§ 75. Mr. FREDERICK WHYTEasked the Secretary to the Treasury whether, in the highest and lowest grades of the National Insurance Act services, the remuneration is the same for both men and women; whether the remuneration for all intervening grades is fixed on two separate bases, one, the higher, for men, and another, the lower, for women; and whether he can state the reason for this difference of treatment?
§ Mr. MASTERMANThe salaries paid to women on the staff of the Insurance Commissions are, except in the case of health insurance officers (whose scale of salary is £80, rising to £150 per annum), in all cases rather lower than those paid to the next nearly corresponding grades of male officers. Assistant inspectors, however, enter at the same minimum, £100, or in the case of specially experienced candidates of either sex, £200, but the women proceed to a somewhat lower maximum salary. In no case (except perhaps that of health insurance officers) are the duties of the male and female staff identical, and the differentiation in salaries where it exists is in part due to this cause, and in part to the normal practice in the public service, which is now under consideration by a Royal Commission.