We’re using the wrong numbers to measure pay inequality in the charity sector, and drawing the wrong conclusions as a result, argues David Ainsworth.

It’s hard to know what to make of recent research by agency TPP, showing that women earn less than men in the voluntary sector. It shows the size of the pay gap doubling to 16.7 per cent, based on a sample of around 1,500 people.

The headline figure makes pretty stark reading. It sounds like women are getting a raw deal.

Nor is this the only report. This is part of a pretty consistent analysis of the way women are treated in the voluntary sector. A number of reports and conferences have been written with the overall narrative that there is widespread inequality in the charity sector and women are the victims. I’m not sure this narrative is entirely fair, or accurate. The narrative about inequality in the sector seems to be based on a single statistic – mean hourly pay of all workers.

So what’s wrong with the TPP report? Well partly it’s the choice of statistics in the first place, partly it’s about the interpretation of the statistics. And partly it’s the underlying assumptions powering that interpretation.

What about the methodology?

When measuring income inequality, you get very different results if you use mean averages, rather than median averages. Mean averages exacerbate differences in areas like salaries, where a few people earn much more than the ordinary person. If you want to measure the situation for ordinary workers, it’s better to use a median.

Median income is often used when dealing with salaries in the economy as a whole because it’s not distorted by oil barons and footballers. The same tools should probably be used to analyse our own sector.

Inequality at the top is very problematic, but it’s not the same as inequality faced by the ordinary worker, and we should be clear which we’re dealing with.

I’m also a little dubious about the decision to include part-time workers in the calculations. It’s a fairly well-accepted fact that part-time work pays less per hour than full-time work, because it tends to be in more junior positions. Part-time workers are predominantly women, and this disrupts the statistics.

There are important questions about whether it’s right that part-time work pays less. There are also questions about whether women choose part-time work or are forced into it. These are important questions, but they’re separate ones. When looking at headline figures, please compare like with like.

If we adjust for all of these factors, I’d image we’d suddenly discover that the pay gap for an ordinary employee is nothing like the headline figure. TPP haven’t given the figures, so I can’t do the analysis. I’d like to.

There is still a huge disparity at senior level, and that needs addressing. But before we get onto that, there’s one other factor that’s rarely included when considering pay equality. What about the unemployed?

Why won’t the charity sector employ men?

It’s often forgotten that male unemployment in the UK is consistently about 10 per cent higher than female unemployment. Overall, UK employers prefer to hire women.

It seems safe to assume that the UK charity sector is complicit in this prejudice. After all, 73 per cent of voluntary sector staff are women, which sounds to me like a sector failing fairly severely in its equality burden.

I find it slightly surprising that the voluntary sector doesn’t see itself as having a gender bias against men. If three quarters of your staff are one gender, that sounds like a pretty prejudiced recruitment environment. Men obviously don’t feel welcome at most levels of the charity sector.

Shouldn’t we be targeting more male engagement in the voluntary sector, especially given the disproportionate number of men in unemployment, most of them in deprived areas and from lower socioeconomic groups, often older, often from non-white backgrounds? Isn’t it a problem that men appear so excluded from the sector as a whole? Isn’t it harmful to these marginalised and ignored men? Shouldn’t the sector be proactively hiring more low-skilled men?

Why are young men underpaid in charities?

The figures in the TPP survey suggest that at administrator and officer level, women are paid significantly more than men. The gap is over 10 per cent, large enough to suggest that there is systemic gender bias against men at junior level in charities. In short, young men are earning less than young women for the same jobs.

I find it a bit odd that we don’t seem keen to address what appears to be systemic prejudice in the treatment of junior employees.

The argument is often put forward that men catch up later. This hardly seems valid. Young men and old men are different groups, socioeconomically and culturally. It seems enormously insensitive to lump all men in together and say that because a handful are doing okay, we can ignore prejudice against the majority.

It’s a longstanding cultural phenomenon, too, not an isolated thing. Historically it has always been the case that cultural and financial differences are greater between men than between women, and that men from lower socioeconomic backgrounds actually have worse outcomes on average than women.

Why is there a problem at director level?

Okay, so let’s move onto the handful of director level individuals who tip the scales in men’s favour.

The TPP figures suggest that there is relatively little appetite or ability for women to become directors in charities, and some disadvantage when it comes to reaching manager level. Or in other words, rather than systemic bias across the organisation, the problem is mainly at the “glass ceiling” level.

This is obviously still a major issue. But why does female involvement stop so suddenly?

It could be conscious prejudice. It could me that the most senior people in the voluntary sector just don’t like women, and they’re making bad things happen to them. It could be unconscious prejudice. Men are just seen as tougher and more impressive leaders. Or it could be that women aren’t pushing themselves forward enough.

These failures on the part of women themselves appear to be the most common answers put forward at an Acevo women’s summit earlier this year.

Then there’s the suggestion that it’s not societal but innate. Women aren’t as ambitious as men, the theory goes. They aren’t as motivated by seniority and power.

Then there’s motherhood. Obviously the majority of people hit director level after the age when they become parents, and the pool of women available to choose from is simply smaller, because the average woman spends several years out of work.

This in particular is a difficult one to solve. If on average women work for something like four years less over the course of their lives, it seems odd to expect that they should end their working lives on the same pay as someone who has put in more hours.

The question then is what to do about it. Can we solve the problem that women do most of the childcare? Do we want to? Is it a problem to be solved, or do both men and women prefer things that way? To what extent is it genetic and innate, and to what extent societal?

In any case, employers are able to solve relatively few of the potential problems highlighted above. Some require government intervention. The majority require action from women themselves.

In any case, the end result is that a few people, predominantly men, earn a lot more money than most other workers. That’s obviously a problem – and not just a women’s problem either, but a societal one. It seems as if we should try to design an economy that has less pay inequality, and obviously we have to work hard to make it easier for women to become leaders.

But while we’re talking about equality, there’s another important issue.

Is it really all about money?

Again and again we hear in the voluntary sector that non-monetary outcomes are important in choosing your vocation, and that pay is not the arbiter of worth. So why are we using it to judge worth when it comes to equality?

On almost any metric other than director-level salaries, men in the UK have worse outcomes. Men have lower educational attainment, have shorter lifespans and worse general health. They have lower self-reported happiness, greater likelihood of unemployment, greater likelihood of suicide, and greater likelihood of homelessness. They are more likely to have been involuntarily separated from contact with their children and are more likely to be victims of violent crime, particularly at the hands of a stranger.

It isn’t even as if their greater mean income produces higher living standards. While men as a group earn significantly more money, and spend slightly more too, they do not appear to have a higher standard of living as a result.

So what to do?

Really, I’d just like to stop thinking about this as an oppositional problem. Inequality is a complex issue, which should be solved by everybody. I think the choice of mean pay as a yardstick of worth is divisive and unhelpful. It pits men against women, as if it’s some kind of contest. Can’t we talk about this more sensibly?