Theresa May can't even close the gender pay gap for her own staff, let alone the country

The Equal Pay Act was passed in 1970. Since then it has been illegal for UK employers to pay women less than men for doing the same job. Instead, they have been paying people who might get pregnant/have higher-pitched voices/are called names like “Katie” rather than “Robbie”, less than men for doing the same job. This is what we call progress.

Almost 50 years after the passing of the act, the gender pay gap stands at 9.1 per cent. There have been many reasons given for this discrepancy in the rewarding of male and female labour. The obvious one – sexism in association with patriarchy’s need to appropriate and exploit female sexual, reproductive and domestic labour – remains the best, but men don’t tend to like it. Therefore the manufacturing of other explanations has become an industry in its own right.

This week a headline in The Telegraph told us that the gender pay gap was “perpetuated by teenage girls who want jobs that pay less”. Damn these foolish, low-pay-loving masochists! Is this really what Emily Davison died for?

Of course, once one scratches below the surface of such claims, one finds the reasoning to be more than a little suspect. Do women really choose low-paid careers? Or is the work that women do – whatever it happens to be at any given time – undervalued in relation to work done by men? One might as well blame women for being women (always a handy shortcut).

In another example of women being paid less because reasons, today we learned that Theresa May’s male communications chief, Robbie Gibb, is being paid £15,000 more than Katie Perrior, the woman he replaced. Admittedly this is the difference between £125,000 and £140,000, eye-watering sums at a time when less privileged women are being asked to demonstrate they were raped just to claim tax credits for a third child. On a purely individual level, it’s hard to see Perrior as a victim.

Nevertheless, it sends a particularly disconcerting message to all women. Our female Prime Minister has been vocal about the need for firms to start publishing their own pay data. When the BBC was under fire for the huge difference in salaries paid to male and female presenters, May spoke to LBC about the sheer wrongness of “paying women less for doing the same job as men”. And yet, when replacing a female member of staff with a male one in her own office, she suddenly finds these rules don’t apply.

Of course, there’s a reasonable explanation. There always is. According to a Downing Street spokesperson, pay levels are based on “a number of factors, including the candidate’s previous experience”. This is obviously true, and certainly Perrior’s own appointment was seen as surprising to some, given she did not have a background in journalism.

But still, do unconventional appointments always lead to lower salaries, or just the ones granted to women? Is a man from another field treated as having bonus experience, while a woman is considered lucky to be given a chance elsewhere? It’s difficult to answer these questions, which is an ongoing problem with flexibility within pay grades. As long as there is any room for discretion, subjective decisions will always give room for a sexism you can never quite pin down.

On the one hand there is the bare fact that women are paid less than men, regardless of experience, qualifications and capability. On the other is the fact that on an individual level, it is very hard to know whether you personally are being paid less because of your sex.

In Delusions of Gender, Cordelia Fine presents research showing that employers adapt their vision of what they need from a candidate in order to give preferential treatment to men: “Rather than unfairly stereotyping the candidates … the raters instead defined their notion of ‘what it takes’ to do the job well in a manner tailored to the idiosyncratic credentials of the person they wanted to hire”. Whatever experience or skills a man has compared to a woman makes him the best person for the job, even if the names on the CVs are switched.

Is Theresa May being consciously, intentionally sexist? Probably not. We should all know by now that May pays lip service to feminist ideals while trampling over the rights and welfare of lower-paid, vulnerable women in particular. Austerity has hit women the hardest; serious threats to refuge funding may be putting women’s lives at risk. I don’t think, however, that we’re witnessing the full-on misogyny that drives some politicians, more the utter lack of compassion of the average Tory combined with the shameless exploitation of feminist rhetoric for political gain.

The gender pay gap is just one measure of the enormous and growing chasm between privileged and deprived people in the United Kingdom. May talks the talk of creating “a fairer society” while leading a party that are doing worse than nothing.

You don’t have to feel pity for Katie Perrior to see her lower pay as emblematic of May’s fauxminism. If you can accept inequality in your immediate circle, you can accept it everywhere. Women in all sectors deserve better than this.