The difficulties of determining fair pay
Salary data suggests that perceived wage gaps in the chemical sciences are indeed present
It’s surprisingly difficult to confirm whether you’re being paid fairly. Apart from a general cultural reticence to discuss or advertise salaries (in the UK at least), fairness has many different dimensions. Equal pay for equal work sounds fair. But fairness can also depend on what salaries are like across a sector, whether they allow someone to afford food and rent, and whether they reward someone’s existing skills and previous experiences.
What’s definitely not fair is that women, chemists with disabilities and chemists from minoritised ethnic groups are more likely to feel that their pay is unfair than their colleagues, according to the RSC’s 2021 Pay and Reward survey. 54% of women think their pay is fair, compared with 59% of men; 40% of respondents from minoritised ethnic groups think they’re paid fairly, versus 59% of all other respondents ; 47% of disabled people and 58% of non-disabled people think that their pay is fair.
Sceptics might counter that the question only asks whether people think they’re being paid fairly, not whether they actually are. Well, other results from the RSC survey suggest there is an underlying salary bias: women, members of minority ethnic groups and disabled people receive lower median salaries than their male, white, non-disabled counterparts.