Equal pay appears to have baffled, stymied and otherwise eluded the grasp of organisations reputed to house the finest minds in the country

They have a total grant allocation from government of over £1 billion, have a better gender balanced workforce than does the NHS or Councils, and have access to some of the best minds in the world.  This year, 5 of Scotland's universities were deemed, by Times Higher Education, worthy enough to be in the top 200 universities in the world.  One can only imagine that equality is not part of the beauty parade organised by Times Higher Education [it is not, I just checked].  With a sector-wide equal pay gap of 18.13%, Scotland's universities are struggling to eliminate the institutional gender discrimination which remains deep-rooted in the sector.

One of the obvious start points in the work needed to close the equal pay gaps in Scotland's university sector, instead of simply reporting it in the prescribed manner, would be to create a single portal where comparable pay gap data could be found for the whole sector. This would not only resolve the many and various issues around the accessibility of pay gap data, but would in turn create an impetus and incentive for those universities with the largest pay gaps to close the gap with the best performing universities. 

Such is the almost universal reluctance across the public sector to make access to equality data easy for members of the public, current university sector practices bear comparison to the impenetrable and byzantine maze encountered when members of the public try to find the best deal for electricity and gas tariffs.

In early 2013, research showed that Scotland's universities were not transparent in reporting pay gap data.  Recent research looks at what has been published since and finds progress, of sorts, in that instead of just 10 out of 17 universities publishing pay gap data, we now have 16 university pay gaps.

In 2013, 2 universities reported pay gaps of less than 5%, whereas this year, just one of Scotland's 17 universities reports a gap of less than 5%.  In this sense, universities are going backwards.

The sector's own central resource on making equality happen, the Equality Challenge Unit, commented in research they published in 2014 : 

Inconsistent approaches to data gathering, analysis and reporting make cross-institutional comparisons of ‘headline’ figures difficult. They can vary quite dramatically, without an explanation of each unique institutional context.

the pay gap across Scottish universities is 18.13%,
meaning women are earning less than men

That said, when aggregating the data published by the universities, the pay gap across Scottish universities is 18.13%, meaning women are earning less than men.  Three years ago, the aggregated pay gap was -5.78%.  Quite an alarming swing, and in the wrong direction.

The biggest Scottish university, in terms of staff numbers and grant funding from government, is Edinburgh University.  Edinburgh is also, according the the Times Higher Education rankings, 24th in the world.  Edinburgh reports a pay gap of 18.12% at 2015, down from the 22.7% reported in 2011. 

One key element absent from the reporting on equal pay gaps by Universities is any acknowledgement and acceptance that their structures, cultures and practices may form part of the institutional discrimination which underpins and contributes to occupational segregation and equal pay gaps.

making equal pay happen remains
something which appears to have
baffled, stymied and otherwise eluded
the grasp of organisations reputed to
house the finest minds in the country.

Having had over 40 years to embrace the work required to deliver equal pay for women, the reality is that for Scotland’s universities making equal pay happen remains something which appears to have baffled, stymied and otherwise eluded the grasp of organisations reputed to house the finest minds in the country.

It is unlikely that with universities left to their own devices, the equal pay gaps will be closed in the lifetime of some women currently working in Scotland’s universities.

Is First Minister Sturgeon a 'No' voter when it comes to race equality in who runs Scotland ?

Earlier this year, Fiona Hyslop, government minister for cultural matters, appointed Richard Findlay to head up the Board of Creative Scotland.  At the time I commented :

the body charged with the strategic development of culture in Scotland is led by an all-white Board, with no Visible Minority Ethnic people on the Board at all.

At that time, February, the Board looked like this [see montage on the right]:

Since then the Creative Scotland Board has been given another stir by Fiona Hyslop.  The corporate blurb on who is now who can be read - and seen - here.  While the gender balance may well have been fixed, it is obvious that the Board remains more than a little pale and not that interesting.

