Skip to main contentSkip to navigationSkip to navigation

The mothers' pay gap

This article is more than 14 years old
It's not being a woman but having children that creates pay inequality and should be compensated for – hang on, it already is

Harriet Harman's just been rapped over the knuckles by the UK Statistics Authority for the way that she's been presenting the figures on the size of the gender pay gap. She said that women were paid 23% less per hour than men, while Sir Michael Scholar pointed out that a more accurate figure would be 12.8%. Without drowning everyone in a "he said, she said" tsunami of accusations (it all revolves around whether we should be looking at full-time workers only or both full and part time) I'd like to put forward a much more radical proposition.

There is no gender pay gap in the UK, there is only a mothers' pay gap.

The basic figures that everyone is working from can be found here (pdf), from the Office of National Statistics. No one is disagreeing with the raw data, the only differences are over which figures we should cherry-pick, how we should combine the various pieces. You'll not be all that surprised to find that those such as Harman, who think that women are hard done by in our society, tend to pick numbers showing the gap to be rather higher than others do. I of course am cherry-picking with the best of them but this table is instructive, drawn from the same data.

As you can see, it is marriage and more especially the having of children that leads to what everyone refers to as the gender pay gap and what should therefore more properly be referred to as the mothers' pay gap. Now that we've correctly identified the reason for differential pay on average, we can decide what, if anything, we'd like to do about it. For if it is indeed motherhood that is causing the gap then all of the current recommendations in the equalities bill are really a little odd. Equal pay audits at companies aren't going to do much about the way that parturition affects income now, are they?

What might be much simpler is to just directly compensate women for the income they forgo by having children. After all, we're pretty sure that we want the species and the country to continue into the future, and since biology has made only one of the sexes able to ensure this (with minor assistance from the other needed, to be sure) then the rest of us should just suck up the cost for the public good.

What would that cost be? Rather than argue about median household, or median or mean individual income, just to keep things simple let's peg the average income that will be affected by having children at £20,000 a year. A nice round number (and we'll stick with rounding numbers). Thus we expect a woman who has one child to be forgoing about £2,500 a year or £50 a week. With three children it's £70 a week. So if we were to subsidise mothers by this much (and other appropriate sums for other numbers of children) then we would have abolished the mothers' pay gap. Something that at least some of us devoutly desire.

Where this becomes really interesting is that of course we do already subsidise mothers. The combination of child benefit and the child tax credit is, at least for those on that average income, rather more than the effect on earnings of that mothers' pay gap.

Which leads to, at least to me, a fascinating conclusion. We don't have a gender pay gap in the UK, we have a mothers' pay gap. That mothers' pay gap has already been sorted out by the direct subsidies that we give to women with children. Which leads on to an even more fascinating question.

Why are we faffing about in parliament with an equalities bill to deal with something we've already solved?

Most viewed

Most viewed