Take a look at the person sitting next to you. The chances are you know the intimate details of their lives, from where they shop to when they last had an argument with their significant other. In fact you probably spend more time with them than your family. (As the Chartered Institute of Marketing’s latest Marketing Rewards salary reveals 26% of marketing professionals at director level are working more than 50 hours a week.) Yet the chances are you don’t know how much they earn.
The culture of secrecy that surrounds the British workplace has made it virtually impossible to establish if we are being paid enough, or at least if our salaries are in-line with the market.
For women this culture of secrecy has profound implications in maintaining the disgraceful gender pay gap that, rather than becoming the relic of a bygone age it rightly is, is actually thriving. According to the CIM Croner Marketing Rewards survey the gender pay gap for marketing directors is now 16.3% up from 2005, where women were paid 2.8% less than male CMOs.
The Equal Opportunities Commission calculated that, over the course of her working life, the gender pay gap would lose an average woman working full-time a staggering £330,000 (or £210,000 after income tax and National Insurance contributions) Astonishingly, according to Unison, the UK is ranked 78th in the world’s pay inequality league, behind countries such as Malawi and Egypt.
