UK: Men should work less to close gender pay gap, says thinktank

Article here. Excerpt:

'A report from the IPPR says there is a gender pay gap in 80% of clearly defined occupations. “This points to seniority as a critical driver of the pay gap: for most occupations, men are in more senior, high-pay versions of the role than women,” said Catherine Colebrook, IPPR’s chief economist and co-author of the report, The State of Pay.
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“What this report tells us is that firms are a big part of the solution to fixing the gender pay gap but they can’t do it on their own,” said Colebrook. “The solutions also have to come from individuals and from government. In short, men need to work fewer hours and women need to work more.”

Colebrook pointed to the “motherhood penalty”, by which the gender pay gap increases sharply after women take time out of work to have children and find their ability to progress in the workplace after returning is curtailed. According to research from the Institute for Fiscal Studies undertaken for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, by the time a first child has reached 20, mothers earn almost a third less per hour, on average, than similarly educated fathers.
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Colebrook said: “Changing men’s working behaviour is a crucial component of equalising pay. Employers could offer paid paternity leave on a ‘use it or lose it’ basis, make jobs flexible by default and encourage men to job-share.”'

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Comments

... truly bizarre and ludicrois stuff to come from a so-called thinktank, this has got to be the dumbest.

I have to confess something. When I first saw this I immediately thought about commenting as follows:

"This has been tried. They've been trying it in France since the country first formed. But it's had no effect."

But I thought better of being so jingoistically snarky so I decided not to write it. :)

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