Employment and labour market
Women in Scotland earn less than men, depend more on the
shrinking pot of social security, and are more likely than men to be members of
the swelling precarious workforce.
Women’s work is done in different
occupational sectors. Women are more likely than men to work as cleaners, as
carers, in catering, clerical and retail jobs. Women are also less likely to
get promoted, and much more likely to be found in the photocopy room or the
mailroom than the boardroom. Women are persistently and routinely discriminated
against when they are pregnant and when they return from maternity leave.
The impact of the labour market differences represented by
the pay gap is profound. Women are twice as likely to be in receipt of social
security payments, more likely to consume public services, more likely to live
with poverty and more likely to be underemployed relative to their skill and
qualification level. Almost a fifth of the Scottish workforce is paid below the
living wage, and 64 percent of these workers are women. Women’s employment in
general is more precarious, and they are more likely to be in informal,
temporary and part-time work that is most at risk in times of recession and
economic uncertainty. 40 percent of low-paid workers are women working
part-time.
With work in Scotland characterised by seemingly intractable
gender gaps, the time for bold action is now.
OCCUPATIONAL SEGREGATION
By 2030
horizontal and vertical segregation in the public sector has reduced by 25
percent.
Scottish Government and Public Bodies should:
Take bold action to challenge segregation
- Use the public sector’s wage-setting powers to drive up pay rates in the care and childcare sectors.
- Create progression routes from admin roles and
reverse the consolidation of administrators into modern ‘typing pools’.
- Commit to growing ten percent of
their technical staff from their own administration staff.
Gendered segregation is evident along the skills pipeline
from the cradle to the labour market, where it emerges as occupational
segregation. This clustering of girls and young women into particular subjects
and areas of study is compounded by social attitudes about women’s roles and
leads to stark gender gaps in the labour market. Women are significantly
overrepresented across low-paid and undervalued sectors, including care,
retail, administration and lower grades within the public sector. Meanwhile,
the glass ceiling that sees men overrepresented in management positions,
including in female-dominated professions like teaching, is clear evidence of
ongoing systemic failures to address gender inequality in the workplace and in
occupational sectors.
An overarching, strategic approach to tackle gender
segregation that encompasses education, skills, employability and employment
support within the social security system is manifestly needed. Successive Scottish
administrations have prioritised occupational segregation at a ministerial
level, as a key strategic focus for work on gender inequality. However, despite
this, results of those limited projects that have focused on tackling
occupational segregation have themselves been marginal and unsustainable. The Scottish
public sector must recommit itself to action, or see another generation sorted
into jobs on the basis of their sex and not their individual potential.
We know a great deal about occupational segregation. The
creative thinking of equalities initiatives and findings from decades’ worth of
pilot programmes suggest ways in which population level change can be made. The
value of work is socially constructed, and public bodies can use their power to
shift assumptions about what certain types of work are worth. The methods of
skills utilisation and work design can be brought to bear on improving the
perceived transferability of administration skills. As we have seen in silicon
Valley, where tech companies have grown their own female developers,
organisations and companies can fill skills gaps by training admin staff to fill
a proportion of technical roles.
EMPLOYERS
By 2030
the gender pay gap in Scotland has fallen by five percentage points.
Scottish Government should:
Drive better practice
- Create a Gender Equality in Business Scheme for private companies in Scotland.
- Ensure 5 percent of the business base in Scotland, and 50 percent of large businesses are accredited organisations/companies.
- Amend the PSED procurement duty to
require public authorities to award contracts to private providers accredited
by the scheme.
Labour Force Survey statistics show that the gap between
female and male employment rates has never been narrower. However, these
headline figures about labour market participation mask the insecurity, low pay
and low quality of women’s employment in Scotland. Women make up 78 percent of
the part-time workforce in Scotland, in large part because of the lack of
flexible working opportunities that can be reconciled with unpaid work. As a
consequence of the persistent discrimination within the labour market, the
gender pay gap in Scotland sits at 15.6 percent.
Employment, company and equality law are all reserved to Westminster,
so the current devolution settlement offers relatively few levers to Scottish
Government to force private sector employers to act. Although there is more
scope for mandating public authorities to take steps to reduce their pay gaps,
the public sector equality duty has not succeeded in doing so. However, the
Business Pledge is an example of a framework that places social pressure on
companies to take action.
A Gender Equality in Business Scheme should be developed in
partnership with women’s organisations and other stakeholders in Scotland. Building
on the work of Close the Gap’s Think Business, Think Equality, it would create
a national benchmark for quality in equal pay reviews, flexible working, gender
balance across boards and management, tackling horizontal segregation, shared
parental leave, the living wage and carer-sensitive employment policies. The
involvement of women’s organisations, including subject experts Close the Gap,
would ensure that the programme was robust. The scheme would support those
companies that perceived a business case for action, and allow them to promote
the gender sensitivity of their employment practice to prospective employees. It
would also let them demonstrate their equalities sensibilities in public
procurement processes.
Enabling change in private companies is not a quick process,
but sustained action delivered through the programme will narrow the gap
between men and women working in the private sector, and increase women’s
economic autonomy.
Further reading
See also
Gender Matters Roadmap - towards women's equality in Scotland