The Gender Pay gap has stirred lots of emotions and generated scores of headlines over these past few months. And rightly so. Sarah Montague for example, had every reason to become ‘incandescent with rage’ when she discovered that she was being paid substantially less than her male colleagues at the BBC. It was a profoundly revealing insight into the value we have placed on women, and the contribution they make to our society.

As she pointed out: “It is hard to communicate the range of emotions you feel on learning that you are paid so much less than people doing the same job as you. Pay is personal. It is a judgment of what you do every day and in my case have done for the past two decades. It is the most powerful measure of what your employer thinks of you relative to your peers.”

It’s not a uniquely British problem though. According to the Guardian, the World Economic Forum’s research has shown that women around the globe ‘may have to wait more than two centuries to achieve equality in the workplace.’ And ‘Taking other indicators such as access to healthcare and education and participation in politics into account, the overall gender gap will take 100 years to close - also longer than the 83 years the WEF researchers predicted last year.’ Viewed that way things are getting worse not better!

These are shameful statistics and deserve to be ‘outed,’ not least because they deny something God has told us about the dignity of women. Now I guess very few people would think of turning to the opening chapters of the Book of Genesis when talking about the Gender Gap, but I don’t think you could do better. For those chapters were, and still are, highly subversive pieces of literature, and have something very important to say to all of us.

This becomes clear when you read these chapters against the background of the popular beliefs and practices of the day for it’s obvious that they debunk many of the ideas that were popular in the centuries before Christ

Most importantly for our subject, they assert that human beings are not an accident of nature but creatures that have been made in the very image of God. This was a revolutionary statement because at the time rulers erected images of themselves to remind everyone that they were at the very top of the social ladder and therefore in charge. But the Book of Genesis asserts something very, very different when it says: “Then God said, ‘Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.’ So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.

Put simply, the author wants everyone to know that it is not just kings and powerful people who represent God; every human being does, whatever his or her gender, whatever his or her social status. And women share in this God given status as much as any man because they are made in the image of God too. Sadly, this high view of women was not only unique at the time ‘it has remained unique well into the modern age.’

When will we ever learn? I really hope it won’t take as long as the World Economic Forum suggests it will because we’ll all be the poorer if it does.

Rob James is a Baptist Pastor broadcaster and writer who currently operates as a church and media consultant for the Evangelical Alliance Wales. He is available for preaching and teaching throughout Wales and can be contacted at [email protected]