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Mr. Bercow: My hon. Friend is making a typically thoughtful speech. Will she say something further about crude pay discrimination: unequal pay for exactly comparable work—a phenomenon that she has recently helped to highlight—in the public domain? Will she also comment on the related problem of historical anomalies in the way in which posts are graded in organisations? That should concern us all.
Mrs. Spelman: Those important questions warrant lengthy exploration. Although I am conscious of the time, I shall dwell on them for a moment. Legislation can do so much for comparable pay. Conservative and Labour Governments have introduced such legislation but, clearly, it has not proved sufficient. As I was in the throes of explaining, we must also overcome cultural factors, such as reticence to push for comparable terms of pay and a reluctance to ask what a man in the same job is being paid. I have the advantage of being a woman whereas my hon. Friend is a man, so only I can look inside my soul and begin to answer why women generally tend to be less assertive.
I shall risk saying that perhaps women regard work somewhat differently from men. Perhaps they are generally less concerned about status, and about status being measured by pay. Their job satisfaction comes from a range of factors. Perhaps it is important for men to have status that is measured in terms of pay. However, one factor is common to both sexes. If one does not know what one's colleague is paid, one does not have the information to conduct the necessary negotiations to ask for a fair return. Information is power. However, I would not go so far as to say that the problem would be immediately solved by some mandatory rule about publishing all rates of pay. In some organisations with best practice, such as management consultancy, where there is a great deal more transparency in the standard salaries and bonuses paid, it can become difficult to justify, in a rote way, variation at the bonus level. It is often linked to the company's profits. It is difficult to apportion how well the company is doing to the different amounts of effort that employees put in. That often cannot be resolved by a simple number.
Ms Meg Munn (Sheffield, Heeley) (Lab/Co-op): Does the hon. Lady agree that aspiration is also crucial? The Government are seeking to do more to encourage the aspiration to go to university of many young people from poorer backgrounds, but traditionally many
women and girls, when at school, have not had their aspirations raised in relation to the sort of employment that they could achieve. They have therefore entered and continued in, perhaps for life, jobs that have not stretched their abilities, so this country has not fully benefited from their skills and talents.
Mrs. Spelman: The hon. Lady is in complete agreement, in essence, with my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Mrs. Browning), whose point was exactly the same. We need to empower women, when they are young by raising their aspirations in relation to equal opportunities, and in later life by helping them to become more assertive in asking for a fair wage. If low-paid women knew that, for every hour that they work, they earn only 60p for every £1 that a man earns for doing exactly the same full-time job, they would be quite angry. That would be a healthy reaction, which could spur on the assertiveness that they need to ask to be paid on equal terms. That would be quite justifiable.
Vera Baird (Redcar) (Lab) rose—
Mrs. Spelman: We have already had quite an extensive digression on how culture interacts with legislation. Our society's culture, and the question of why women are in their current position—which we all acknowledge is unacceptable—is an important debate, but it is open-ended because we all know that it is not easy to change culture. That is not as simple as passing legislation, and it will take many different effects to bring it about. If the hon. and learned Lady's point is separate from that, I shall give way, but otherwise I would prefer to proceed.
Vera Baird: I want to comment on the point about asking for better pay.
Mrs. Spelman: I shall give way.
Vera Baird: I am grateful to the hon. Lady for giving way. Does she agree that one of the best ways of facilitating a more aggressive search for better pay for women is to encourage them to join trade unions? Will she congratulate the Government on their recent allocation of substantial money to the trade union movement to enable it to modernise and to cope adequately with the demands that we must encourage in women?
Mrs. Spelman: I anticipated that intervention when I was writing my speech, as hon. Members might expect. I do not think that trade union membership is a panacea. The trade union movement has been around for a long time, but we still have a pay gap between all men and women of 18 per cent., and a significantly larger one at the lower end of the pay scale. I learned from the Topss conference that average annual membership of a trade union costs about £200 a year. That is a factor for low-paid women. I acknowledge that Labour Members are likely to make that point, but I invite them to recognise that trade union membership is
not a magic answer. Just becoming a member of a trade union will not necessarily change the culture in our society.
Mrs. Spelman: I should like to proceed, if the hon. Lady does not mind.
Sometimes, for whatever reason—such as a different ethnic, linguistic or cultural background—women are not aware of their entitlements. I have mentioned migrant workers, who are in a particularly weak position and in need of much help. Perhaps one of the saddest examples is of older women who, for historical reasons, belong to an age of deference. Although as people in public life we might feel that that age of deference is long gone, those women's upbringing in that period means that their whole attitude towards employers is of an unquestioning approach to authority. Such women are often subject to discrimination. It is right to acknowledge that that exists in our society. Those women are often further prevented from speaking up because they were denied the learning opportunities that men of their generation were offered. To put it in stark terms, some of those women are afraid of making waves with employers because they fear redundancy and recognise that their prospects of securing alternative employment, as they near retirement age, are increasingly limited.
Retirement itself presents no quick release from the injustices experienced by many women because, as we all well know, the pension system in the United Kingdom discriminates significantly against women. It is increasingly clear from the demographic pattern in this country that we will have to take more urgent action to remedy that. Women live between seven and 10 years longer than men on average, yet pension provision for women—who will have to depend on it more—falls short of what men receive. More than twice as many women as men of pensionable age rely on means-tested benefit, and the Age Concern survey that I mentioned last week during questions to the Minister for Women and Equality shows that the average income of retired women consists of just 32p for every £1 that men receive. Again, that is a powerful piece of information that could spur on many older women, if they were aware of it, to more assertive action. Incidentally, I pay tribute to the female members of the pensioners convention in my constituency, who very definitely are assertive.
Perhaps the most alarming statistics of all are that 91 per cent. of all those without a full basic state pension are women, and that one in four single women pensioners now live in poverty. The reasons for that are numerous and complicated—complicated enough to warrant a debate of their own—but inflexibility in the eligibility criteria for state pension provision is clearly a major factor. One problem with the pension credit is that it assumes that everyone is entitled to the full contributory pension, but sadly that is not the case for many women, who have not met the qualifying criteria. Unless I am very much mistaken, the Pensions Bill that has just received its Second Reading, which I have scanned, does not specifically address the problem of the underprovision of pensions for women.
Gender discrimination clearly permeates the lives of women throughout the working and retirement periods, and it is the challenge for us all, not least women such as me who are involved in the legislative process, to try to arrest that. Should we fail, we will be condemning future generations of women to levels of pensioner poverty that are completely at odds with the advantaged position of a wealthy western power.
As with all the biggest problems that society has to overcome, there is no simple solution to this one, and it would be erroneous to suggest that the problems that I have mentioned can be overcome solely by legislation. The reality is that we need to complete the cultural changes that were initiated 86 years ago when women were first given the vote. Our country's mindset still has some way to move forward from the preconception that women somehow justify their inferior salary, or in some way deserve the disadvantages that they often experience in the workplace.
Legislation can in many ways precipitate and advance such changes, but it cannot be the sole driver. Attitudes are changing and inequalities are becoming increasingly unacceptable, but if we consider that, more than 30 years after the Equal Pay Act 1970 was introduced, women are still being paid on average 18 per cent. less than men in a full-time context, and 40 per cent. less than men in a part-time context, it behoves all of us in the House to strive for a better deal for women.
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