Professional Women in the UK Face a Large Pay Gap and Struggle to Juggle it All

By Irene Velázquez

According to the UK’s Office for National Statistics’ Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, in 2013 the gender pay gap between male and female full-time workers increased to 10 percent from 9.6 percent. It is also being reported that one of the industries where women experience the largest pay gap is financial services.

Clare Flynn Levy, CEO of the financial software firm Essentia Analytics, says men are granted higher salaries simply because they stand up for their rights more than women do.

“Women don’t tend to shout from the rooftops about their achievements and talents the way that men do. They don’t tend to put themselves forward for projects and promotions,” Levy said. The CEO also says that men fight for a bonus they don’t believe they deserved, something most women wouldn’t do.

Levy also cites the financial service industry’s “traditional work environment” as an issue.

“In fund management, there is quite a traditional work environment where you are at your desk early in the morning and you leave relatively late, and it’s quite face-time oriented. There’s an assumption that ‘I have to be at my desk between eight and six every day.’ Once you have kids, maybe that becomes a problem.”

Women essentially have two jobs: their full time, paid work, and their full time domestic duties at home. Given that women often have to work twice as hard to get noticed in the workplace, it’s no wonder the women surveyed in the UK are feeling the overwhelming pressure to perform, which makes the pay gap even more dispiriting. In the funds industry in London, women are experiencing a pay gap of 37 percent, according to the salary data company Emolument.

A Problem for Business
Emolument reports that asset management companies do not pay women fairly. In London, women earn a minimum of £40,000, whereas men earn at least £41,375 at analyst-level, and £34,300 and £34,800 at the entry-level.

Emolument chief executive Robert Benson acknowledges the problem.

“It is a problem for all businesses if they can’t retain the best-quality people, and there’s no reason why women aren’t equally qualified and able to do the job,” he said.

Emolument analyzed the salary figures of 494 employees in the management industry and this data was compared to that of workers in the same field.

Emolument head of business development, Alice Leguay, says their data from over 16,000 participants gives professionals tangible, verified statistics in order to benchmark themselves and help them make key career decisions. The company’s website asks employees to state their exact job description, title, years of experience, employer name, percentage bonus change year on year, and gender, enabling contributors to use a set of filters to make the data specifically relevant to them. The process is completely anonymous.

There are jobs where women are being paid more.

“According to our data, we have identified that as fund managers, women often make as much, if not more than men. Even though there are many more men than women in this job, with a ratio of about one to five,” Leguay said. “Also, the myth of the average banker’s sky-high earnings has taken a beating: the proportion of bankers making more than £1mm annually is in fact tiny at one in 60.”

The pay gap isn’t the only issue professional women in the UK share with American women.

Juggling It All In The UK
The workplace gender campaign Opportunity Now developed Project 28-40, a study into women’s experiences in the workplace in the UK, aiming to accurately diagnose what is really happening so that more effective actions can be devised to encourage women to develop their careers. Now closed, the study found that an overwhelming number of women in the UK are more concerned about how they will juggle all of their responsibilities. Opportunity Now encouraged UK-based women to take their survey, which will outline the reasons why women ages 28-40 stop progressing in their careers or make the decision to abandon their jobs altogether.

Based on the first 15,000 female workers who answered, 62 percent of them feel stressed because they have to do their best both at work and at home. Eighty-two percent believe that becoming a mother will stop them from progressing in their career. Seventy-one percent of women surveyed reported that it is difficult to balance their roles as mothers and as workers.

Sixty-five percent of women who answered the survey stated that work would have to be their first priority in order to progress in their career. This is where many problems begin, as many mothers – especially those with young children or those having their first child – no longer consider work their first priority.

These findings illustrate how closely tied the struggles of women across country lines are, and just how much work still needs to be done to retain and support ambitious, talented professional women the world over.