Early in August Hyslop and Creative Scotland oozed oleaginous self-congratulation on how the Board had reached the 50:50 gender target, and that it was the first body to do so since Nicola Sturgeon had launched the Partnership for Change on 25th June.  In all of the unctuous drooling over having achieved the First Minister's directive on gender balance in less than 2 months, careful study of the text reveals that government is quietly constructing a hierarchy of equality in Scotland.

While there can be no question but that the elimination of gender discrimination from the Board's of Scotland's public bodies is long overdue, this cannot and must not be achieved at the expense of creating a hierarchy in the work being done to eliminate discrimination across all groups of people who experience discrimination in their lives on a daily basis.

If the Board of Creative Scotland can be made to achieve a gender balance within 2 months of the directive issued by Nicola Sturgeon, it is fair to ask just where the directive is on bringing a racial balance to the Board of Creative Scotland, and just when will it be achieved?  If gender balance on public and third sector boards is to be achieved by 2020, why has Nicola Sturgeon not set a timetable for race equality to be achieved on those same boards ?  The absence of similar directives for balancing boards in relation to disabled and non-disabled people suggests that this community of people is also being pushed further back in the equality queue being created by Scottish government.

it is already obvious that the government's record on
equality lacks credibility and that if you are Black
Minority Ethnic or disabled, Ms Sturgeon will not always
do her best for you

The First Minister at the recent SNP 2015 conference invited people to judge her government on its record and to always do the best for you.  With the conference reports barely old enough to wrap this week's deep-fried Mars Bar suppers, it is already obvious that the government's record on equality lacks credibility and that if you are Black Minority Ethnic or disabled, Ms Sturgeon will not always do her best for you.

Scotland's Councils blame women for equal pay gaps

Recent research shows that the NHS in Scotland is failing to live up to a promise made by the current First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, in 2009 that on equal pay Scotland's NHS would go beyond the letter of the law and be exemplary.  It may well be of course that Ms Sturgeon's abilities at arithmetic, and hence her capacity to keep her promise, are somewhat limited.

Given the glacial pace at which the NHS is closing the equal pay gap, it seemed worth checking what was happening in Scotland's other big public sector employers, the Councils.
There are 32 Councils in Scotland.  Recent research reveals that there appear to be at least 32 different ways to carry out equal pay audits and publish the findings.  The City of Edinburgh Council is way out there on its own in how it presents equal pay data.  It does look as if Edinburgh's equal pay gap table would be more at home in the Sudoku pages of newspapers and magazines rather than in a report to elected members on the Council's equal pay gap.  It does also beg the question what elected members thought the pay gap was/is when they nodded through the report earlier this year.


Councils have had over 40 years now to embrace the work required to deliver equal pay for women. The stark and obvious reality is that for Scotland's Councils, making equal pay happen for women remains something which they have reluctantly embraced and suspect most of them would rather they had to take turns dancing with the corpse of Margaret Thatcher than close the equal pay gap.

This lack of enthusiasm for eliminating gender discrimination is reflected in the emerging visibility of the substructure of organisational pay gaps, where the most common causes are identified in Council reports as the preponderance of women in low paid and/or part time work, with it being implied that women are choosing these jobs and so culpable in creating the organisational gender pay gaps. 

There is a complete absence in equal pay gap reports published by Councils of any recognition or understanding of the cultural, historical and political elements which created and sustains the institutional discrimination in relation to gender which permeates society and its structures, of which Councils themselves are a part.  It is no surprise that with the absence of that understanding, Councils have no real plans for eliminating the gender discrimination embedded in their workplaces in the form of occupational segregation.  As Argyll & Bute Council put it so eloquently:

“The persistence of the overall organisational pay gap is, like most local authorities, mainly caused by the relative numbers of lower paid female dominant roles.”

“The remaining organisational pay gap is mostly reflective of the relative large numbers of lower paid female employees in high number occupancy roles. This is not anomalous in a local authority context.”

Sometimes pictures do indeed speak louder than words, and the equal pay gap performance table below, based on what data Councils themselves have published, provides a lament for the continuing exploitation of women by the power systems and structures in Scotland where men still hold sway.