Oxfordshire County Council: Education for lowest-paid female staff

Apprenticeships and the opportunity to get up to GCSE A-C grade standard in English and maths are among the methods being promoted to reduce the proportion of women in the authority’s worst-paid jobs such as cleaning, administration, school crossing, catering and customer service roles.

The council’s Gender Pay Gap Report 2020 showed that while the difference in wages between the sexes is close to vanishing, men hold a disproportionate amount of the top roles.

Half of director-level posts are held by men, out of kilter with the fact that almost two thirds of the council’s 5,085 employees are women who hold slightly more than 70 per cent of the lowest paid positions.

Human resources director Karen Edwards, presenting to the county’s Remuneration Committee, said: “The issue we need to focus on is ensuring that our female employees are able to gain qualifications and progress into roles throughout the organisation.

“We do quite well on that but there is certainly more we could do for those that are sitting in the lowest pay quartile.

“I think we should be looking at levels of maths and English in those groups because they are still quite often a block as you try to promote and get into senior roles, right across the workforce but certainly in that lower quartile.”

Councillor Jane Murphy (Con, Didcot East & Hagbourne) said: “It would seem to me that it has to be about motivation to want to achieve, and keep them.

“The more you motivate people, the more you keep them in that job and the more they can move up. It is difficult but once you do it you get a lot of loyalty from it as well because people believe in the brand.

“People who have left school sometimes get int a rut and sometimes think they cannot get out of it.

“If you are being offered this as a positive, that you could do these things like night classes or day release, it would be brilliant because it just gives you that boost to move on to something else if you want to.”

The report showed that on average, men were paid 1.8 per cent or 31 pence per hour more than women at Oxfordshire County Council in 2020, down from 3.18 per cent or 53 pence per hour the previous year and “considerably less” than an average gap of 14.5 per cent in across the public sector.

The median pay - the middle amount if you listed salaries from top to bottom - for men and women was the same, despite the public sector average being a difference of more than 15 per cent, a statistic lauded as “quite amazing” by committee chair Councillor Liz Brighouse OBE (Lab, Churchill & Lye Valley).