Eleanor Burnham Grapples with the Gender Gap (Eleanor Burnham )

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Eleanor Burnham <info@eburnham.org.uk>

Eleanor Burnham Grapples with the Gender Gap

October 4, 2006 11:23 AM

Eleanor Burnham today tackled the Minister for Equal Opportunities on the continuing imbalance between men and women in Welsh workplaces.

Ms Burnham, Welsh Liberal Democrat Assembly Member for North Wales, questioned how much progress was being made in redressing the balance between male and female employees in light of figures suggesting few women achieve high power, high pay roles in Wales.

Ms Burnham said: "I cannot believe that in this day and age there is still a gulf between the salaries paid to men and women doing the same jobs.

"This Welsh pay gap means that, on average, full time working women are paid 12% less than men. And it is even worse for part time female employees, who are paid 31% less than their male counterparts.

"Considering the praise lavished on the Assembly for its 50/50 split male and female membership, it's shocking to see that even now, less than 20% of councillors in Wales are women and just 9% of local government executives are female.

"No matter what the government says, women are still largely confined to stereotypical jobs within teaching, nursing and healthcare and administration.

"The Welsh Assembly Government's Equal Pay Campaign is a valuable step to genuine gender equality in the workplace, but more must be done to make higher executive positions available to women as well as men throughout Wales."

Notes:

Statistics taken from the report Who Runs Wales? (2006) issued by Wales Women's National Coalition and the Equal Opportunities Commission.

Available online at:

http://www.intute.ac.uk/cgi-bin/redir.pl?url=http://www.eoc.org.uk/pdf/Who%20Runs%20Wales%202006.pdf&handle=sosig1141815370-21241

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