Businesses need to engage men in the conversation about equal pay and embrace the changing ways in which people want to work if the gender pay gap is ever to be closed, senior women in the advertising industry declared this week.
“I fundamentally believe that we can’t close the gap on our own – we have to get men to help us,” Katie Mackay-Sinclair, CSO of Mother, said during a WACL Gather panel on Thursday (May 23).
“That’s the only way to accelerate change, from my perspective.”
Last month, it was revealed that the median gender pay gap across UK agencies in advertising had increased 1.1%, from 16.9% in 2017/18 to 18% in 2018/19.
According to the Office of National Statistics, the average pay gap for full-time employees stands at 8.6%. However, the gap among all employees widens to 17.9%, which the ONS attributes to a higher number of women working in part-time jobs – often due to childcare – which are paid on average at a lower hourly rate than full-time jobs.
Lisa Thomas, global brand director at Virgin, said that engaging men in the conversation about equal pay means ensuring that the same opportunities for flexible working and parental leave available to women are made available to men, and normalising men taking up those benefits.
“[The question] is how we create the opportunity for the gender pay gap to be closed,” she said. “[We have to] make it okay for men to take a fifth day to do something else.”
Speaking to Mediatel, Thomas said that ultimately, the work place will eventually change “whether men like it or not”.
“I don’t think it’s going to happen overnight, but the reality is that it’s more than just [saying] we need gender parity. It’s much more about how we create a world in which gender parity is possible, and everyone within that needs to change and think about a new working generation.”
Thomas added that “younger” men in organisations, who have grown up in a “different environment”, are more open to the benefits of working part-time to pursue other interests.
“There is also a greater understanding of the need for more balance in the workplace,” she said.
Virgin itself has a “way to go” in terms of the pay gap, Thomas said, but the business is working on it by thinking about how it can support employees to enable them to progress through the business, diversifying at recruitment level, offering an “incredibly flexible” working policy and providing “good” parental leave for both men and women.
“Our take up, like many businesses, is low with men for both flexible working and parental leave, so we are looking at ways that we can turn that into a tangible benefit across the organisation for both women and men,” she said.
