Why do Men Have the Best Paid Jobs?

Submitted by daniel on Wed, 04/01/2006 - 00:00

According to a recent report by by the Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC), only a sixth of young people in Britain received any advice or information on work experience in a sector where the workforce is currently dominated by the opposite sex.

Few careers advisers appear to be making the link between career choices on the one hand, skills shortages, pay, and progression on the other. The Free to Choose report reveals that young people – particularly girls who leave before higher education – are not being given the access to careers advice, work-experience placements and training opportunities that would give them true freedom to fulfil their ambitions and potential and gain higher pay. Instead, too many are being channelled into jobs traditional to their sex.

By contrast, girls who have entered work through higher education have broken into new, higher paid jobs in areas like medicine and law and now form more than half of entrants. Free to Choose is the final report from the EOC's groundbreaking investigation into sex segregation in training and work.

The EOC has found real evidence of support for change among young people:

• 80% of girls and 55% of boys said that they would or might be interested in learning to do a non-traditional job;
• When exploring what would tempt them to try non-traditional work, three-quarters (76%) of girls and 6 in 10 boys (59%) said that they would like to try work normally done by the opposite sex before making a final job choice;
• 25% of boys said caring work sounded interesting or very interesting and 12% of girls were interested in construction; For example less than 3 % of childcare apprenticeships are male and less than 2% of construction apprenticeships are female.
• 92% of women and men said that they would want young people who are about to enter the workforce to be able to make job choices without worrying about traditional stereotypes of women's and men's working roles.

Despite this, the EOC found that:

Some young people reported being actively discouraged to pursue a career outside the norm for their sex. One female trainee plumber said: "schools careers – it would have been good if they had just not discouraged us." In one survey, of the 45 childcare work experience placements undertaken, only 2 were filled by boys, whereas only 29 of the girls had listed it as their future choice;

67% of women, didn't know when they chose their career, about the often lower pay for work mostly done by women and of these two thirds of young women said they would have considered a wider range of career options had they known; Although boys are affected by restricted choices, the situation has a particularly damaging effect on girls because jobs with a mostly female workforce offer much lower rates of pay than those where the workforce is mostly male: salaries for those employed in childcare is half or less than in areas such as engineering and plumbing.