Gender pay gap in the U.S. is reversed by young women

By Daily Mail ReporterLast updated at 10:38 PM on 2nd September 2010

Successful: Young single women are earning more than men their same age, according to new research

Single women under 30 are earning more than men of the same age in almost all of America’s big cities, a study claimed yesterday.
The average full-time salaries of unmarried young women in 147 out of 150 U.S. cities are 8 per cent higher than men in their peer group, said researchers.
In Atlanta and Memphis, the women are making 20 per cent more. Men’s pay has fallen behind by 17 per cent in New York, by 12 per cent in Los Angeles and by 15 per cent in San Diego. 
It is not just the big cities where young women are ahead. In Charlotte, North Carolina, women’s wages are 14 per cent higher than men’s and in Jacksonville, Florida, they are 6 per cent higher.
The reversal in the gender pay gap was hailed last night as a milestone in women’s rights.
But the breakthrough only applies to childless single women under 30 who live in cities. Overall in the U.S., women still take home about 80 per cent of what an average man earns.
James Chung, of market research company Reach Advisors, produced his report after analysing U.S. Census Bureau statistics from 2,000 communities.
He put the pay reversal down to the trend in women getting a better education. For every two American men that graduated from university or get a higher degree, there are three women with the same qualifications.

 

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Power industry to re-energise skills

Fears have been growing in the industry that not enough people are entering the profession to offset the ageing workforce. Some 80pc of the UK’s energy workforce is expected to retire by 2025.
The Sunday Telegraph revealed earlier this month that more than half of school leavers would not consider a career in science, technology or energy, according to a poll by Centrica. Sam Laidlaw, Centrica’s chief executive, called on employers to “act urgently” to address the impending skills gap.
The National Skills Academy for Power, set up in March this year with just under £2m investment from employers and about £2.9m from the Government, said the new qualification, designed to directly allay mounting concerns about skills shortages, could be in place by next year.
Tony Hill, of power company EA Technology, backed the qualification, claiming it marked the start of a concerted industry effort to tackle the skills gap. “The power industry is trying to pull together a more co-ordinated approach to skills shortages,” he said. “We have an ageing workforce and we need to attract people into the sector.”
Len Tweedie, of CE Electric UK, a major electricity company in the north of England, said: “We want to establish a common set of standards so that skills can become transferable across employers. At the moment, [electricity] companies each have a different way of training staff. To move from one company to another, workers have to be reassessed at the next company they go to work for, which is costly and not adding any real value.”
He added the lack of industry-recognised training put people off working in the sector because it was hard to establish what long-term career options were available.
“When the economy stabilises we will be competing for skills again, so it’s important to raise awareness of what our industry can offer new recruits,” he said.
Utilities group Morgan Sindall also backed the new qualification. Andy Crowder, managing director of utility services, said: “Introducing a new common set of standards adhered to by the whole industry will be fantastic for moving people about. If we get a contract in Scotland, for example, workers from the East Midlands area could instantly move across without having to do extra training at the new employer to prove they are at a certain level.”
The skills academy is set to launch a new recruitment website in October, featuring case studies of what it is like to work in the power industry, as part of the awareness campaign.
Dave Newborough, HR director at E’ON, said: “The energy sector is invisible to graduates, especially engineering graduates. The recruitment site will help make the sector more visible to the external world.”
Tim Balcon, chief executive of Energy and Utility Skills, which runs the Academy, said: “Employers recognise engineering has a poor profile as a career, particularly in utilities. The skills website will help to raise awareness and give people a chance to get advice about working in the sector. The qualification will be recognised across industry and help to improve workers’ career paths.”
Mr Balcon said it was possible an existing qualification run by an employer could be adapted to become the industry standard.
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Gap-year students learn to give ‘face’ in chase for the China dream

