Workplace flexibility required to address gender pay gap

To address Ireland’s gender pay gap, women must be given “realistic opportunities” to take up senior roles within organisations, a goal that will require a greater degree of flexibility from employers around working arrangements to achieve.

On International Women’s Day, women in Irish business are flagging the changes they believe necessary to improve representation in the workplace and quality of work life for women.

Among other things, Ireland should consider “following the UK’s lead” and trial the four-day working week concept, said Marian Ryan, director at Taxback.com.

“Four-day weeks have been found to boost worker productivity, improve the work-life balance of workers and, crucially, address gender inequalities,” she said. “In recent research we conducted, we found that seven in 10 respondents would greatly welcome a four-day week. If a four-day week were to be trialled in Ireland, we would likely see more women being able to hold on to full-time jobs and a more equal sharing of childcare responsibilities between men and women.”

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Published last week, a report by PwC indicated that Ireland has an average gender pay gap of 12.6 per cent across the organisations that published pay gap reports last December. This compared with the most recently available data on Ireland’s national pay gap of 11.3 per cent (2019) and a European Union average gender pay gap of 13 per cent (2020).

Ms Ryan said that to address Ireland’s lingering gender pay gap, women must be “given realistic opportunities” to take up senior roles.

She said: “This means that senior roles must be available to those who require flexible working arrangements, which is what parents need when juggling the demands of work and children. As we all know, often the primary responsibility for childcare falls on the shoulders of women and so without flexible working arrangements, many jobs simply won’t be feasible for women, whether those roles are senior or not. An employer that professes to offer equal opportunities and pay to women and men is simply not doing so if flexible working arrangements are not available.”

The gender pay gap is also evident in pensions, said Janita Lanigan, a senior consultant with insurance broker Lockton Ireland. She said “the pension pots of Irish men aged 60 to 65 are on average almost twice as high as those of Irish women of the same age”, pointing to research by the Economic and Social Research Institute that indicated a 35 per cent average gap between Irish men and women’s pension in 2019.

“Interrupted careers paths when women, as they so often do, step back from work to look after children, have a major bearing on pension planning,” Ms Lanigan said. Time taken out of the workforce to care for children is also time lost paying into a pension – as well as receiving any employer top-ups to that pension.”

While auto-enrolment in pension schemes should help, she said “employers and the Government also have a role to educate women about pension planning and to inform them about the options open to them to boost their retirement income”.

Emma Conlon, director of operations at Excel recruitment, said that more understanding around gender-specific health issues is needed in the workplace.

“The many gender-specific health issues regularly experience[d] by women as a result of their hormones, either menstrual, menopausal, or otherwise, should be treated with the same validity and understanding as having a stomach bug or the flu, which can be just as debilitating,” she said.

“Women should not be penalised in their career progression for being afflicted by burdensome hormonal symptoms.”