A shorter working week could help close the gender pay gap – here’s how

Recent events in Downing Street have prompted many of us to think about what we were doing while No 10 partied. Ask any working parent to recall May 2020 and they’ll tell you it was less “wine and cheese” and more “whine and cheestrings” as they balanced work and childcare.

If something positive has come out of that period, then it is surely the national conversation we are now having about the way we work. From hybrid working to health and safety, the pandemic has prompted us to consider the culture of overwork and overproduction that we view as “normal”.

For many women, that “normal” consists of low-paid, part-time, and insecure work generating a gender pay gap that, pre-pandemic, stood at 17.4 per cent. Of course, much of that inequality is rooted in the uneven way we share unpaid work such as care and household chores. Women generally carry out an average of 60 per cent more unpaid work than men, meaning they do less paid work as a result. Indeed, it begs the question: is it a pay gap or a care gap?

For a very short period during the first national lockdown, that dynamic began to shift. This has helped us understand why a shorter working week could improve the gender pay gap. The Women’s Budget Group recently analysed time use data and evidence from the first stage of the pandemic to see what impact it had on unpaid and paid work. We found that, during this period, men increased the time they spent on unpaid care as their paid work declined.

Although women continued to perform the majority of unpaid care, men’s share increased to 40 per cent during the first lockdown, up from 34 per cent previously. When men eventually increased their paid hours again in the second phase of the pandemic, the trend for sharing care was reversed.

This unintentional natural experiment indicates that a shorter working week for all could lead to a more even distribution of housework and care responsibilities, freeing up women to take on more paid work, including more secure contracts and promotions.

A shorter working week could be vital for closing the gender pay gap and creating an equal distribution of care and domestic labour, but it is by no means a silver bullet. We don’t want to see women using their spare time to do more care while men decompress. In order to ensure that a reduction in working hours has the desired effect, it needs to be accompanied by other strong pro-labour institutions and mechanisms, not least of all a reform of our paltry and inadequate parental leave system, which in its current state, frames mothers as the default primary caregiver and treats fathers and secondary parents as mere bystanders.

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This is exactly why we also need a flexible approach to the implementation of a shorter working week. A shorter day as well as four day and three day weeks should be offered, particularly for those with school-aged children. Too often mothers are forced into taking jobs below their skill or qualification level in order to be available for the school run, limiting their opportunities for career and pay progression, which contributes to the gender pay gap.

Of course, working less isn’t just good for equality, it’s good for the environment too. Evidence suggests that countries that work fewer hours have lower greenhouse gas emissions. Our work towards the creation of a green, caring economy looks at inclusive ways to address the climate emergency, and the shorter working week is a valuable part of this. But it’s also a prime example of a policy that has wide-reaching, intersectional benefits.

It opens up a much bigger conversation about the dangers and consequences of overproduction and a skewed work/life balance, and inequalities in how we spend our time. From climate change to Covid to the cost-of-living crisis, each of these emergencies provide an opportunity to tackle inequality, should be viewed as much for this as for their broader implications.

Dr Sara Reis is deputy director of the Women’s Budget Group