“If a Chinese colleague says to you ‘Isn’t the Beijing traffic terrible’, what do you think would be the correct response?” asks Louise Beamont, CRCC’s irrepressibly bubbly expert on cross-cultural relations. A perplexed silence fills the room, so she helps them out.
“Okay. So we don’t say, ‘Yeah, it’s awful. Takes ages to get anywhere, don’t know how you put up with it.’ That would be the ‘bad’ response. Much better to say ‘Ah yes, it is a little bit congested, but then you should see the traffic in London, it can be just as bad.”
This is the interns’ first insight into the Chinese game of giving ‘face’, or mianzi; a near-endless and often opaque part of the social ritual that catches out even experienced foreigners doing business in China.
It takes a while for them to get the hang of the idea of Chinese double-think. “When a Chinese person criticises China they are not really criticising it,” explains Ms Beamont. “They are only giving your country ‘face’, and you should return the compliment. Think of it as a game.”
For the interns, a mixture of students and recent graduates mainly from Britain but also from the US, Spain, France and China itself, it is the first of many tests that leave them looking daunted at what lies ahead.
Among the most important they will have to grasp is the notion that Chinese offices are much more strictly hierarchical than Western ones; places where age takes precedence over ability and collective loyalty is prized over individual ambition.
For an enthusiastic British graduate keen to make a good impression on their first day, this is an accident waiting to happen. Louise expertly conjures the cringe-making spectacle of the bushy-tailed young intern who is keen to share his opinions and show off his ‘flair’ in his very first meeting, blissfully unaware that this, to put it mildly, is not how the most junior of office juniors is expected to behave in China.
“You need to think very carefully about how you will come across,” she counsels her enthusiastic young China greenhorns. “The way you behave will have a massive impact on the success of your time here. You need to move slowly and establish relationships, build your guanxi.”
It is a fine line between offering much-needed advice and squashing the enthusiasm that radiates from these students, who will have each paid nearly £1,800 for the chance to get an early taste of business life in China.
Daniel Nivern, a 29-year-old Oxford graduate who founded CRCC three years ago, says the company can hardly keep up with demand. Last year they placed 200 students in mostly Chinese law, finance and marketing companies. This year it will be more than 500.
“Business is growing very fast,” he adds. “I think that’s fairly obviously because there is a rising interest in China and a growing sense that China is going to figure very prominently in the future working lives of this age group.”
That said, many of the students still seem to see themselves as pioneers of a sort, daring to go where many of their peers would not.
“I guess lots of my class are aware about China’s rise, in a general sort of way, but it still feels rather far-off,” said Sarah Woodward, a 20-year-old studying business and French at Glasgow’s Strathclyde University, “When I said I was going to China a lot of people were like ‘Oh my God!’, like it was scary or something.”
Later, at a Chinese banquet where the students honed their shaky chopstick skills, they also hinted at the somewhat uncomfortable sense that China might soon be where the jobs are.
Louise Goodurn, a 20-year old studying marketing at Reading, admitted that she had come to look at China after trying and failing to get work experience in London at a time when companies are cutting back.
“It was so competitive and I didn’t get anywhere,” she said, “So I thought I’d come out here and gain some experience learning how to interact with Chinese people and see how marketing works differently out here. I’d definitely consider working abroad for a while.”
Her impressive determination was echoed by Iain MacFadyen, a 23-year old mechanical engineering graduate from Strathclyde with a passion for greentech and renewables, who said he’d have loved to score a job with Shell or BP, but that didn’t happen.
“If you’ve got good qualifications you can get a job, but it’s much harder to get the job that you really want,” he said, draining not one but two glasses of beer in a double ganbei! – or ‘bottoms up’.
“The job market it’s extremely competitive at the moment. I know very clearly what sector I want to work in and if that means going abroad to somewhere like China, then that’s what I’ll do.”
But more than determination, or indeed fear of a cooling job market back home, the over-riding emotion among this future generation of British businessmen was sheer excitement at the possibilities and opportunities that China presents.
“The reasons for wanting to come to China are so clear to me,” enthused Samuel Carter, 22, who will graduate in business and finance from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh next year.
“China was the only country that escaped the crunch and it’s still growing so fast. They have big plans for the financial sector down in Shanghai and one day I’d like to be a part of that.
“I have a friend who’s studying architecture and he’s the same. He wants to go to Shanghai because he says that’s where all the coolest buildings are being made right now. Everyone wants a piece of the action.”
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Gender pay gap to be disclosed by law

The Government’s pay gap measure is likely to be implemented next April under the forthcoming Equality Act.
Public sector employers will also be made to disclose other diversity statistics under the Act, such as the number of disabled or ethnic minority staff employed by the organisation, although the Equality and Human Rights Commission is due to outline exactly what is expected.
However, under the proposals being consulted upon, the Government has decided to abandon a former obligation that private-sector employers bidding for public-sector contracts should publish their diversity statistics. Dropping the requirement, introduced under Labour, should bring qualified relief to the business world, which has that collecting the information would be costly and bureacractic.
An Equalities Office spokesman said the Government was committed to a “hands-off” approach to regulation.
But he could not confirm whether private sector employers would be subject to the same public sector rules on disclosing the earnings gap.
A clause within the Equality Act would allow the Government to impose mandatory pay audits in the private sector from 2013, but so far the coalition has “not decided” whether to bring this into effect, he said.
Find IT jobs at Telegraph Jobs
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Equal pay still 57 years away

