Gender Equity in the Workplace

Gender Equality: The United States versus the United Kingdom
Introduction
The United Kingdom is often called the mother country of the United States. However, in some ways, the countries still differ, including in their measures of gender equality. Perhaps the most notable example can be found in the leadership of the United Kingdom. Unlike the US, the UK has already had a female head of state, in the form of Prime Ministers Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May, and before that the UK was led by female monarchs as heads of state. The US has lacked such a female figurehead at such a prominent position, though Hillary Clinton did come close to securing the White House in 2016, and several female Congresswomen have risen to prominent positions, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar. Presidential hopeful Joe Biden has said on record that he will pick a female VP as his running mate, which means that if he wins in 2020 America likely will have its first female president since Biden has also indicated that he has no problem stepping aside and handing over the reins of power to his No. 2. Still, these are but a few examples, and the differences in gender equality between the US and the UK go beyond positions of power. They also touch on issues of the character of the women’s movements in the two countries, pay, leisure, and even how gender equality is viewed—though on this latter point the two countries have a bit more in common than they have different.
Where the Countries Differ on the Issues
Both nations lag in terms of ensuring equal pay for equal work, in terms of parity between the genders. In the UK, 78% percent of companies pay male employees more than female employees (Covert, 2018). However, the one silver lining to this statistic is that it was compiled at all, as the UK now requires all companies to make their salaries transparent and public, so at very least, companies can be publically shamed and held accountable. The US lacks such public data, and at many companies, sharing information about what one makes is considered taboo.
The UK also historically has a much stronger tradition of a militant women’s rights movement. It was not until the suffragette movement in the UK during the beginning of the 20th century began to take more radical measures to secure universal suffrage, including actions that might be considered terroristic today, including vandalizing buildings, bombing, cutting telephone wires, and even, in one case, throwing themselves in front of a race horse, that the US movement began to take similar actions (Gray, 2015). Without the radicalization of the US suffrage movement, many historians think it would have taken even longer for women to secure equality. In fact, the only reason the women’s movement in the US obtained suffrage in the first half of the 20th century was that it sold out the anti-war effort in exchange for the right to vote: by backing Wilson’s push to enter WWI, the women’s movement led by Carrie Chapman left its anti-war platform and helped push America into war so that Wilson could have a chance to promote his League of Nations (Van Voris). In exchange, the 19th Amendment was ratified and signed into law in 1920. What that rather ugly double-cross in the history of the women’s movement in the US shows is that militancy has never had the same character in the US as it has had in the UK. The famous film Mary Poppins features one of the most militant feminists in all of children’s media, but it is worthwhile to note that she was British—not American.
However, it should be noted that today the UK does not rank among the most gender-neutral nations within the industrialized world, however. As noted by the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE), the UK lacks a written constitution to enshrine equal rights under the law. Similarly, in the US, there was a failure to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, but since the US does have a written constitution, there may be some hope at a future, later date, to ensure that such equality is codified within the law. The US is also a federalist system, however, and laws protecting women’s equality may vary widely between the states, although officially, discrimination against gender and pregnancy status is prohibited under the law—in other words, gender is a protected category. Although it lacks a formal constitution, the UK did pass in 2010 an Equality Act, which prohibited unequal treatment based upon gender, consolidating previous anti-discrimination laws, and which was passed with the intention of “helping to achieve equal opportunities in the workplace and wider society” in a more active manner than simply banning outright discrimination (“United Kingdom,” 2020, par.4).
The UK still has a stronger federal authority than the US, but by European standards “efforts towards gender mainstreaming in the UK have been described as highly fragmented and disconnected from general policy and agendas, with little evaluation taking place” between Scotland, Wales, England, and Northern Ireland (“United Kingdom,” 2020, par.2). Also, the entrenchment of the UK’s class system can mean that women who are of lower class status may struggle even more to find parity, although this is certainly true of the US as well. Members of historically-discriminated against groups who are also women may likewise face greater discrimination. Thus, while the UK may have exhibited some more positive features in its history regarding gender-based discrimination, it is far from a world leader in equality, nor is the US.
Where the Countries are More Similar
One of the ways in which these two countries are similar when it comes to the issue of gender equality is in the way the issue remains a debate for some people in society. In the US, for example, it is still debated whether gender inequality still even exists or if it is just a socio-political myth used by women and groups on the Left for socio-political purposes. For instance, the wage gap and the gender leisure gap are two points that are debated widely in the US. If one is asking Christina Hoff Sommers, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and writer for Time, she will say, no, it does not exist: “The bottom line: the 23-cent gender pay gap is simply the difference between the average earnings of all men and women working full-time.” The enduring myth that “women earn 77 cents for every dollar a man earns—for doing the same work” is based on the average earnings statistic—not on an actual analysis of a side by side comparison of pay for men and women doing the same work (Sommers). But if one asks Nikki Graf, Anna Brown and Eileen Patten, writing for Pew Research, one will research a much different answer. They argue that the pay gap is closing but that women are still behind by as much as 15 cents on the dollar. However, if one pays attention to the data that Graf et al. are using, one can see that Hoff Sommers could in fact have a point—which is why the issue is so hotly debated among sides in the US. Data interpretation is something that just about anyone can do, so it does matter what one’s perspective and orientation to the issue is going in. As Hoff Sommers argues, these studies are not of side by side comparisons of wages for men and women doing the same work. They are rather statistics of median earnings—and all they really show is that men make more money than women: they do not actually show how that is happening, i.e., whether men are working more hours, working different jobs, or receiving higher pay because they have higher positions in companies. Both sides of the argument are correct, nonetheless: there is a wage gap—or rather an earnings gap. The only difference is in how the sides interpret the statistics.
