Book - Why Women Are Poorer Than Men and What We Can Do About It by Annabelle Williams

Money gives you freedom.

It will never buy you happiness, but having enough money allows you to have choices; over where you live, what you do for work and how you spend your free time (author & financial journalist Annabelle Williams)

If you think this book is about the existence of the pay gap, think again. Indeed, it’s not a book I would have picked up had I not seen the author talk about the subject at a How To Academy event (great subscription, by the way). At this event, I learnt straight away the pay gap gets a small mention towards the end. The book is packed full of facts such as a typical British woman will earn £223K less than a man during her working life. That’s a whole house.

Whilst I’ve gradually learnt about the financial gender divide over recent years, I always thought it didn’t include me. I’m not a parent where it really hurts, and I’m not black where it’s even worse. I’m Indian, and we appear on the stats less, but we do pop up. It’s not about me, though, is it? It’s about all of us.

Anyway, before we get to the gender pay gap, we need to understand how threatened men have been by women having any sort of independence or power throughout history. The police abused the suffragettes both inside the prison walls and openly for the world to see during demonstrations. We also need to know the part generations of governments played in stopping women from owning their own property and how people in power have played in screwing pension laws. When I say police, people or government, I, of course, mean men.

Looking back, it’s astonishing to think women couldn’t get a mortgage on their own until 1980. That’s eight years before I got my first house not knowing that if I was born a decade earlier, I wouldn’t have able to do what I believed to be my right. In turn, that was some years before I worked in Fleet Street where there were still a couple of bars that didn’t allow women to buy drinks despite this being outlawed as late as 1982. They never got my business as part of my job was to wine and dine clients back then.

Women couldn’t buy property because they were classed as property. 

The inequality has been highlighted in the last 18 months as carers, nurses, cooks, cleaners - the vast majority of whom are women - got elevated to key workers. They risked their lives and headed straight back into work to provide us with the essential services we need. Women make up 80% of the care sector. Did they get the respect and pay they deserve? No, they got a round of applause.

The majority of unpaid carers are women, which is amongst the lowest-paid sectors. We don’t get to hear about how women are affected because the data isn’t separated. We know about income from a salary; we don’t hear about sources such as investments, savings or second homes, which men most often own.

One of the hundreds of facts that Annabelle Williams has pulled together from her years as a financial journalist is that there are more men called Steve running the UK’s top 100 companies than there are women chiefs. And no, they are not paid as much as men.

Why Women Are Poorer Than Men is full of insight into areas I’d never even thought about, and I am so glad I came across it. I knew I’d have far too many stickers marking pages of note, so for the first time, I defecated a book with pencil marks. I know I will refer back to it many times - it’s a lovely looking book. If you need anything, I can probably look it up for you.

It will take 257 years for women to reach economic parity with men; this is not something we can leave to another generation.