This is despite a 2.8pc growth in pay packets for women over the last year, compared to 2.3pc on average for men.
Petra Wilton, head of policy at the CMI, said: “Girls born this year will face the probability of working for around 40 years in the shadow of unequal pay. The prospect of continued decades of pay inequality cannot be allowed to become reality.”
Ms Wilton called on the Government to “take greater steps” to enforce pay equality by naming and shaming organisations who fail to pay male and female staff fairly.
She added: “It’s not just Government that needs to act. Competitive businesses need to attract diverse workforces and appeal to the most talented employees. To do this managers and employers need to recruit from a wide talent pool but they cannot expect to attract the UK’s best female talent if they continue to undervalue it.”
The IT industry was the worst offender, the survey showed, with women on average getting paid £17,736 per year less than men. The pharmaceutical industry generally paid its female workers £14,018 less than males.
Across the regions, women in the Midlands fared the worst, taking home £10,434 less than men doing the same jobs, the survey, carried out in conjunction with XpertHR, showed. Even the smallest pay gap, in the North East, stood at £8,955.
The Equal Pay Act, designed to eradicate gender inequality, was introduced in 1970. Four decades after the legislation, the national gender pay gap stands at 16.4pc, according to the Office for National Statistics.
In certain sectors, such as finance and law, women working full time can earn just over half the amount men get.
The Government’s new Equality Act, due to come into force this October, is expected to outlaw gagging clauses written into workers’ contracts that prevent colleagues from discussing pay and bonuses.
Theresa May, the Home Secretary, said the move will bring an end to the “culture of pay secrecy” that has dominated the workplace for decades.
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North-South dividing line slips southwards as recession widens economic gap

By Arthur Martin
Last updated at 12:02 AM on 16th August 2010

The traditional North/ South divide is creeping further south as the impact of the recession widens the economic gap in Britain, an academic claims.
The two halves of Britain are split in the study by a diagonal line bisecting the country from near Gloucester in the South West up to Grimsby in the North East.
Analysis of average incomes, house prices, life expectancy and levels of education shows that the gap between the two regions has grown wider in the recession.
The divide splits the nation in two, with no Midlands, so residents of Birmingham, Worcester and Nottingham are classed as northerners because they generally earn less, die at least a year earlier and get a worse education for their children ‘Britain is pulling itself apart’ than their southern counterparts.
A tale of two nations: Britain is split in the study by a diagonal line bisecting the country from near Gloucester in the South West up to Grimsby in the North East

But as Government cuts are introduced, towns marginally on the south side of the divide, such as Leicester, Warwick and Lincoln, could begin to struggle and be pushed on to the northern side.
Danny Dorling, professor of human geography at Sheffield University, who led the research, said: ‘Britain is a country pulling itself apart. ‘The North/South divide is no longer a vague idea.
‘We have enough information on life chances, health and wealth to say where the line lies and what is happening to it.
‘The recession is exacerbating these differences and I suspect the dividing line will also move southwards as the Government’s cuts take effect.’
The line may prove a surprise to those living in the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire, which the study deems northern, especially when The new North South divide Gap is widening… and edging down the map the city of Lincoln, which is more than 100 miles to the north-east, is classed as southern.
Some experts believed that the banking crisis would narrow regional differences by hitting financial sector workers who live in London and the South East hardest.
But the government bailout of banks has greatly benefited the South as the money has trickled out into the wider regional economy.
Residents in Birmingham (pictured), Worcester and Nottingham may well be surprised to learn they are being classed as northerners

South of the diagonal divide, people in towns such as Cambridge and Aldershot live four or five years longer than in some of their northern equivalents, researchers found.
‘Southern’ children also have a better chance of attending one of the top 20 universities in the country. Professor Dorling will publish his research in a new book, The Economic Geography Of The UK.
The decline of manufacturing and the growth of London’s financial sector mean that a key factor in deciding where the North/South divide lies is simply travelling time from the capital.
Professor Dorling says that anywhere more than two hours from the capital is likely to be ‘northern’, with the exception of areas such as Devon and Cornwall, which are buoyed by tourism.
Meanwhile, a separate study has found that many of the UK’s major towns and cities on the northern side of the divide have deteriorated into jobless ghettos with a quarter or more out of work.
It found that the former steel and coal town of Merthyr Tydfil in Wales topped the league table with more than 30 per cent unemployed.
Liverpool came second with 26.8 per cent out of work. The figures also support the new North/South dividing line. Nine out of the top ten ‘jobless ghettos’ are on the divide’s northern side.
Only Hastings in Kent, with 24.3 per cent out of work, creeps into the list. The two studies lay bare the massive task ministers face in reviving Britain’s failing towns by getting people back to work.
Employment Minister Chris Grayling claimed too many healthy adults in ‘unemployment blackspots’ were treating benefit dependency as a way of life.

