Equality Bill
4:57 pm
Katherine Rake: Discrimination is a tricky thing. It is quite difficult to observe directly, and as a former academic I know that it is difficult to register and measure directly. However, when people have decomposed the gender pay gap to look at the different elements that contribute to it, discrimination is the largest factor of all, the remaining factor. Having said that, there is an awful lot of penalty attached to working part time, to motherhood, to discontinuous labour market records, all of which are more familiar to women. But my belief is that if organisations get good at addressing pay discrimination, they also get good at diversity more generally, and promoting equality for women.
Where we see good practice in private sector organisations, for example, they tend not only to have pay auditing systems—very successful ones—but they also tend to promote more women into senior positions, have good flexible working policies, and have maternity and paternity provisions above and beyond the statutory minimum. They do that because they know that it delivers to them. In an economy that is dependent upon human resources, it delivers the bottom line to them because if they lose the skills of 52 per cent. of the population, they will not be effective organisations. I think that good practice on pay will feed through and make organisations wake up to a whole series of issues that they have elsewhere. There will be all sorts of positive benefits from addressing discrimination.