Barbara Cahalane on what to do if you feel undervalued.
Is equal pay a women’s issue? I don’t think so. Fairness does not mean everyone gets paid the same. Fairness means that everyone – man or woman – is paid fairly for the value they create.
But there are reasons why women need to pay more attention to their salary. Recent studies and data from the Fawcett Society, the Chartered Management Institute and the Office for National Statistics point to a worrying trend: women’s pay lags behind men’s (even allowing for career breaks for childcare). In the private sector women are paid about 20% less and receive lower bonuses too.
So are women in the construction industry paid fairly for the value they create, and are they paid as fairly as men in the industry? Given the traditional and male-dominated nature of the construction industry, it would be miraculous if the sector bucked the general industry trend.
If you are a woman in the construction industry, a chat about money with your manager should be on your list of financial housekeeping tasks in 2014.
We all find it hard to talk about money (again, research indicates women find it harder than men). In the public sector it’s easier. There is transparency about the salaries for various roles and usually a prescribed scale of increments to reward progression and experience accrued in a given role. Companies in the private sector, in contrast, don’t like discussing pay in public due to issues of confidentiality and commercial sensitivity in revealing who gets paid what.
How can you get around the taboos about disclosure and find out whether you are being paid fairly? The obvious answer is to ask your colleagues. The likelihood is that if you are willing to say what you earn, they will share too. But, if you want to pursue the issue formally, you will need to take a planned approach:
- Identify your peer group.
- Ask to see a pay distribution chart for that group and where you appear on it. You are not asking for names and amounts, just a general scale and the distribution with your position highlighted.
- Analyse the information. Are you where you expect to be within your peer group? Does it feel fair? If you are lower down than you expected, could it be that others in your peer group have additional responsibilities, or more experience on the job? Or do you find that your position in the distribution does not feel right given the level of your responsibilities, experience and contribution?
If it feels right, well and good. But if it doesn’t, then you need to discuss money with your manager. Before you do, it’s important to prepare well and think realistically about:
- The value you create for your company.
- A sense of what the market rate is for your role.
- The reasons why you feel your position in the distribution is unfair (with examples of what you have achieved).
If you feel you are undervalued and underpaid, but your manager does not agree, what can you do? You could ask if there are additional responsibilities you can take on to increase your value and make your pay similar to others in your peer group. Asking your manager to discuss this will cause them to think about and justify why others are paid more.
If your manager’s response is that the company has no money, then ask how can your rewards package be improved in non-monetary ways. That might be training, or more time off, or being included in a higher level of health care. Be creative.
It’s important to have the conversation. Women tend to assume that their worth will be recognised. If only this were so, we would not have such a discernible pay gap.
Barbara Cahalane is corporate communications director at BAM Construct UK. The views expressed in this article are her own, however, based on 30 years’ experience of working in a number of sectors
