The Equal Pay Act prohibited any less favourable treatment between men and women in terms of pay and conditions of employment.
A five year phase-in was agreed to give employers time to adjust.
“Equal pay had been a TUC objective since … 1888, but natural justice had always conflicted with assumptions about the needs of society. Men needed to work to support a family. Married women did not need to work, and unmarried women had no family to support and could not expect to be paid the same as men with obligations. By the 1960s the balance was changing. New attitudes to women’s rights, encouraged by the new feminism, were one element. New jobs for women in the expanding light engineering and technological sectors of industry meant new recruitment opportunities for trades unions, which almost for the first time started to pay serious attention to the demand for equal pay.” Anne Perkins