Women can contribute to gender pay gap with their choice of university subjects

The movie Hidden Figures starred Taraji P. Henson as a woman whose mathematical skills were used in the early US space program. Picture: Twentieth Century Fox

As required by law, British companies have this month been revealing the gap between what they pay men and women. The exercise has produced some pretty startling numbers. Snap, a social media platform, for instance, pays the average woman 53 per cent less than it pays the average man. At Goldman Sachs, the figure was 37 per cent. According to analysis by Bloomberg, the national gap is 9.8 per cent – slightly higher than in 2017, when the government first started requiring this data to be published. Outrageous, no?

No, actually, I don’t think it is. Behind those figures lie some complex issues about the way work has changed and what people want, most of which do not reflect especially badly on either the companies or the people.

When I started work in the 1980s, there was plenty of good old-fashioned sexism in the workplace, which manifested itself in the pinching of bottoms, the exclusion of women from the boardroom and discriminatory pay. It had been illegal to pay women less than men for doing “work of equal value” since the passage of the Equal Pay Act in 1970, but the act was hard to enforce, culture hard to change and women reluctant to demand pay increases.

A lot has changed. These days, any bottom-pincher would end up in the corporate equivalent of the stocks, possibly with a charge of sexual assault to boot. Women get bodily dragged into the boardroom by chairmen desperate to fulfil voluntary quotas so that they don’t get publicly shamed. And recent research shows that women are just as likely to stomp into their boss’s office and demand a pay rise as men are. That may be in part why, according to Korn Ferry, a recruitment firm, about 1 per cent of the pay difference in Britain is explained by unequal pay for equal work.

You might argue that even if men and women are paid the same for the same work these days, the fact that they do different sorts of jobs proves that discrimination persists. But the difference in the jobs that people do are largely a consequence of the choices they make, which start long before bosses have a chance of favouring one sex over another.

First, there’s the choice of what to study. Although, as we all know, British girls are grinding boys’ faces into the playground when it comes to A-level results, they’re much less likely to study maths, further maths or physics – the top three subjects that correlate with high earnings among 24-year-olds.

And when they get to university, they’re much less likely to study economics, computing and engineering – three of the six subjects that provide the highest return on the cash they’re forking out for their degrees. (Women are a bit more likely to study law and medicine, two other high-earners; business is evenly divided.) Two thirds of creative arts students are female; two thirds of economics students are male.

Women are more likely to study medicine and law than economics and engineering. Picture: iStock

I have no data to prove it but I promise you that not many of those economics students chose the subject because they thought their degree would be fun. They did it because they thought it would help them get a well-paid, possibly interesting, job. And they were right. The returns on a degree in the creative arts – what a graduate earns compared with a non-graduate – are 7.2 per cent; the returns on an economics degree are 10 times higher. So if the economics students sacrificed current fun for future success, they deserve their extra pay.

As for choice of degree, I think women’s decisions are regrettable. When it comes to their choices at work, I’m not so sure.

Talking to my daughters about possible careers, I suggested banking. One of them shut down that conversation before it started. “Do you know the hours those people work? I want a life.” I kept shtum, which experience has taught me is wise when I feel a comment about my children’s values hovering on the tip of my tongue.

A chat with a banker friend of theirs made me glad I didn’t rush to judgment. He works from 8am until 11pm on weekdays; if there’s a deal on, he’ll work weekends as well. He has plenty of money; he earns lots and has no time to spend it, but no life. Two thirds of his team is male, he says.

Law, a popular subject for women looking to get ahead, comes with extensive working hours. Picture: iStock

Conversations with others in banking, law and consultancy suggest to me that the hours these people are required to work have lengthened since my generation started out in the workplace. It makes sense – globalisation has intensified competition between the top firms, and competition forces the pace of work – but it’s also bonkers. And if women are unwilling to participate in that particular form of craziness, I’m on their side.

Motherhood forces another set of choices on women. By the time they’re in their thirties, women’s earnings are falling behind men’s because motherhood leads them to take career breaks and work fewer hours than men do. Statutory paternity leave has shifted that a bit, as the responsibilities of child care are more evenly shared these days, but the burden – or pleasure – is still mostly the woman’s.

The more even it is, as far as I’m concerned, the better. But I wouldn’t discourage parents of either sex from taking lots of time off to look after their children; and if women are more inclined to than men, well, that’s their choice.

Sheryl Sandberg, Meta’s chief operating officer, famously instructed women to “lean in”, meaning that in meetings and in their working lives as a whole they need to push themselves forward in the way that men naturally do. I’m with her, by and large. But if there are times in their lives when they want to lean back from work and into home life, and if they’re less inclined to sacrifice their lives to high-pressure jobs, then good luck to them.

THE TIMES