Morning Sunday! While you're waking up bleary eyed, lounging in bed on the last day of the weekend before it's back to tube hell and sitting at your desk tomorrow morning we thought we'd bring you some motivating news. Yup, as if dragging yourself into workisn't hard enough, it doesn't help to know that you’re breaking your balls for less money than that bloke sitting next to you. Just because he has a penis. And that it's apparently going to take another 75 years before women start earning as much as those who can stand up while peeing. So, just in time for your grandkids, then.
A new report released by Oxfam this week reveals that it will take another 75 years for the gender pay gap to close, as long as it continues to ebb away at its current pace. That’s another 75 years of women being outearned by men at a current rate of 80p to their £1. Of effectively working for free from the start of November. Ridic. Especially considering the fact women still outperform men in nearly every academic stage.
And the thing is, it's not just women who would stand to gain by closing the gap, Oxfam’s Executive Director Winnie Byanyima explains: "If women’s paid employment rates were the same as men’s, the USA’s GDP would increase by nine per cent, the Eurozone’s by 13 per cent and Japan’s by 16 per cent." So, it's a win, win, then.
Our sister folk at Grazia have launched a petition calling for a piece of Labour legislation – Section 78 of the Equality Act 2010 – to be enforced. The legislation requires employers, with staff of more than 250 people to annually publish details about the hourly pay of men and women they employ. The legislation would mean total transparency about wages and how they’re affected by gender, which would hopefully be enough of an encouragement for companies to speed up this pay gap nonsense.
We're adding our names to Grazia’s petition here. Are you?
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Picture: Marc Davies
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.