Gay pay in the UK
Did you know that, on average, gay men in the UK earn 1% less than straight men? And that once you control for various factors (eg the higher likelihood of gay men to live in London, which has higher pay than the rest of the country), gay men actually earn an average of 6% less than straight men?
I discovered this unfortunate fact while reading a short research paper entitled Gay Pay in the UK (which I can email to anyone who's interested). The authors can't figure out why there's a gay pay gap for males. Discrimination would seem the most likely answer. They do note that this gap hasn't shrunk since legislation a few years ago designed to prevent workplace discrimination against non-straights.
But if it's bad news for the boys in the Spartan army, the ladies of Lesbos are laughing. On average, lesbians make a whopping 35% more than straight women. Once factors such as education and regional location are controlled for, lesbians still earn 11% more. I'm guessing that while some of this is attributable to Anna, it's mostly down to the career compromises that women are often forced to make once they have kids. I'd be interested in seeing data comparing lesbians with children to lesbians without, but this paper didn't address that.
posted by jd @ 8:45 pm
6 comments
6 Comments:
Perhaps the answer is to do with self-selection. Maybe being gay is sufficient to prevent certain men from attempting to enter certain professions. The data can only have been collected via men prepared to identify themselves as gay so perhaps there's a correlation between the kind of publically experienced sexuality of the kind that would lead a person to respond to a questionnaire and a voluntary selecting-out from the kind of high-end, well-paid professions that would preclude such a public sense of gay sexuality. We can see this is in the absence of gay high court judges, footballers, and city traders. The reason why there's not such a difference in pay between straight and gay women is that you can't opt out of declaring that you're a woman.
Oh, and the rest of that thought: you can't opt out of declaring that you're a woman and the kind of jobs that women are allowed to do don't allow such a wide pay differentiation. How many women CEOs are there? The question is not how different straight is from gay but rather how bankable straight women, gay women and gay men are compared to straight men when it comes to high-end professions.
Excellent points. Not being gay, I wouldn't want to weigh in and say that overt discrimination isn't still rife (i have no clue), but the first thing I thought when I read this was "self selection" in terms of what jobs gay men pursue (which is an aspect of a discriminatory society).
This is of course the exact same issue with regards to female employment as a whole (eg choosing/being constrained into entering particular professions), so I think your second point is very well made indeed. The default setting when discussing employment issues is still straight, male, and white - to which I would add "unencumbered by unpaid caring responsibilities" (eg in discussions of the "ideal worker" under intensified capitalism).
On a similar note, this is why, in discussions of the female wage gap, when the government posts its figures comparing male and female wages, it compares female part-time wages to male full-time wages. Some argue against this, because male part-time workers are poorly paid compared to male full-time workers, just as female part-timers are poorly paid compared to female full-timers. But the argument in favour of making this comparison is that because such a large percentage of women (more accurately, mothers) are squeezed out of full-time work by a lack of family-friendly policies, then part-time work becomes a core component of the female work experience, and thus should be compared to the core component of the male work experience, rather than to the relatively small percentage of men who do part-time work. (Dont' have figures to hand, alas.)
Another thought on occupational segregation: almost by definition, it encourages the average wage of the group in that occupation to remain stagnant in real terms. Here's an exaggerated hypothetical illustrating the point: Let's say that all florists in teh UK are gay men, and that the number of jobs in the florist industry is the same from year to year. This means that when one gay man is promoted (hurrah for him!), another is demoted (poor bugger). The average wage of gay men (in this industry) has remained exactly the same. Even without the extremes of my example, you can see how it would work: if all Kevin's colleagues are gay men (I have no idea if they are), then when he gets a promotion, that means that another gay man will have not gotten that promotion, thus keeping the average gay wage from rising as much as it might have. Whereas when a gay man in a more open industry (eg banking) is promoted, this is more likely to be at the expense of a straight man, thus improving the overall status of gay men as compared to straights.
Of course, in industries where women make up the bulk of the workforce, men tend to predominate at management level, so women are on the whole fighting amongst themselves for the lowest two-thirds of jobs.
I still think a crucial missing variable as far as any correlation between gender, sexuality and wage is concerned is 'well-paid, high-status man who won't tick gay when surveyed.' There's only so far you can go in using mass media (MORI, national census included) to quantify the effect of overt discrimination against disclosable identities. It's rather difficult to know the full picture at the violent end as well (see last Wednesday's Guardian article on this here). I wish I could find that Prospect article about the shopping basket of trust as this would have a bearing on the question of what you disclose to whom, but I can certainly remember that journalists came very low down the list and that politicians were at the bottom. It would be interesting to know where pollsters come but how would you find out? Are you a) unwilling to do this survey? b) hoping to have sex with me? or c) not telling the truth?
So, occupational segregation. I think that using stats based on mode rather than average is actually rather good. It would certainly seem to skew use of the data towards progressive ends and no-one who criticises it could seriously suggest that policy based on this will tend towards part-time men's wages being reduced. As for the embattled florists, yes, I see your point. Not only would it keep the average wage low in the sector but it would also actively create unemployment for that particular group. This is what you mean by the core component of women's work experience having to be part-time low-paid work because they want to have children. It's crap, I agree, but what do you do? Didn't the government already address this by increasing the funding for childcare training and introducing professional qualifications? On the one hand, if women are going to stay home and look after children, you might as well get them qualified. But on the other, professionalising a sector of the economy that is already a dumping-ground for one group is just a way of keeping them there. It's the same kind of intractable problem that occurs to me when I see the children on my estate, standing around in groups rapping and krumping way past bedtime. I want to say to them that if they really want to rebel they should go home, read more, study hard and become doctors or lawyers. Is this radical or reactionary? It would be interesting to know how you would present employment policy based on the question of core component and group choice once questions of ethnicity come into play. Are publically-funded DJ workshops for every bored black teenager equivalent to defending unemployment as a community tradition? Back to the question of choice feminism on your blog a while back (see July 27th 2006).
Do you think that this link is any use? ONS.
Trev,
Here's a Law Society report that just came out - it finds that most gay & lesbian solicitors who were surveyed:
"acknowledged that they were reluctant to come out at work for fear that it would seriously hinder their career progression.
While none of the participants in the study reported having experienced overt discrimination on the basis of their sexuality, they admitted feeling restricted by perceptions and expectations of discrimination."
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