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UK women suffering gender pay gap

Saturday, 07 March 2015 4:30 PM [ Last Update: Saturday, 07 March 2015 5:10 PM ]

UN says UK men still earn about 20 per cent more than women.

The UN’s new report has shed more light on gender inequality in the UK.

According to the report, men still earn on average 19.1 per cent more than women, and female MPs make up less than a quarter of parliament.

The report’s authors say British women are particularly badly hit because the welfare state of the UK emphasizes individual freedom, and provisions of daycare and after-school facilities enabling mothers to work full-time are lacking.

“We have a situation in the UK where the public mythology and the self-perception of the state that it has equality when it comes to gender or religion but the reality is that we have very deeply ingrained structural discrimination, and by this I mean the fact that culturally these ideas of equality are not accepted, and we don’t really have either the laws in place or the proper laws in place to enforce that equality,” Co-Founder of Islamic Human Rights Commission, Arzu Merali told Press TV.

She referred to the growing social of role of women in UK adding:” This participation is not on a equal basis and is often exploited too and it’s the same in the workforce. So there is a big gap of about 20 percent that the UN has found in pay that women receive in this country but there’s also a glass ceiling for how high they can go in the profession they choose.”

Arzu emphasized that there is no equal support for women in the UK society.

“Although we now have a lot of women in the workplace, we don’t have support for them and the women are in fact working at home and also working at the workplace so they actually have two jobs and that’s another form of exploitation unlike the Islamic system where work of a woman at home is recognized as a job. We don’t have that in the kind of male-centric idea of the world.”

The human rights activist then blamed the state-run agencies dealing with social equality for not taking concrete steps in making strong measures to protect women’s right.

“There are various bodies who deal with equality and there have been for many years. And there is also legislation that impose equality, however these are not concrete enough or does not have enough powers to enforce the kind of required equality when it comes to issue of pay and certainly there hasn't been the cultural change that will allow women to succeed not only in the workplace but also in their personal and private lives,” she said.

She finally accused the legal system in UK of being hypocritical when it comes to gender equality.

MTM/MH

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