I was interested to read the news on the gender pay gap (Women still far adrift on salary and promotion, 23 August). Care responsibilities and part-time work are a convenient get-out clause for institutional and systemic economic discrimination against women, particularly mothers. Yet the fact is that women are penalised in the waged and unwaged economy for having children.

In the discussion about the pay gap many assumptions are made: that women often stop working or work fewer years than men; that somehow “jobless” means “workless”. In fact, these mothers who have “dropped out of the workforce” have continued to work: they have simply become unwaged and unvalued carers of babies and young children, volunteers in the communities and helpers at schools.

The reality is that the pay gap discussion is a misdirection, focusing on pay discrepancy based on the paid workforce. It doesn’t talk about the income gap when taking into account the unwaged labour (valued by the ONS recently at about £1tn) in the shadow, core economy. The majority of that work is unwaged care – care that has to be done by somebody. Much is done by women – mothers. So the position is even worse than these headlines suggest.

We have to find ways to ensure that mothers are not penalised in their job, pay and conditions. A restructured economy and workplace, which does not expect “ideal worker” performance, is long overdue – men have to show up at home, not just at work. But the counterpoint to this has to be that we ensure that mothers are not also marginalised when they take time out of the paid workforce. Basic income and the abolition of the family tax penalty in single-earner families would go some way to reduce the income gap for carers. The truth is that it is not a gender pay gap but a maternal income gap. It is not discrimination against women but against mothers.

Vanessa Olorenshaw

Sevenoaks, Kent

• In response to the IFS research a government spokesperson expresses concern and reminds us that “the government is pushing ahead with plans to force businesses to publish their gender pay and gender bonus gap”. Well bully for them, but such action will not address the need for affordable childcare, better quality part-time jobs nor the retraining or upskilling that would be so helpful to mothers who are forced to change employment direction.

Of course we need a change of attitude but these are structural impediments which cost women, their families and the country dear. We should also question the IFS finding of a decline in the wage gap among the lower educated. I might wager a small coin that this is more to do with men’s pay being held down than women’s pay moving up.

Margaret Prosser

Labour, House of Lords

• As all work, including the professions, has come under increasing commercial pressures and all sectors are subjugated to cost- and fee-cutting demands, so the status of women in the workplace has deteriorated. This climate of rampant competition is a situation in which work-life balance is sacrificed to naked ambition. Long hours are frequently demanded (often unpaid). This presents women in particular with impossible choices.

Since the destruction of the public sector, a trail-blazer in equal pay and maternity leave, the shake-out has affected women more than men, both as employees and as beneficiaries of services.

The social surveys used in The Spirit Level, with charts of income differentials within all democracies, show that all the Scandinavian countries are well rated, while the UK is the third worst. A survey published in December 2013 showed Britain as one of the three worst countries in the democratic world for professional women. In the five best countries – Sweden, Norway, Germany, France and Spain – the proportion of women to men in my profession of architecture is in much better balance, there is better paid maternity and paternity leave and childcare is much more affordable. In Sweden and Norway, where the gender split is 50/50, the cost of childcare is 7.1% and 16.7% of average income respectively. In UK it is close to 50%.

Kate Macintosh

Winchester, Hampshire

• One reason for the persistence of the gender pay gap is government policy. Since 2010, Conservative-led governments have imposed a virtual pay freeze on all public sector employees. A very high proportion of public sector workers are women, many of whom are graduates, such as nurses, midwives, social workers and teachers. This Treasury-inspired social engineering has contributed to maintaining the gender pay gap, particularly among graduates.

Alastair Hatchett

Visiting fellow, University of Greenwich

• Margaret Hodge’s excellent piece (Motherhood should not be a brake on women’s careers, 24 August) follows on from the IFS report which confirmed that the gender pay gap widens as women and men grow older. One important factor is that time spent working part-time or in non-conventional patterns is not valued as “experience”. We need a change in the images we use to think about work commitment and careers: how about “career mosaics” instead of “career ladders”?

Tom Schuller

London

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