Recently in equality Category

The gender pay gap is a hot topic both sides of the Atlantic right now, so it seemed an appropriate subject for my second post from New York. At its core the debate looks fundamentally the same in the US and in the UK, though the legal technicalities are different.

On the one hand, there is the issue of sex discrimination by employers, leading to unequal pay between men and women doing work of equal value or, in the words of the US legislation, performing "equal work on jobs the performance of which requires equal skill, effort, and responsibility" (The Equal Pay Act of 1963). On the other hand, there is the stubbornly persistent gender pay gap, which continues in both countries despite decades of legislation outlawing discrimination in pay.

The common issues are well illustrated by two posts that caught my eye this week, one from the US and one from the UK.

The first is by Stephanie R. Thomas, Director of the Equal Employment Advisory and Litigation Support Division of MCG, on the Compensation Café blog. She looks at the Paycheck Fairness Act, not yet signed into law, which is being promoted by the Obama administration as "a common-sense bill that will help ensure that men and women who do equal work receive the equal pay that they and their families deserve".

Among other issues, she cites a key criticism being made by opponents of the Paycheck Fairness Act: that it is somehow based on a false assumption that pay disparities between men and women are predominantly the result of discrimination by employers, when in fact much of the remaining gap can be accounted for in other ways.

In an interesting post on his Flip Chart Fairy Tales blog, the anonymous UK HR blogger Rick, makes the same point:

[T]he factors that contribute to the gender pay gap are overwhelmingly social. Like just about every other society in the world, we expect women to take most of the responsibility for looking after children. Much of the gender pay gap is due to the conflict between the requirements of a corporate career and those of childcare.

It seems to me that in this debate it is crucially important to distinguish between unequal pay resulting from discrimination by employers and that element of the remaining gender pay gap that results from wider social and historical factors concerning the roles played by men and women in society and the value that we as a society put on different kinds of work. Legal sanctions against errant employers are a valid way of addressing the former but surely not the latter.

The spat between XpertHR contributor Darren Newman and Duncan Bannatyne of Dragons' Den and Daily Mail fame concerning the Equality Act 2010 continues to make waves, leading today's Society Daily from the Guardian.

This is not a debate about about whether or not the Equality Act 2010 is a good piece of legislation. It is about what is in the Act and what is not.

There is a mythical Equality Act out there, which exists in the columns of some UK newspapers, and the minds of some commentators, but which doesn't bear very much if any relation to the real Equality Act.

As I say in XpertHR Editor's Choice commentary today, this means it is more important than ever that HR professionals get beyond the ill-informed polemics and focus on what the legislation really says and the practical implications for employers.

To that end, this month's outlook video focuses on one area of the Act that will certainly have an impact on employer practices: the prohibition from 1 October 2010 of questions about the health of job applicants before making job offers, except in specified circumstances.

The video, in which I interview XpertHR's head of content Jo Stubbs, was published today.

Equality Act 2010: new rules on health questions during recruitment

If you don't have Flash installed, you can listen to the audio track of this video (MP3 format, 6MB).

For the full low-down on the Newman-Bannatyne spat, see Darren Newman: Dragons' Den's Duncan Bannatyne, the Daily Mail, the Equality Act 2010 & Me.