Shell oil anti-women discrimination

This 30 June 2017 video is called Four widows of Nigerian activists launch civil case against Shell.

Shell under fire after confessing to 22per cent gender pay gap

Friday 1st December 2017

OIL giant Shell has revealed that its male employees in Britain earn a fifth more than their female counterparts.

Shell UK chair Sinead Lynch admitted that the corporation had “fewer women in senior leadership positions and fewer women working in technical or trading roles that attract higher levels of pay.”

The company also acknowledged that only a third its employees are female.

Shell blamed an industry-wide shortage rather than discrimination, as just 25 per cent of graduates in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (Stem) are women. In engineering and technology alone, the figure is just 14 per cent.

But the Fawcett Society said employers have a responsibility to ensure diversity in their recruitment, as well as creating structures and a culture that allow women to succeed and challenging working practices that might exclude women.

Jemima Olchawski, head of policy at the women’s rights think tank, said: “Progress on the pay gap has stalled and without significant changes it could never close.

“But improving performance on gender equality in the workplace would add £150 billion to GDP by 2025, so it’s an area where none of us can afford ‘business as usual’.”

Green Party deputy leader Amelia Womack said: “How appropriate that a company based on extracting fossil fuels should have a prehistoric gender-pay ratio. It’s not good enough for Shell to say the gap is the result of there being too few women in senior positions. Companies with glass ceilings built into their promotion and pay structure have no place in the 21st century.”

She pointed out that, in all kinds of work, women are still underpaid, undervalued and overlooked for promotion, and highlighted solutions such as free childcare and quotas for women on boards to ensure that they receive the same recognition, reward and support as men.

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A skills imbalance was the argument used by the Bank of England when it revealed last week that it paid men almost a quarter more than women.

From next April, companies with more than 250 employees will be required to publish figures on their gender pay-gap every year.