Is #PRpaygap missing the point?

For anyone in the PR profession, Twitter newsfeeds have been dominated this week by PR Pay Gap. The hashtag follows the latest PRCA salary survey, which revealed that women in the sector typically earn £8,000 to £10,000 less than men in a similar role.

It’s been an interesting conversation, with much talk about transparency and better people management. Regardless of the efforts of PR industry bodies, however, it seems the issue isn’t being addressed at agency level and, as @pr_cox from the Education & Training Foundation pointed out on Twitter “PR cannot be serious about being guardians of reputation if we pay women less than men for the same work.”

The issue is about much more than pay scales and transparency, however. The amount a person is paid should be aligned to the value they provide to the organisation. But how should that value be measured?

If we are to follow the logic of one anonymous ‘agency head’ quoted on Twitter “Gender pay should take account of hours worked. It’s well known that men work much more hours in a career than women”. This statement is missing a fundamental truth about the value of an individual to an organisation: value is not about the time someone puts into their job but about the outcomes they achieve.

A person is worth the sum of their hours in the office rather than the talent, enthusiasm and experience they bring to work is, quite simply, ludicrous. I’m sure we can all cite experiences of colleagues – men and women – that have spent long days chained to their desks with little to show for it. Indeed, at Clare PR, our whole business model is designed around the principle that fees should be based on the results achieved rather than the time allocated to achieving them.

The simple fact is that a person should be hired and paid on criteria that considers their performance, regardless of their gender, measured not in time spent, but in value added. The same is true of a PR agency or any other external supplier. Only then can any profession – or any society – become a true meritocracy; something we all, surely, male or female, aspire to.