Coronavirus is an unprecedented challenge to equality 50 years on from equal pay

Half a century ago, the Equal Pay Act was passed into law. It was a watershed moment for women in the workplace: legislation which finally said that women must be paid the same as men for doing the same work.

This landmark in our history was carried through by heroes of the Labour movement: the inimitable Barbara Castle, Labour’s Secretary of State for Employment and Productivity, the 187 women sewing-machinists at Ford Dagenham who went on strike against sex discrimination in job grading in 1968, and the trade unionists who founded the National Joint Action Campaign Committee for Women’s Equal Rights.

50 years on, gender inequality is still a major problem across Britain’s workforce. An updated equal pay law has now been incorporated into the Equality Act, but the gender pay gap still stands at 17.3%. In government, Labour closed the pay gap by 7.7 per cent but under the Conservatives this progress has stagnated, with just a 2.4 per cent decrease in pay inequality since 2011.

The Coronavirus crisis represents an unprecedented challenge to gender equality as the gap between women and men looks set to widen even further. According to the IFS, women are one third more likely to work in industries that have been shut down including retail, restaurants and hospitality as a result of this crisis than men. While some of these sectors are set to reopen in June, others such as hairdressing and beauty, which are 83% and 94% predominantly female respectively, will have to wait even longer before they re-open.

The Government has failed to publish data on the number of women who have been furloughed or made redundant as a result of Covid-19. However, IFS figures published this week reveal that mothers are more likely to be furloughed than fathers during this crisis and 47% more likely to permanently lose their jobs. Some pregnant women, who were sent home from work on unpaid or sick leave at the beginning of this crisis, are being left without an income or access to the Government’s furlough scheme.

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The reality of this is that Covid-19 could turn the clock back more than a decade in the fight for gender pay equality. This crisis looks like it could undo what progress has been made for women over the past fifty years.

But the Government’s recent decision to suspend gender pay gap reporting for employers for the rest of this year as a result of Covid-19 does not reflect the urgency of this crisis. Every effort must be made to tackle pay inequality during this crisis, and gender pay gap reporting must not fall to the wayside.

Women represent the majority of our keyworkers, and in many ways have been the heroes of this crisis: the teachers supporting our children, the NHS staff looking after those who are sick and the care-workers supporting elderly and disabled people to live independently.

Seven out of ten social care-workers, the majority of whom are women, are paid less than £10 an hour. Women in these jobs continue to be undervalued and underpaid. It is time the Government paid care workers a decent living wage. 

This Anniversary should be more than a moment for reflection on what has, and hasn’t, changed over the last fifty years; it should be a call to action. If the Government is serious about tackling the gender pay gap, it must develop a gendered response to this crisis which aims to mitigate the impact of Covid-19 on women. That is why Labour has backed the Fawcett Society’s ‘Right to Know’ campaign that would give women the right to know what a male colleague doing the same work is paid. 

50 years on from the historic Equal Pay Act. We must do everything in our power to ensure that during this crisis, pay equality is not forgotten.