The sunday times article on women

Women,in general, could earn less than men for the next 150 years because of discrimination and ineffective government policies, according to leading economic analysts.

The salaries of today’s young women are still less than those of their male colleagues, and the inequality has changed little this decade.

In the report by the Centre for Economic Performance (CEP), at the London School of Economics, the imbalance has been blamed on women who take maternity leave and work part-time after having children.

However, it also challenges the effectiveness of recommendations made earlier this year by the Women and Work Commission, which was set up by the Government in 2004 to tackle unequal pay.

The report on women’s salaries found that even those who worked full-time and did not take career breaks would earn 12 per cent less than their male counterparts after ten years.

It said:

“We are used to each generation of women making progress relative to the one before. But this process has slowed with the current generation doing only slightly better than the previous one."

Similar numbers of women and men were in work aged 20. But by the age of 30, there was a 20 per cent gap between the numbers of male and female workers, indicating that most women still take time off when they have children.

Alan Manning, the author of the report, said: “The problem is not that women are choosing one career, such as hairdressing, rather than another, such as plumbing. It is that they are continuing to choose family over career at some point in their life.

When Women they return to the labour market they often work part-time. This reduces job security, and inevitably the women earn less.