At the end of 2003 Norway adopted a rule that boards of public companies must be at least 40% composed of women. So what happened next?

Firstly, Norway has the highest female board representation of any country in the world.

But the quality of corporate governance appears also to have changed. One of the most striking observations recounted in FT analysis is the story of how female directors on Statoil's board asked questions about corruption that led to the resignation of the company's chairman and CEO.

"Women are more willing to ask questions without regard to whether they may be perceived as stupid or awkward questions" explains Grace Reksten Skaugen, one of the country’s most prominent directors, in the article.

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Marilyn Davidson, professor of work psychology at Manchester Business School, says her female undergraduates expect to earn--and think they deserve-- 25% less than their male counterparts.  

Davidson says women generally expect less than men, and don't speak up when they feel they deserve a raise the way men do, and that this gender difference carries on throughout a woman's career. 

The overall gender pay gap in Britain is 17%, but at senior-management levels, it's 25%, and the gender gap in executive bonuses is a whopping 50%.  But women are far more likely than men, say Davidson, to accept what pay has been offered, without questioning or asking for more. 

Davidson says that women place more emphasis than men on intrinsic job satisfaction, whereas men consider their pay to be the most important factor in whether their job is satisfying.  But it doesn't follow that women should earn less than men for performing the same job simply because money isn't their primary motivation.  It doesn't follow that women should earn less than men for any reason, whatsoever.  Any more than it would make sense that a person should earn less based on skin color or religion.   But it appears that women need to stop relying on legislation and regulation to ensure their equal rights, and get a little tougher and more assertive when negotiating their own pay packages.

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Today marks the day that the average woman's pay in the US caught up with what the average man earned during calendar year 2008.

Jocelyn Samuels of the National Woman's Law Center gives the analysis in the linked AlterNet article.

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A new Equality Bill being presented to the UK parliament could force companies to publish their gender pay gaps by 2013.

According to the BBC:

"Ministers ...want to tackle the fact that - 40 years after the introduction of the Equal Pay Act - women in the UK still earn on average 23% less per hour than men."

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Your (wo)man in Washington is written by Valerie Young, Advocacy Coordinator for the National Association of Mothers' Centers and its netroots initiative, Mothers Ought To Have Equal Rights. 

In this post she addresses the gender-pay gap, saying that improved workplace policy will go a long way toward redressing the balance and paying women what they're worth.  But it isn't everything, and it won't go far enough: the unpaid contributions of women to the economy need to be acknowleged too:

"Women spend about one third of their time in paid work, and two thirds in family carework or community work, or other uncompensated labor. (Men, on the other hand, spend two thirds of their time in compensated work, and one third on non-compensated work.) No matter how lucrative we make paid work, we cannot close the gender gap by that method alone. At some point, the carework that women do, in disproportionate numbers to men, will have to be regarded as the essential activity for all other human endeavors that it is. Without bearing children, raising them, caring for sick parents, neighbors, spouses, organizing households, providing for anything and everything other than paid work -nothing else is possible. No workers, no producers, no consumers, nothing happens."

In other words, a cultural shift needs to take place, in which people aren't valued merely for their monetary contribution to the economy.

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I don't think it's fair that I should be charged 30 to 50% more for my haircut than Mr. Newton, especially since his hair requires much more care and time than my straight-across-the-bottom blunt cut does.  But I'm a woman and he's a man and that's how the world works: a woman's haircut costs more than a man's regardless of style.  Likewise for lots of services, like auto repairs, wherein women can expect to pay more than men for the same service. 

And so we come to the health insurance industry, which can charge up to 39% more for an individual plan for a woman than a man, even when maternity is excluded.  The reason?  Women go to the doctor far more than men do, for routine care and checkups. 

Ten US States have health insurance anti-gender-discrimination laws on the books; time for the other forty to step up and do the same.  California is currently considering such a law.

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A new report from the Equality and Human Rights Commission finds that women earn less than men in the British financial sector across all levels of seniority.  In other words, the issue isn't simply that women, by and large, occupy lower-level positions than men; it's also that they're paid less for doing the exact same job.  On the lower rungs of the financial ladder, women earn 16% less than men in equivalent positions; at the top, they earn an average of 45% less. 

The Guardian calls this report "shocking" but I'm not sure many professional women, in any field, would be shocked by these numbers.

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