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.