The Good, the Not So Good and the Ugly: Gender Equality, Equal Pay and Austerity in English Local Government

Abstract

Drawing on theories of responsive and reflexive legislation and gender mainstreaming, this article examines the implementation of the gender equality duty and the Single Status Agreement in five English local authorities between 2008 and 2010. Both of these initiatives coincided with the global financial crisis. The data highlights how organizational restructuring following budget cuts resulted in the separation of these two important initiatives between equality and human resource management teams, preventing the duty from reaching the high expectations of the Equal Opportunities Commission and the Women and Work Commission. The reliance on equal pay legislation and the failure to use the gender equality duty missed an opportunity to move away from adversarial forms of legislation and towards more responsive forms of regulation of pay equality.

Women’s experiences of menopause at work and performance management

“…This leads us to consider gendered ageism and, relatedly, the use of performance or capability procedures to manage out workers to explore these hidden processes. As such, considering the Leicester policy as a liberal structuralist attempt to create equal opportunity by eliminating structural and procedural barriers reminds us that this does not necessarily produce equality in practice (Conley and Page, 2018; Meyerson and Kolb, 2000). The gendered and age-specific characteristics of the menopause have other, less visible impacts, which we did not consider in our academic activism and to which we now turn.…”

Battles through and about statistics in French pay equity bargaining: The politics of quantification at workplace level

“…Employers usually want to minimize the costs of re‐evaluation and to continue to rely on mostly female cheap labour. Conversely, trade unions often demand more fairness and transparency in wage structures, particularly in female‐dominated public services facing deregulation or austerity measures (Conley & Page, ; Thornley, ). Detailed studies of the negotiation process sometimes reveal the intellectual and technical complexities of such negotiations.…”

“…Both regulatory duties and market initiatives raise the issue of gender statistics and their social usages at the decentralized level (within companies), a level which remains usually a black box for researchers and even for public administrations. The processes of measuring, interpreting and tackling gender pay gaps can be particularly conflictual in times of economic difficulty, restructuring and austerity (Conley & Page, ).…”

Career Advancement for Women in the British Hospitality Industry: The Enabling Factors

“…Despite recent initiatives such as the mandatory gender pay gap reporting, gender discrimination persists in the UK (PwC, 2019). The UK has one of the worst records on gender equality at work (Conley and Page, 2018;Glassdoor, 2016) and is ranked 11th out of 18 countries in the gender equality league table (Glassdoor, 2016).…”