Gender pay gap reporting has exposed the underlying gender career gap that ultimately causes it. Too often, women find their careers blighted as a result of taking time out for caring or family responsibilities. Balancing the scales won’t happen overnight – or any time soon – but employers have been taking steps in recent years to help women overcome these difficulties, with family-friendly policies slowly being introduced in organisations of all sizes.
These include surrogacy leave, adoption leave and parental bereavement leave following a stillbirth or miscarriage, as well as specific menopause and carers leave. This approach has been shown to make business sense, as it helps organisations to retain their best people and save on recruiting and training new staff.
However, a 2022 report from Grant Thornton found that just one in five Irish businesses have women in senior management roles.
“We need more women in the workforce for longer so that there’s the opportunity to get into more senior positions and to ensure that we have best representation of women,” says Maeve McCleane, chief people officer at Lidl Ireland and Northern Ireland. The supermarket giant has a gender-neutral pay policy, meaning men and women are paid the same rate at the same levels in hourly and salaried roles – the remaining gender pay gap is attributable to a greater proportion of men than women in senior roles in the business.
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“While Lidl is pleased with its progress to date, it is taking further steps to eliminate the mean gender pay gap across its workforce with a number of initiatives,” says McCleane. Among these are “a dedicated Leadership Academy and female-focused HR policies developed to support women in every stage of life, including menopause supports, compassionate leave for miscarriage and early pregnancy loss, fertility leave, and the Lupilu family leave programme designed to support those looking to start a family while also achieving their potential”.
“We recognise our responsibility as an employer to those going through the menopause to be able to freely discuss their symptoms and request accommodations without fear of judgment, so we’ve invested heavily in training and support programmes and initiatives to better support managers and all employees,” she adds.
Lidl is also conscious that many of its employees have responsibilities outside of the home; last year it partnered with Family Carers Ireland to introduce supports for employees caring for a family member or loved one. The company recently commissioned research which found that two in five Lidl employees are currently in a caring role and 35 per cent of male staff identify as a carer.
“There is an obvious need to support those who are in these roles but slipping through the net,” says McCleane.
More and more employers are on the ball when it comes to addressing the gender career gap but wider society is still playing catch-up when it comes to having the burden of caring and family responsibilities shared more equally. This is the view of Pat O’Connor, professor emeritus of sociology and social policy at the University of Limerick and author of A ‘Proper’ Woman? One Woman’s Story of Success and Failure in Academia. For example, she says childcare is still viewed by the institutional structures in Irish society as a “woman’s problem”.
“This was most clearly illustrated during Covid when the schools and childcare centres were closed, over-70s – ie grandparents – were confined to their homes and no provision was made, even for the children of frontline workers in hospitals. Even now if children are not well and the creche won’t take them – what are parents to do? They are too tired and overstretched to advocate and lobby for a decent, reliable system.”
O’Connor says there have been some improvements in terms of childcare, such as increased subsidies, but availability and cost are still big problems.
“Working from home potentially facilitates the juggling, but not really for parents of very small children or lone parents, and some businesses, such as the larger US tech companies, are wanting to cut back on that,” she adds.
And, according to O’Connor, while negative attitudes to maternity leave persist, larger organisations and universities have begun to take this in hand.
“Some universities facilitate re-entry after maternity leave by reducing teaching responsibilities for six months, for example,” she says.