How do we fix the CEO gender pay gap? Strictly Business debate

What can we do about the gap that starts at the very top? Ruth Sunderland and Alex Brummer debate the matter.

At every level of our careers, from the top of the corporate ladder, women are paid less than men.

Jane Fraser, the British-born head of Citibank, known as the First Lady of Wall Street, has been in the news after receiving a 9 per cent pay rise to more than £20 million last year.

A huge appetite by any estimate, but still less than her male equivalents.

David Solomons, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, earned 21 million pounds. James Gorman, the head of Morgan Stanley, took home £26 million. Bank of America’s Brian Moynihan earned £25 million and Jamie Dimon, the long-serving boss of JP Morgan Chase a cool £29 million.

Very few people would have much sympathy for a woman who made £20 million in a year. (I’ve carefully avoided the word “earned” here because it’s hard to imagine anyone actually earning rewards on such a colossal scale.)

But if shareholders are going to pay ridiculous amounts of money to men to run banks, then they should do the same for women.

Of course it would be much more sensible if salaries and bonuses for all genders were reduced to more sensible levels, but that is never going to happen.

The same goes for sports, where women earn less than men.

The victorious lionesses have a much lower blow than male soccer players. The average wage in the Women’s Super League is £50,000 – that’s a year, not a week – which would barely keep the men in Ferraris.

Financially, being a WAG makes more sense than being a world-class sportswoman in her own right, which is just depressing.

This is all rather rare, but it affects ordinary women, who typically earn nearly 15 percent less per year than men.

That equates to working almost two months a year for nothing. And the dishonesty doesn’t even stop at retirement, because lower pay means lower pensions.

The explanation is known.

Women are held back at work by caring for children and other family members. Childcare is expensive and sometimes unreliable. Female employees are less self-confident. There is a wealth of anecdotal evidence that we underestimate our own abilities and don’t push ourselves for promotions.

There is another explanation: antediluvian attitudes.

While overt sexism has become much less common now, most women can relate incidents of unconscious discrimination at work.

A recent thread on Mumsnet was full of angry female executives venting about how they had been mistaken for the PA, sent out to run errands for men and similar humiliations.

Many women may not even realize that they are paid much less than their male counterparts or even men who report to them.

There is a need for much more transparency.

When the BBC announced the rewards for its top stars, the differences were shocking.

But women are in the dark about whether they are paid fairly compared to men, both in the same company and in other companies in their industry.

We should have the right to see anonymised data on compensation at our level in the company hierarchy so that we can see for ourselves if we are being cheated of our worth.