This is an issue for everyone - women and their families are worse off as a result of this continuing pay gap. It starts early on - women graduates can expect to be earning 15% less than men by the age of 24. It continues throughout working life and beyond resulting in lower lifetime earnings and lower pensions for women.

We have been in the lead of identifying and tackling equal pay issues for many years. We first identified equal pay as a major issue for our members in the late 1980s. Since then we've been raising the issues, both through individual cases and on a collective basis.

A critical tool has been our survey evidence. This allowed us to demonstrate the extent of the pay differences between men and women very graphically. For instance, using the actual pay differences, we showed in 2000 that at that rate of progress it would take 216 years for women's pay to catch up with men's in BT. We gave publicity to this and integrated our findings and analysis into our pay negotiations.

The main causes of the pay gap for our members are:

• Lower starting pay for women
• Slow or no progress in long pay ranges to catch up higher paid men
• Job segregation - where women are concentrated in lower paid roles

Whether through raising individual cases or through our negotiations, we have been addressing this issue across our membership.

This campaign is aimed at raising awareness of the issue across the union, giving useful sources of information for reps and members who may be faced with this issue, giving ideas on how to progress things further and giving an update on how we are progressing this issue across the employers we deal with.

On this page you will also find some useful links to organisations where you will be able to find out more.