The average female manager in the UK faces a wait of 57 years for their salary to be on a par with male counterparts, while equal pay for women HR bosses is a mind-blowing 107 years away.
These are the findings of the ‘2010 National Management Salary Survey’ undertaken among 43,000 managers in 200 organisations by researchers XpertHR on behalf of the Chartered Management Institute (CMI).
The study revealed that, although female leaders’ salaries rose by about 2.8% in the last 12 months to £31,306 per annum, on average they were paid £10,000 or 24% less than their male equivalents.
But it also indicated that women HR bosses faced the longest wait of any sector before their take-home pay equalled that of men. Although their wages increased by 3.1% over the last year compared with pay rises of 2.9% for men, the gap was on average closing more slowly than in other professions. The pay differential with male colleagues currently stood at £7,847.
Nonetheless, the biggest pay gap of all was in the IT sector, where women took home on average £17,736 less than men. Female engineers fared the best, on the other hand, with a differential of only £2,433. In regional terms, the pay difference was worst in the West Midlands, while the smallest gap was found in the North East of England.
As a result, the CMI’s director of policy and research Petra Wilton called on the government to take more action to enforce pay equality by monitoring organisations’ activities in the area more closely and naming and shaming those that failed to pay female staff more fairly.
But she added: “It’s not just the government that needs to act. Competitive businesses need to attract diverse workforces and appeal to the most talented employees. To do this, managers and employers need to recruit from a wide talent pool, but they cannot expect to attract the UK’s best female talent if they continue to undervalue it.”
To add insult to injury, meanwhile, and despite being on lower pay, female leaders are also more likely to be made redundant than their male colleagues. Over the last 12 months, 4.5% of women managers lost their jobs in this way compared with only 3% of men.
But resignations were on the up too – perhaps due to dissatisfaction over renumeration levels. Some 7.7% of female directors quit their post last year compared with 5.3% during the previous 12 months. The 2009 figure was more than double the 3.6% of males who voluntarily left their positions in 2009.
