How Countries Are Grappling With The Gender Pay Gap

has the UK come closer to closing that gap? How does this compare to the United States, and what are other countries doing to give equal pay for equal work. Welcome to Benchmark. I'm Scott Lanman, economics editor with Bloomberg News and Washington. So globally women make less than men, and both in the United States and the UK women make a little under twenty less than men, but some countries are working to close the gender pay gap. Here

to tell us more is Bloomberg reporter Rebecca Greenfield. Rebecca is also the host of The Paycheck, a limited series podcast that has just published its grand finale. Rebecca, welcome back to the show. Thank you so much for having me so. First of all, Rebecca, congratulations on finishing up

the Paycheck. It's a fascinating podcast. It's really enjoyable. I really liked it, and you and your colleagues just did an amazing job, you know, taking an issue that numbers the kind of stuff that I covered on a day to day basis on the Economy team, and yet you know, really going into the stories behind it, making it come to life and finding so many angles that you know that I learned a lot, and I think anyone who listens to it will learn a lot too. So congratulations

on it. Thank you so much. That's that's really it's really nice to hear that. So first of all, I'm just wondering why did you decide to do the podcast. So a lot of people know this big headline number, right that women make less than men, but we really wanted to get beyond that. We wanted to get into why that happens now, the history of it, and maybe

even some solutions. So I think if you can come out of the show just knowing one thing that you didn't know before about the gender pay gap, then we've done our job, and I think most people find more than one now, Rebecca, this was also had a personal angle for you too. Can you tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, so in the first episode, I tell a story about my life. It's about my mom and she sued her employers for paid discrimination when I

was in middle school. So we tell the story about that, about how she was a surgeon and she found out that she made five times less than her colleagues for a certain work she was doing, and she sued and it was almost a ten year battle which ended up getting her a settlement. But we also talked about how kind of it affected her personally. She talks about it as her third job and as someone who grew up in that time, how having a mom like this made

me view the world. Yeah, it was just a really powerful way to to start the podcast, and you know, we all really appreciate you sharing that with the public and the whole world. Basically for us today, I wanted to also start by having you set up a clip from the Paycheck. So tell me first, who is Carrie Crazy?

So Kara Gracy was one of four international editors at the BBC the British podcasters, So she had a really pretty big important job and she worked at the BBC for all of her career over thirty years, and she moved to China a few years ago for this prestigious position. And then this summer everything kind of came crashing down when the BBC had to disclose the pay of its top talent, and she found out she was making fifty percent less than the men doing the same jobs. So

she resigned. All right, let's hear that clip. I was for four years leading our China coverage. That's carry testifying in front of British Parliament a few months ago. There are significant risks in our China coverage. I dealt with them. I did a good job twice. I've been a world Television society. Normal need for the BBC for specialist journalists of the year. It's just and you know what, I

get me emotional. But what I really want to say about this equal pay problem at the BBC is what it forces the BBC to do is to retrofit in defense, you know, defenses just to the cations of the indefensible. The BBC gets most of its funding from the public. Its newest charter required the broadcaster to reveal how much it pays its top talent. The government thought that people should know where their money was going. It turned out it was mostly going to men. The BBC had a

wide pay gap at its most senior levels. The top man made over two million pounds, the highest paid woman just a quarter of that. So Rebecca, this wasn't just about the BBC. Right. When did the law to disclose how much British companies pay men and women go into effect? Right, So the BBC was required to disclose pay of its top talent. But a separate law went into effect in the UK April of this year where companies with over two hundred fifty employees had to publicly disclose their gender

pay gaps. So that's the difference unadjusted raw difference between what men and women make in a given company. And this went into effect April of this year. And what was the BBC's response to this controversy. So the BBC says that you know, it's working with a gender pay gap like the rest of other companies, and they're committed to gender equality and they resolved a lot of the equal pay complaints and they say they want to close their gender pay gap. By Gracy thinks it's not enough.

