Fine speeches won't bring equal pay

I've listened to 30 years of excuses for practices that will be remedied only when governments get tough with business

It is hard to think of a set of legislation that has failed so comprehensively as the equal pay and opportunity laws passed with such a fanfare in the 1970s. It happened before I entered the exciting world of work, armed only with a degree in Latin and mind-boggling ambition, but it was almost as if they had been designed expressly for me. I can still remember the headlines suggesting that discrimination against women at work would soon be a thing of the past and nothing would stand in the way of women (like me) from working-class backgrounds.

Dream on. Three decades later, a Trade and Industry Secretary is still addressing high-powered seminars in Downing Street, trying to find answers to very old problems. Yesterday Patricia Hewitt came up with a raft of proposals on maternity leave, the pay gap and the glass ceiling, and in interviews beforehand she said all the right things. "What we are talking about here," she argued "is the fact that about six out of 10 women work in jobs that are low-paid and typically dominated by women, so we have got very segregated employment."

She also declared that this situation reflected "very old-fashioned and stereotypical ideas about the appropriate jobs for women, or indeed for men".

The Government had made progress, she went on, but the seminar heard a mass of statistics that make lamentable reading for working women and girls who are about to enter the workforce for the first time. Here is a selection: there is still a 19.5 per cent pay gap between the average hourly earnings of men and women, rising to 40 per cent for part-timers, while teenage girls earn 16 per cent less than their male counterparts.

The first of those figures, the fact that women in hourly employment still earn only four-fifths of a male wage, is one of the most powerful arguments against the notion that we do not need feminism any longer in this country. How can women be equal when we have to pay rent, mortgages, council tax and everything else with so much less money in our pay packets than men? (I have been arguing for some time, only partly in jest, that if we get only four-fifths of the pay, our bills should be reduced accordingly.)

The figure has remained more or less static for years, seemingly impervious to everything governments have done to address it. Not, of course, that Conservative governments ever did that much, even when their own leader was a woman. Ensuring that women get equal pay is exactly the kind of intervention business leaders see as evidence of the interfering nanny state, which is what Conservative newspapers complained about back in the heady days when equality legislation was first contemplated.

They need not have worried. Yesterday we heard a lot about what Ms Hewitt and the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, intend to do for working women - extending paid maternity leave beyond the existing six months is the headline-grabber - but the list of problems remains horribly familiar. And it seems reasonable to ask why a Labour Government which is committed to gender equality, and includes a record number of female MPs, has so signally failed to remedy such basic injustices after seven years in power.

We have been promised career advisers who will offer schoolgirls more information about traditionally male jobs; a new drive to increase the number of female entrepreneurs starting up their own businesses; funding for universities to help female science and engineering graduates find jobs; and education "taster courses" for men and women in non-traditional subjects, such as plumbing for women and child care for men. (Look out for hysterical headlines in the press about the Government encouraging paedophiles to work with children next time there is a quiet news day.)

It all sounds lovely but also very New Labour, in the sense that it isn't going to frighten, or indeed require very much at all, of employers. It is all very well for Mr Brown to confess that "we are barely at the foothills of meeting the challenge" and Ms Hewitt to echo his comment that the Government has not done enough to satisfy the "yearning" expressed by the public in 1997 for a different kind of politics. "It was perhaps a rather vague and generalised desire and perhaps that is one of the reasons why, I think, it is true to say we have disappointed that," she said on Radio 4's Today programme.

Well, I can tell Ms Hewitt and Mr Brown that I have had a very specific yearning throughout my adult life, which is to see a Labour Government take measures that would end the scandalous pay gap between men and women once and for all. The various pieces of equal pay and opportunities legislation have been ineffective not just because women are pushed into low-paid occupations, but because it is so difficult to satisfy the conditions laid down in those laws.

Time and again employers are gently chided by ministers, as though unequal pay and the bunching of women in low-paid occupations has almost nothing to do with companies or their hiring policies. Yet the Government can encourage teenage girls to think about becoming plumbers or engineers as much as it likes, and without much cost, but it will achieve very little if jobs are not open to them when they come to enter the workforce.

Blaming the victim is always a popular pastime and I have listened to 30 years of excuses to explain discriminatory pay and hiring practices that will be remedied only when governments get tough with businesses. This is not exactly a popular suggestion to make to the present administration, with its substantial record of sucking up to industry, but there are compelling economic arguments for doing it.

I wouldn't describe it as a rallying cry but the Equal Opportunities Commission has just pointed out that "British productivity is suffering because working women's skills are not being used to the full". Even more to the point, the looming pensions crisis we are all supposed to be losing sleep over will be caused, in no small part, by the fact that most women earn too little to save substantial amounts for their retirement.

Women in their 60s, 70s and older are far more likely to be dependent on State benefits, which effectively means that governments are subsidising mean employers who discriminate against female employees. That argument alone - and female poverty in old age is something we should take seriously - should convince the Government that finally achieving equal pay should be at the top of its agenda when it comes to drawing up the next election manifesto.

If it is not, it is reasonable to conclude that this Government, like its predecessors, is more afraid of offending business than women voters of all ages.

I would never have believed it if anyone had told me three decades ago that women would still be waiting for equal pay in the 21st century. It is one of the great political scandals, a systemic injustice that speaks volumes about the value accorded to women in Britain today. Frankly, I have had enough of seminars and polite discussions: how much longer do we have to wait?