Women, you can stop working now. Here's why.

 It’s that time of year again. Thursday 10 November marks Equal Pay Day – the date from which, as a result of the gender pay gap, women in the UK are effectively working for free for the rest of the year. According to the Fawcett Society, the full-time pay gap stands at 13.9%, and at the current rate of progress it will take 60 years to close. And the figures are even starker for BAME women, who face a pay gap compared with white workers.

But women across Europe have had enough, and have started staging walkouts to protest against this pay disparity. In October, thousands of women in Iceland left work at 2.38pm on a Monday afternoon, the time from which they are essentially working for free every eight-hour day. And this week, women in French workplaces, including Paris city hall, downed tools at precisely 4.34pm, highlighting the moment at which their annual 38.2 days of “unpaid labour” began.

Such protests draw attention to the gender pay gap – a phenomenon that has become so normalised that women are encouraged to simply accept it (when we’re not being repeatedly told that it doesn’t exist at all). Why should we continue to accept being constantly short-changed?

So, inspired by the women of Iceland and France, I have a few ideas about how women in the UK could highlight the 14% deficit they face, and see how readily others are prepared simply to shrug and get on with it …

• From 10 November onwards, when doing the office tea round, ensure your male colleagues’ mugs are just 86% full, let their tea water cool 14 degrees after the kettle reaches boiling point and, just to drive the point home, take a small but pointed bite out of their biscuit.
•  When dropping children off at school (a task that is part of the unpaid caring work still disproportionately done by women), drive only 86% of the way, then stop abruptly, bundle them out and let them walk the remaining 14% of the journey. Similarly, clean only 86% of any room, scrape 14% of the food off any plate you have prepared for male family members and take care to wash only 86% of any sock belonging to a male partner. Simply cutting the toes off before washing would be an efficient way to achieve this.

• Women in different careers, feel free to be creative and make the point in your own unique and personal ways. Surgeons, down your scalpels with 14% of the operation left to go; waitresses, cut a 14% wedge out of each customer’s pizza; actresses, walk off stage 86% of the way through a play, leaving the audience to guess the ending. I advise female refuse collectors to leave 14% of the contents of each resident’s bin in a neat pile on their doorstep.

If engaging in any kind of sexual activity with a male partner between now and New Year’s Day, wait until you estimate that they are precisely 86% of the way towards climaxing before stopping abruptly and abandoning said sexual activity for a good book or a Jessica Jones box set. 

These are, of course, tongue-in-cheek suggestions. But it is frustrating to wonder how long it will take before this inequality is seen as an urgent problem, rather than simply an inevitable burden more than half the population must continue to shoulder. And most importantly of all ...

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