WHEN SITTING in an over-stuffed basement conference room on a rainy Saturday afternoon in Gateshead, a girl gets to wondering if she can ever be paid enough.
All around me women were complaining about the same thing, haranguing ministers about the fact that they still get paid a fifth less than men in full time work, even less in part time, a gap unchanged in a decade.
It was a hot issue at Labour’s Spring Conference, especially as the Government’s new Women and Work Commission is due to present its interim findings next month.
But as the ranks of trouser-suited female politicians blamed first men, then employers in general, I had a strange feeling that something was being missed. Why was no-one asking women to change too?
This is a taboo opinion, and sitting, as I was, centimetres from Julie Mellor, head of the Equal Opportunities Commission and Polly Toynbee, Guardian doyenne, even a dangerous one. But if you are getting paid less than your male colleague, you probably have yourself partly to blame. Yes, you.
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Now, don’t get upset. I am not some anti-feminist of the “she was asking for it” school, holding women responsible for all bad things that befall them. But if “she was asking for it” sums up a set of offensive attitudes that men were forced to abandon at the end of the last century, “she wasn’t asking for it” should become the rallying cry for women in the 21st century.
You see, research indicates that the pay gap has many causes (such as the career changes caused by motherhood) but the biggest of all, accounting for two-fifths of the problem, is unexplained “factors associated with being female”. Many think this is straight sexism. Yet I’m not convinced that employers like to discriminate directly anymore. I think it’s more a case of “don’t ask, don’t get”.
Linda Babcock, an economics professor at Carnegie Mellon University in America, was perplexed when she found that the average starting salary of a class of her masters graduates was 7 per cent higher for men than women, especially when all of them had been advised to ask for more than their initial offer. She then asked who had actually negotiated their salary — only one woman in 14 had, compared to nearly two-thirds of men.
Those who had negotiated had been able to increase their offer by almost exactly 7 per cent — suggesting that the pay gap would have been eliminated if only women had the balls to ask for more. Other studies back this up — men are between four and nine times more likely to ask for more pay than they are offered.
And this is no small difference. If, at the age of 22, I got the same job as a man but meekly accepted the salary of £25,000 while he bumped it up to £30,000, and let’s say we both got automatic salary increases of 3 per cent a year, by the time we retired at 60, his career would have earned him over half-a-million more than mine. Of course, that’s an underestimate, because the man would most likely have increased the gap still further by asking for more pay rises.
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This is why girls thrive in school, where if they perform well, they get an A. But when they are thrust, blinking, into the world of work, they fail to realise that if they perform well, they will pass, but to get an equivalent of an A (a pay rise), they have to go into their boss’s office and argue the case.
And here’s where the trouble starts. My female friends describe asking for a pay rise as one of the most humiliating experiences of their lives. “I felt like a needy girlfriend, begging to be loved more,” one wailed. “If they like me, they should just show it, without me having to ask.” Compare that with men, who tend to see it more like a hard game of squash — all bad feeling patched up while snapping each other’s bottoms with towels in the locker room afterwards.
Julie Mellor, when I cornered her on this at the meeting, also thought that “women still feel lucky” to have a job in the first place, and related the story of Karin Forseke, the CEO of Carnegie. Forseke said that her female bankers tended to accept bonuses without a murmur, while men fought to increase every penny.
If you feel “lucky” to have your job, no amount of government legislation can stop that. But if you feel lucky, so does the person who doles out the pay rises for having such a sucker as an employee, and so does the callow youth at the next desk, who just got the cash you were too “lucky” to ask for.
So the “she was asking for it” revolution should start when you screw your courage up to knock on your boss’s door. If you’re too shy to do it for yourself, do it for your daughters, and for women everywhere.