In the UK, the same debate goes on, and one can find it if one is willing to keep eyes and ears open. One of the problems about this issue, however, is that it is often addressed by people who only look at one side and so are forever taking part in their own echo chamber chorus. Maybin, writing for the BBC, notes that the gender pay gap in the UK is a result of different factors, such as part time work, type of work, and the age of the workers. If a gap in pay does exist, Maybin suggests that the reason is because women work different hours from men and different jobs. Essentially, it is the same argument as Hoff Sommers makes in the US. There may be an earnings gap, but both writers on both sides of the pond ask why that is. Is it because of sociological differences between men and women? Or is it because of institutional prejudices?
What these reports from the other side of the issue show is that on both sides of the pond the issue of gender inequality is still viewed by some as not being a real thing at all but rather being a symptom of the clash between the old conservative groups and the new Feminist or Feminist-leaning groups, who reject the old world order. The statistics can be used to sculpt and shape a picture, but depending on the artist, that picture can be made to look in many different ways.
If one is going to accept the argument of Hoff Sommers, there really is not anything that needs to be done about it. If women want to make more than their male colleagues in the US—or in the UK for that matter—all they have to do is put in the kind of hours at the kind of level where they will earn a higher salary. Maybin does not come out and make the same kind of assertion, but the point is floated and can be read in between the lines. It is not a question of inequality in terms of lousy, law-breaking HR departments all over the country arbitrarily deciding that every female employee will receive 15 cents less on the dollar than her male colleague. That would be quite illegal and any company caught doing that would surely face a bevy of lawsuits. That is why the argument of Graf et al. as well as of Heather Wilde at Inc. citing a study by the US Department of Labor falls a bit flat in the US. If the wage gap were really a deliberate act on the part of the Human Resources departments of every company across the board in the US, every company would be sued out of business for discrimination because it is against the law under the Civil Rights Act to discriminate on the basis of gender. There are myriad labor laws aside from that one that protect against exactly this sort of thing. It is therefore possible that what Graf et al. and Wilde are doing is simply exactly what Hoff Sommers says they are doing: taking statistics of median earnings of men and women and interpreting those statistics through a lens of gender inequality without really thinking about what the stats actually show.
The leisure gap is another point of contention—at least in the US. Porter points out that there is a leisure imbalance between men and women that indicates the continued inequality between the sexes. However, as Codina and Pestana note, there are time differences in the way men and women experience leisure and in the way they think about the past, present and future. As a result, men and women tend to require different amounts of leisure to maintain a healthy frame of mind. Thus, Codina and Pestana argue that women actually need less leisure time than men because women tend to get more out of a little leisure time than men get out of a lot of leisure time. In other words, women are generally more efficient in the way they use their leisure time than men are, which allows them to be comfortable with less leisure time. Even if they had more time to allocate towards “leisure” activities it would likely not be allocated in the same way men allocate time to leisure. What all this indicates is that the gender leisure gap is really just an expression of the much wider overall gender gap in particular—i.e., that men and women really are different psychologically, emotionally, physically and socially. Codina and Pestana found that “men have more leisure time, but women have a more positive leisure experience and time perspectives than men” (2513). Essentially, they noted that men require more leisure time because they do not have the capabilities that women have to use it efficiently for rejuvenation. Codina and Pestana concluded that “women enjoy themselves more with less available leisure time and are more positive with regard to time orientations” (2513). Men, on the other hand, tend to need more time for leisure because they are biologically and cognitively wired differently.
Conclusion
In terms of politics, the character of the women’s movement and transparency, the UK has certainly outstripped the US when it comes to making advances in addressing the gender equality issue. The UK has had more female leaders in the highest positions than the US. But the US is built differently and is a different kind of nation in terms of size and structure. The fact that the US has come close to electing a female leader for president is in itself significant. However, the two nations are similar in the fact that people on both sides of the Atlantic still question the gender issue. There is still some debate over what the statistics actually show.
References
Codina, N., & Pestana, J. V. (2019). Time Matters Differently in Leisure Experience for Men and Women: Leisure Dedication and Time Perspective. International journal of environmental research and public health, 16(14), 2513.
Covert, B. (2018). What the US can learn from Britain on equal pay. The New Republic. Retrieved from: https://newrepublic.com/article/147882/us-can-learn-britain-equal-pay
Gray. E. (2015). How the British suffragettes radicalized American women. Time. Retrieved from: https://time.com/4084759/how-british suffragettes-radicalized-american-women/
Maybin, S. (2016). Four ways the gender pay gap isn't all it seems. Retrieved from https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-37198653
Porter, J. (2014). The gender leisure gap: Why women are losing their time to just chill out. Retrieved from https://www.fastcompany.com/3034205/the-gender-leisure-gap-why-women-are-losing-their-time-to-just-chill-out
United Kingdom. (2020). European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE). Retrieved from:https://eige.europa.eu/gender mainstreaming/countries/united-kingdom
Van Voris, J. (1996). Carrie Chapman Catt: A Public Life. New York City: Feminist Press at CUNY.