‘Just not good enough’ | Today is the day of the year when women stop working for free

Today is Women’s Pay Day – the day in every year in which women stop working for free when compared with the salary of the average working man. That means that, due to underpayment, women work for free for nearly two months of every year – a shocking number that adds up to a full free year of work at an alarming rate.

The Trades Union Congress (TUC) has analysed numbers from the ONS and its own research, and found that the current gender pay gap (GPG) sits at about 15% in the UK and is the widest for older women and women in the South East of the country. In fact, women aged 50-59 have the highest pay gap at 20.8% and in the South East, it sits at 17.9%, meaning that a 50-year-old worker in the South East could be working for free up till the third week of March.

In terms of industries, it will come as no surprise to anyone in the sector that women in finance suffer the most severe pay gaps: the gender pay gap in finance and banking is a dismaying 31.2%. According to TUC, that’s the equivalent of 114 days – meaning women work for free for nearly a third of the year, until Sunday 23 April 2023.

Even in jobs that tend to be dominated by female workers (and, it must be noted, with more women in senior management – which means women are paying women less) such as education and healthcare, the gender pay gap persists: 22% for education and 14% for healthcare.