labour Market
Sheila Wild
http://www.equalpayportal.co.uk/
Page | 12