Are you being paid enough?

Great article from Marketing magazine that I thought I'd share with you...

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.

So why is this? And more importantly what can we do about it? A very good investment-banker friend of mine believes, quite simply, that women continue to be paid less because they are poor negotiators. That, in his line of work, they duck out of the theatre of negotiation at the first punch.

While a (male) CMO chimes in that women ‘get too caught up in the demands of doing their day to day to day jobs to focus on themselves and negotiate properly.’ (Imagine that, focusing on your job, what an error…)

But is this really fair? Is it really that women are bad negotiators or are they coming up against less the glass ceiling, but more an invisible wall which remains rife with sexist assumptions?

I was once offered a promotion and when I enquired about the salary was told ‘It is not about the money’ (I should add this was not at a charity). How do you negotiate with that? I can’t say it’s a response that any of my male colleagues have encountered.

The experience gave me the same kind of sinking feeling as the latest CIM data. We all know the gender pay gap exists but the biggest frustration is the continued lack of transparency which allows it to go unchecked.

Do you think you are being paid less than your male counterparts? The fact is that you probably are but you will find yourself facing less of a glass ceiling, more of a brick wall when it comes to finding the facts. Many companies offer no salary data at all – presumably because they would have some difficulty in justifying the glaring pay differences that exist between men and women.

So what can be done about it? This is a role for the chief executive of every single company in the UK, public or private. In the age of ‘authentic leadership’ where consumers are demanding trust and transparency in droves the buck stops with them, they need to be asking for, sharing and acting on this data.