She testified in front of Parliament and said that you know, she they offered her raise, but it still wasn't equal, and she just wants to be valued for who she is. So there's kind of this tension happening. It sounds like we could come back in and have another look at this whole issue. What about the other companies that have

reported in the UK? What have those reports shown? So over ten thousand companies have reported, and basically the majority of companies and the majority of industries have found that women make less than men. I mean, it's not a surprise, but some of the pay gaps are really big. So Goldman Sacks, which is another company that we feature in one of our episodes. In the first episode, it has like over at pay gap, So it's like a really

stark difference between what men and women are making. What it doesn't show these numbers don't show is like why that's happening generally. It just means women are holding most of the lowest paying jobs and then companies kind of have to decide where to go from there. So it's really interesting that the UK has this law and all these companies have given these numbers, But is there any kind of enforcement mechanism for having such a big pay gap and penalties or anything like that. Or is it

just about shaming these companies into doing something. Yeah, exactly. We we call it a shaming initiative in the episode. It really is kind of this idea that in theory, if your company has a huge pay gap, you're gonna not want to look bad and try to close it. I also think it's more of a diagnostic tool at this point. You know, we're trying to see what the problem is and tease it out from this big national number we're normally hearing. But yeah, there's no enforcement for

closing the pay gap or anything like that. It's really a blunt instrument. Talk about blunt. I mean I found a lot of the a lot of your reporting to be very blunt and the interviews to be blunt in how companies are facing up to these issues. One segment I found very fascinating was a woman who was the CEO of a bank in the UK talk about the pay gap at her company, and it turned out that a lot of men were at the higher levels and women were at the on the lower rungs of that bank.

Can you tell us a little bit about that and was that segment challenging to produce in any way. Yeah, so we I believe you're talking about the segment we did with the CEO of Virgin Money. Jane and Gaudia talked to us and yeah, they're big financial services company in the UK and they reported a thirty three percent pay gap, so that's big and bigger than the national average.

And when they dug into it, they found that it's because women are generally clustered in these customer service jobs, which are the lower paying jobs, and men generally have the highest paying jobs. So, you know, how do they fix it? And yeah, it was really interesting to hear the CEO talk about it because she was saying how she, you know, needs to get more men to want to

do these jobs. But you could see how that would be hard because first of all, they're not very well paid, but also there's just this idea that this is a woman's job and so far they really haven't had much luck. But I also found it fascinating from the perspective it that you had a woman CEO talk about this and how difficult it was from her perspective even to overcome this issue. I mean, did didn't you find that with

with other women that you had interviewed also. Yeah, and the general feelings from women is that it's really tough. And I think, yeah, their company does all the right things, you know, all the things we hear that you're supposed to do, having initiatives and having programs to get more women into senior roles and the females yo, and yeah, none of this is enough, and I think, yeah, it's a bit shocking. Let's talk about the United States a bit. I know we have a pay gap here. I've edited

stories about it. You've written about it too, uh and um, you know we have your podcast now to talk about it. And yet this issue goes back over a hundred years. You actually went back to the Civil War and I found that really interesting. How how did you come across this history. So there's this letter that was written to the New York Times. It's it's anonymous, but probably by a group of women arguing that they want equal pay

for equal work. And a lot of the language they're using sounds so similar to the stuff we hear now, but it's it's from the Civil War era. It's these women who worked in the federal government and they were working secretary jobs basically, and these were jobs that were held by men, and they were making half as much as the men were, and they were saying, this is ridiculous.

We are doing the same work. But the reason that they had been hired in the first place is because they could be hired for cheaper There were only so many jobs open to women, so any job a woman can get, she was going to take for pretty much any rates. So they were making less money. They got hired because they could be making less money, and eventually they were like, this is ridiculous, So they started petitioning

the government for equal pay. And so you have this equal pay debate happening a hundred fifty years ago, which is really fascinating to think about it in the context of now where we still have not solved this problem. And did you know about this before you worked on the podcast? This letter is kind of lawre in the equal pay world. I mean not law, but it's something that if you do enough googling and researching, you come across it. And so I decided I was decided that

there must be a story behind this letter. So I went out and found a historian, Jessica Zappero, who wrote a book about this time period and She told me a lot about what was going on in this time, and a lot of what happened actually lead to the development of the way our economy is now and why women do certain jobs and why those jobs pay less. Well, it might be lore in the field of studying the

gender pay gap. To me, it was new. I learned something, and I found that really interesting, so I appreciated that. Let's fast forward to today. You also talk about some of the arguments that you hear the people used to try to discredit the pay gap and talk about why it doesn't matter or why you shouldn't look at it

this way. What did you make of all that. There are a lot of people who like to tell me that I don't know what I'm talking about, and that the pay gap is a myth and that it's not real, and that it exists for reasons that make complete sense. Um. I think these people basically say that when you control for certain things like job type or hours worked or having children, that the pay gap disappears, so we don't really have a problem them. I have so many responses

