Gender Pay Gap, Voluntary Interventions and Recession: The Case of the British Financial Services Sector

Abstract

State institutions and trade unions put pressure on the British financial services sector to reform its gendered practices and reduce its gender pay gap following both the recession and the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) Inquiry (2009). This article considers the effect of these pressures by comparing the gender pay gap pre‐, during‐ and post‐recession periods. Using Labour Force Survey data, the article finds a marginal pay gap reduction in the post‐recession period, a reduction that was greater in financial services than in the rest of the economy. However, the financial services pay gap remained resilient and substantially higher at the top of the earnings distribution. Union membership and collective bargaining were shown to reduce the pay gap including for women members with children. In contrast, countervailing factors, including ethnicity and post‐recession longer working hours, contributed to the pay gap. The study reveals the limitations of voluntary interventions against a resilient gendered culture.

Who Works for Whom and the UK Gender Pay Gap

“…The ‘Other industry sectors’ group is dominated by the public sector, so the gender distributions of firm fixed effects are similar to those in the public sector (Online Appendix Figure C1F). The male and female distributions over the firm wage premiums are also relatively similar within the ‘Manufacturing’ and ‘Financial services’ industry groups (Online Appendix Figure C1C,E), despite in the latter group of jobs there being evidence of large gaps at the mean and at the top of the wage distribution (Healy and Ahamed ). However, the gender differences in the ‘Non‐financial (sales) services’ group, which is dominated by retail and hospitality services, are starker (Online Appendix Figure C1D).…”

Practice What You Preach: The Gender Pay Gap in Labor Union Compensation

“…At present, a raw comparison of female and male full‐time wage and salary workers in the United States shows that women earn only 82 cents on the male dollar (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2020b). This pay gap has been studied in a variety of contexts and appears to be ubiquitous – it exists in the private (e.g., Bell 2005; Muñoz‐Bullon 2010), public (e.g., Han 2020; Mandel and Semyonov 2014), and non‐profit sectors (Mesch and Rooney 2008; Nikolova 2014); across a number of industries, including manufacturing (e.g., Elvira and Saporta 2001) and service industries (e.g., Healy and Ahamed 2019); and among executives (e.g., Bertrand and Hallock, 2001; Carter, Franco, and Gine 2017), managers (e.g., Watson 2010), and employees (e.g., Drechsel‐Grau and Holub 2020; Han 2020). However, it has not yet been studied in labor unions, which is surprising given their societal status as agents of equality (Western and Rosenfeld 2011).…”

Visible and invisible borders in time and space

“…Nevertheless, we are seeing more women (and some men) working flexibly, whether working shorter hours, from home or other variants. However, we were concerned to find that in our recent study of financial services, that working hours had increased since the recession (Healy and Ahamed, 2019) and as we know long working hours are a deterrent for women with caring responsibilities (Metcalfe and Rolfe, 2009). Reflecting on my career I realise how important key actors were in enabling and facilitating access to research subjects.…”

“…The then National Union of Teachers were a crucial support to the teachers' study. Unions also enabled a number of studies: of black and minority ethnic union activists undertaken with Harriet Bradley (Bradley and Healy, 2008;; a comparative study on British and American women activists with Gill Kirton (Kirton and Healy, 2013); and it was unions who alerted us to explore the very high pay gap in financial services (Conley et al, 2019;Healy and Ahamed, 2019). The British Medical Association provided Franklin Oikelome and me with invaluable data which enabled us to do our work comparing UK qualified physicians with international medical graduate career experiences Oikelome, 2007a, b, 2011;Healy, 2007, 2013).…”