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School leavers ‘not interested’ in engineering career

Centrica said the results were a “huge concern” because an estimated 70pc of the UK’s current nuclear workforce could be retired by 2025.
Sam Laidlaw, chief executive, said: “The Government plans for 400,000 jobs to be created in UK green industries by 2015. Yet, unless we convince young people of the exciting and rewarding careers available in energy today, the UK will lack the skills to take advantage of the green agenda.”
He added: “Ensuring we have the expertise and skills needed to meet the challenges it brings is the responsibility of the industry, the education sector and parents. Working together, we must act urgently to address this impending skills gap as we seek to lead the transition to a low-carbon future.”
National Grid agreed the Government should step up efforts to tackle skills shortages in science, technology, engineering and maths.
Jon Butterworth, operations director, said: “I am personally worried about the quality and quantity of young people studying … engineering.”
He added: “National Grid would like to see industry and Government working consistently on a campaign to inspire people to acquire the skills needed to be part of a low-carbon future. We need to counter stereotypical images that engineering is boring or geeky. We need young people to want to get involved.”
A number of energy companies contacted agreed. An EDF Energy spokesman said: “It’s crucial that we make science, technology and engineering appealing again so the future workforce has the skills needed. A large part of EDF Energy’s recruitment challenge will be in the search for a wide range of engineering, nuclear science and technology skills.”
Dave Newborough, head of HR at E.ON, said: “We have a huge engineering skills challenge over the coming years.”
A spokesman for the Department for Education said: “We need to keep pace with businesses’ demands so qualifications remain strong and we equip young people with the skills the economy needs.”
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JUmp in exports sees UK trade gap narrow in June

Last updated at 1:22 PM on 10th August 2010

A rise in exports during June saw Britain’s trade deficit narrow more than expected to a four-month low.
The Office for National Statistics has revealed that the goods gap shrank to £7.401bn from £8.028bn in May, after analysts had forecast a drop to £7.8bn.
The total trade deficit, which includes services, narrowed to £3.260bn from a 22-month high of 3.818bn in May.

Export drive: Hopes rise that a re-balancing of the economy could still happen

Britain’s trade performance has been disappointing of late, with sterling’s slide since 2007 having failed to offset weaker demand from Britain’s trading partners.
Tuesday’s figures have rekindled hopes that a long-awaited re-balancing of the economy could still happen, although analysts were reluctant to read too much into one month’s release of what is often a volatile series.
Peter Dixon, an economist at Commerzbank, said: ‘It’s certainly a major improvement on what we’ve seen in recent months.
‘I guess it’s an indication that the UK economy is getting a bit of an uplift from exports, but also as the economy slows a bit, there’s a bit less imports.’
Stronger oil and chemical exports and the reduced imports of cars drove the improvement in the global goods trade deficit.
Overall, the value of UK goods exports rose 4.3 per cent on the month, while the value of goods imported into Britain rose 1.0 per cent.

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Hester warns of prolonged RBS recovery

By Simon DukeLast updated at 10:40 PM on 6th August 2010

Royal Bank of Scotland boss Stephen Hester warned he still has a mountain to climb to nurse the bailed-out lender back to health even after it scraped back into profit in the first half.
Unveiling operating earnings of more than £1billion, the RBS chief warned that the overhaul of the crippled Edinburgh giant is far from secure, notwithstanding the mini-revival in its fortunes.
‘The restructuring is proceeding according to plan but there’s plenty left to do,’ he said. ‘The race is not yet run.’

Back to black: RBS reported pre-tax operating earnings of £1.1billion in the six months to June

Hester spoke as RBS capped off a week of resurgent results across the financial sector with a welcome return to the black for state-controlled RBS.
The group turned in pre-tax operating earnings of £1.1billion between January and June - up from a paltry £15million last year - as its losses from soured loans shrank amid a bounce in the economy. 
 

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Ban on gagging clauses in Equality Act ‘may have no effect’

However, an employment lawyer has warned that gagging clauses “are not banned per se” within the Act and can still be legally written into a contract. According to James Cox, partner at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, the only right employees will have to discuss their remuneration is if they are concerned they might have been discriminated against.
“The Act is not the death of the gagging clause. If an employee wants to tell you their pay, or you want to ask a colleague about their pay, you are only protected if you are doing so to establish whether you have been discriminated against,” he said.
“If two people are talking about pay, doing the same job, but they share the same characteristics – for example, they are both white men – they will not be entitled to discuss pay or bonuses. Neither will a woman be entitled to ask a man doing the same role what he earns out of curiosity – it has to be because the woman is seeking a pay disclosure in relation to discrimination.”
On average, men receive five times more in bonuses than women in the City, on top of a 39pc pay gap, according to the Equality and Human Rights Commission.
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