Today in Westminster Hall, we will be debating a motion I submitted, ‘that this house has considered women and low pay’. That 45 years after the Equal Pay Act was introduced we still have to raise the issue of women and low pay is incredibly frustrating. It was supposed to be the act that got rid of pay discrepancies between men and women and guarantee equal pay for work of equal value. In reality, the current gender pay gap stands at 19.1 per cent, three per cent higher than the European Union average, and there is still so much more work to do.
One thing that a lifetime of low wages does guarantee is a retirement on a low pension. Women retiring in 2015 will on average, expect to receive 25 per cent less per year than men. The gender pay gap affects women from the day they start work, for the rest of their lives. It is no wonder that one in four women pensioners live in poverty. When three in five minimum wage jobs are held by women and men occupy 88 per cent of jobs in the high-paid industries of science, technology and engineering, there is an imbalance in the labour market. I want to ensure that the government has a clear strategy in place to diversify the labour market and close the gap between men’s and women’s earnings once and for all, so that future members of parliament will not have to have this debate.
The Labour party has always been at the forefront for the fight for equality and that is why we must take a stand now. In the last Labour government, the gender pay gap reduced by a third, this trend has since continued in the current government, but the gap between men and women who are self employed is widening.
More and more women are self-employed; indeed, self-employment has accounted for half of the overall net growth in women’s employment since 2008. Self-employment can be good for women; it provides the flexibility that so many women need when they have caring responsibilities. But it also has its downsides; income is often below the level of the legal minimum wage, and as one person wrote on Twitter, ‘self-employed people can’t pay themselves a high wage’ if the money is not there. This has not been acknowledged by the government. So, while George Osborne may appear to be giving women on low pay a boost with the ‘national living wage’, he is taking away vital support through tax credit and benefit changes which so many rely on. The government may talk the talk on equality, but while 85 per cent of their tax and benefit changes fall on women it compromises any chances of improvement for women on the lowest pay.
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Ruth Cadbury is member of parliament for Brentford and Isleworth. She tweets @RuthCadbury