Equality Bill

I am happy to accept the point behind the hon. Lady's remarks, which is that we absolutely have to go further and that there is no cause for complacency. It is worth while saying that what we have has been working—albeit too slowly—but we need to continue pushing on. It would be a courageous person who claimed that Britain is all marvellous. She is right to point out that we have further to go. Our concern is that the causes of the gender pay gap are far from simple. Direct discrimination is clearly an issue, but many other very knotty and difficult issues will require careful addressing if we are to continue to erode and reduce the gender pay gap—and ideally at a faster rate, as the hon. Lady just mentioned. The causes of the pay gap are well known, but let me quickly summarise and rehearse a few of them. Problems with flexible working are well known. There is no doubt that, if someone is trying to combine child care, for example, with work, it is essential that they achieve a proper work-life balance and that they be allowed and helped to do that by their employer, whether public or private sector. Clearly progress needs to be made in allowing and encouraging flexible working. Child care is another issue. Affordable child care at the right time of day, on the right days of the week and in a convenient location, is essential for anybody trying to juggle family responsibilities with holding down a job. Repeatedly in surveys, the lack of suitable, affordable and conveniently sited child care comes up as one of the top two obstacles for people with family responsibilities to getting a job and, in particular, to remaining in it. The classic pattern is that someone manages to get a job and to get through the first few weeks, but the moment they first encounter something such as a school holiday, all of a sudden their existing child care arrangements are inadequate and they soon discover that they cannot continue to juggle those two important facets of their lives. Clearly, therefore, child care is crucial. Equally, there is the perfectly legitimate element of individual choice. I am sure that everyone would agree that it would be entirely wrong for parliamentarians to dictate to families up and down the country what their work-life balance should be and how they should prioritise child rearing, for example, versus employment. We need to create an environment in which people can make their own decisions based on their personal lives and situations, an environment in which those decisions are backed up, made simpler and supported rather than obstructed. However, it is legitimate to say that it is perfectly possible for people to take structurally very different decisions. Women might on average take different decisions from men, and part of that, in a free society, is perfectly acceptable, providing that they do it of their own free will and for the right reasons, rather than being pushed, cajoled or pressured. There are many different facets to gender pay discrimination and many reasons for it. It is not just me and other parliamentarians saying that. Some years ago, the Equal Opportunities Commission published a working paper, series No. 17, entitled "Modelling gender pay gaps". In it, it tried to break down the causes of the gender pay gap. It stated:""Broadly, the research finds that gender differences in life-time working patterns account for 36% of the pay gap. Rigidities in the labour market, including those that concentrate women into particular occupations and mean that they are more likely to work in smaller and non-unionised firms, account for a further 18% of the pay gap. 38% is due to direct discrimination and differences in the labour market motivations and preferences of women as compared with men. The remaining 8% is due to women's lesser educational attainment in the past"." Thankfully, the latter gap is much reduced, and in some cases has gone the other way. The EOC report talks about the full-time gender pay gap, which is down to 12 per cent. in round numbers. The implication of those figures is that 38 per cent. of the 12 per cent. gender pay gap in full-time employment is, as the report states, due to two factors:""direct discrimination and differences in the labour market motivations and preferences of women as compared with men"," which we have just been talking about. There remains a systemic difference in this country between women with child care needs and men. In other words, roughly 5 per cent. of the gender pay gap is due either to direct discrimination or differences in labour market motivations. That means that the direct discrimination, which is the point of clause 75, and of obliging companies to publish gender pay differences, accounts for between 1 and 5 per cent. of the gender pay gap. That does not make it unimportant—it is potentially very important—but it is crucial for the purposes of the debate to understand the size of the issue that we are addressing.