The gender pay gap means women working in teaching and other education roles effectively work for free for an average of 81 days a year, according to a new analysis.
The Trades Union Congress (TUC) calculated the figures by looking at average pay across the year for both genders and calculating when women’s pay would run out if they received the same rate as men.
Across all sectors, today (23 February) is the date when the average woman “stops working for free” compared with the average man, according to the analysis.
But for education and teaching staff in England, this date is 22 March, despite the industry being dominated by female workers.
Female education and teaching staff are estimated to work the second largest number of days for free out of all industries, at 81 days, compared with an average of 54, the TUC has said.
The analysis, calculated using the latest Office for National Statistics (ONS) Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE) data, suggests that the gender pay gap in education is 22.2 per cent.
Kevin Courtney, joint general secretary of the NEU teaching union, said: “Pay penalties abound in the predominantly female education workforce.”
Female teachers and support staff “are consistently undervalued and overworked”, he added.
Women with caring responsibilities and those who manage to secure part-time work are “denied pay progression, denied promotion and many are pushed out of their jobs and out of the profession”, he said. Those who stay take longer than their male counterparts to achieve leadership positions, he added.
It is time for the government to “value” the “contribution that women make to the education of our children”, Mr Courtney said.
Analysis released last year showed that the gender pay gap for secondary school leaders had widened by more than a third in a year.
Paul Whiteman, general secretary of the NAHT school leaders’ union, said the gender pay gap was an “incredibly important issue” for his organisation, which has a “predominately female membership”.
Mr Whiteman said that, while pay for all school leaders has fallen in real terms in the last 10 years, “disparities in the system mean women have been hit even harder and the pay gap has worsened”.
He added that “the gulf is wider in more senior roles” and the situation “may be even worse for Black, Asian, ethnic minority and disabled women, but we still don’t have national data needed to track this”.
The gap could reflect a number of issues, he said, including the under-representation of women in senior leadership positions, the impact of the education pay framework and the fact that women are more likely to manage caring responsibilities in family life.
The TUC analysis found that women working in financial and insurance industries experienced the largest gender pay gap of 31.2 per cent according to the analysis, with 114 days of working for free.
Professional, scientific and technical industries followed education, with a 19.9 per cent gender pay gap and 73 days worked for free.
TUC general secretary Paul Nowak said that working women “deserve equal pay” but ”at current rates of progress, it will take more than 20 years to close the gender pay gap”.
He added: “That’s just not good enough. We can’t consign yet another generation of women to pay inequality.”
Mr Nowak said it was “clear” that “just publishing gender pay gaps isn’t working”.
“Companies must be required to publish action plans to explain what steps they’ll take to close their pay gaps,” he added. “And bosses who don’t comply with the law should be fined.”
Mr Nowak added that the law should be changed so that ”all jobs are advertised with all the possible flexible options clearly stated” and, he said, “all workers must have the legal right to work flexibly from their first day in a job”.
