Gender Pay Gap highlighted in the Highlands
Highlands & Islands labour MSP Rhoda Grant has been highlighting " the persistence of the gender pay gap" with the display of a poster showing that the hourly pay of women in full-time employment in the Highlands is 83 per cent of that of men.
At present men in the Highlands earn £12.04 an hour ,while women earn £10.03.
If the gender pay gap were to be expressed in terms of a calendar, men’s hourly pay would be set to stretch acrossthe entire 365 days of the year.
However, the female hourly pay would stretch only as far as this weekend ( October 29 to 30) .
This would be more than 60 days less.
Ms Grant said, " The gender pay gap results from several factors such as :
*the worth of women’s work being under-valued
*childcare and caring duties resulting in less time in uninterrupted full-time employment
*the concentration of women in a few sectors of employment in part-time, low pay jobs, and with fewer opportunities for promotion and access to training.
"A necessary first step in tackling the gender pay gap is to make employers liable for publishing details of any differences in pay between male and female employees to make these employees aware of the gap.
"However, the Coalition Government has cooled over this. The Fawcett Society promotes the smart business case for removing the barriers to women working in ‘traditionally jobs’ for men and for raising women’s general level of participation in the jobs market.They estimate its worth to the economy could be between £15 and £23 billion."
Events to mark the gender gap nationally take place on Friday November 4, Equal Pay Day.