to that. First of all, there's no way no matter how much you control, there is always a gap between what men and women make it never disappears. But I actually think it's worth considering that we have this data point. We know that this number exists and it's persisted, and I want to know why that exists, what does it mean? And I think when you dig deeper, it isn't as simple as just women are making choices to take lower paying jobs. And I hope that you can learn that

from the show. And the United States doesn't really have this kind of push to address the pay gap that the UK had, I mean they passed a law, of the US is just sort of sitting around waiting for something to bubble up, Is that right? Yeah, I mean we do have some equal pay laws on the books. Equal pay for equal work is a law and you can't discriminate. But yeah, there's no big transparency law or

anything like that. There are some state and municipal laws that are taking some small steps to address the pay gap. I'd say the most popular law right now are these salary history bands. So this is cities and some states that are saying you cannot ask people what they made

at their previous jobs. And the point of that is basically because often women and other underpaid groups if they're being discriminated against at their previous job, and then they go to the next job and you're basing their salary off their old job, You're going to continue perpetuating that pay gap. So it's an attempt to kind of stop that from happening. But this is not widespread and actually the business community is really fighting it. Yeah, it's more

on a small scale anyway than a national scale. Now there's one other country you delved into that's really fascinating because it's small. They have many women in influential positions, and yet the paycup still hasn't closed. Tell us about Iceland and why it hasn't been able to close the cap. So. Iceland has a lot of equal pay laws, some of the ones similar to hear in the US. But they

have a new law that's pretty interesting. So whereas the UK law is diagnostic, you know, it says this is the problem and hopes companies will just do something about it,

Iceland's new law actually compels companies to do something. So Iceland is requiring companies with over twenty five employees to explain any differences between what men and women make, and if explanation isn't good enough, the company has to fix the pay gap, and that can be by paying women more or cutting salaries, or doing whatever you have to

do to make that disparity go away. So, in one example, the Customs Office found that it was paying men and women in a certain office less money, and they had this explanation for why because the men were close to retirement and they had worked in the field and now they were coming back to the office. And the Iceland was like, you know, no, it's not okay. You have to pay them the same. So that's something that is taking it a step further. But it's a new law,

so we don't really know how it will work. So we need some more time when we can get to the paycheck part two to figure out how it's all working. So, after doing all this reporting and thinking about the solutions that we've talked about, what seems to you like the best way or ways to close the pay gap. Do we need stronger laws, do we need stronger enforcement. Is it just a matter of having more women in the kinds of positions that would influence pay at employers? What

do you think? So this might be a not very satisfying answer, but it's like all of it and none of it, you know, So the forces that cause the pay gap, basically sexism, when you boil it down, are very strong. And you know, no one law or one company policy is really going to be able to undo all the attitudes that we have about men and women and what they're supposed to do. And I think that there are a lot of laws that can help, and

I'm I think that I'm in favor of that. I think that companies need to do things, and I think that more than anything is we need to change people's attitudes and the way they view the genders in the workplace, which I realized as a very tall order. Do you think they're changing. I think the one heartening thing is that in the last six months we've seen how something like Me Too has been able to change people's attitudes.

And I don't know if we'll know the actual effects of that, but I think one thing it has done is shown that the experiences of women and men at work are different and that can affect their careers and their lives. So at least we're starting to change that attitude. Rebecca Greenfield, host of The Paycheck, thank you so much for joining us on Benchmark. Thank you for having me. I just wanted to urge everybody to check out The

Paycheck if you haven't already. As soon as this podcast is over, go to iTunes, go to Spotify, where if you find podcasts, search for The Paycheck on Bloomberg and listen to it. It's got six episodes. They're all fascinating, they're all fantastic, and we're grateful for Rebecca to share some of what she found on Benchmark. Benchmark will be

back next week. Until then, you can find us on the Bloomberg terminal, Bloomberg dot com, our Bloomberg app, and podcast destinations such as Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. We'd love it if you took the time to rate and review the show so more listeners can find us. You can also check us out on Twitter, follow me at scott Landman. Our guest, Rebecca Greenfield is at r Z Greenfield. Benchmark is produced by topor Foreheads ahead of

Bloomberg Podcasts is Francesco Levie. Thanks for listening, See you next time. Sunder Ba can hander for