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Jobs for the Girls: Two Years On

Yes. I want also to place on the record, as the hon. Member for Mid-Worcestershire has, our thanks to Elizabeth Flood, the then Clerk to the Select Committee, who will be joining us later, so I will probably have to thank her again. She somehow created order and excellent drafting out of the large amount of material before us, although of course the responsibility for the report is ours. I also thank Eve Samson, the current Clerk to the Committee, who took on board the last-minute sorting out at the end of the process of publishing the report and was rather better than me at working out how to produce a concise summary and press release. I wanted to include everything and she was slightly more disciplined. I see that the previous Clerk, whom we were just thanking for her excellent work, is here. I want to draw particular attention to her heroic endeavour—I thought that it was a rather mad endeavour, but she achieved it brilliantly—in managing at the end of the report to produce a table that compares the recommendations of three reports. The Select Committee's predecessor produced the first ““Jobs for the Girls”” report on the effect of occupational segregation on the gender pay gap before the general election and recommended that the Committee returned to the subject when the women and work commission had reported. Second in the table are the recommendations of the women and work commission report, ““Shaping a Fairer Future””. It made 40 recommendations. Third is the Government's one-year-on report on implementing the women and work commission proposals. In a heroic endeavour, which I would not have tried, the Clerk managed brilliantly to tabulate and compare the various recommendations. To be frank, this area has been swimming in reports and recommendations over the years. We have discussed endlessly the barriers and inequalities faced by women at work and the difficulties that exist but, as has been said, although progress has been made, the gender pay gap persists, despite 30 years of equal pay legislation. My right hon. and learned Friend the Minister for Women and Equality estimated that at the current rate of progress it would take 80 years to eliminate the gap—she was possibly being a bit optimistic. When the women and work commission was set up in July 2004, there was a gap in mean hourly earnings between men and women of 18 per cent. among full-time workers and 40 per cent. among those working part-time. According to the last Office for National Statistics survey, the gap has narrowed to 17.2 per cent. for full-timers—or 12.6 per cent. if we strip out the extremes and put it at the mean—and to 35 per cent. for part-timers. It is hard to eliminate the pay gap for a number of reasons, but particularly because men and women tend to work in different occupations, and traditional female occupations tend to be lower-paid and less valued than those of men. However, it is important to reiterate that the pay gap and segregation are not just unfair to women. The Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Committee—I do not know whether the Committee has found a quicker way of saying that.