The UK Government is going to force firms to reveal the bonuses they pay to men and to women.
Apparently, in the UK, a woman on average earns around 80p for every £1 earned by a man. The Government will also make it a legal requirement for every company with more than 250 employees to publish the difference between the average pay of their male and female employees.
Earlier this year, business hit a target for the percentage of women on company boards. That was set at twenty-five percent by government adviser Lord Davies. Be in no doubt he will want that to go to fifty percent.
Our Prime Minister, Mr Cameron, has said: “You can’t have true opportunity without equality. There is no place for a pay gap in today’s society and we are delivering on our promises to address it.”
Maria Miller MP, who chairs the Commons Women and Equalities Committee chimed in, launching an inquiry by her committee into government strategy on reducing the difference between what women and men are paid.
Mrs Miller said unequal pay was predominantly a problem that affected women over forty and that measures already announced by the government did not account for this group.
I saw a video recently in which one Mike Buchanan was pointing to research indicating that having loads of women on company boards impacted negatively on their profitability.
GOD CREATED THE MAN TO WORK AND THE WOMAN TO HELP HIM
But I think my disquiet is more with the principle that gender pay equality is either achievable or desirable.
You see, in the beginning, God created the man, gave him some work, and then created the woman to be a helper for him. The pattern of a man as the head of the household, providing outside the home and women caring within it is still one which chimes with people and to which they aspire.
Even in what we regard as the most primitive societies, women stay near the camp, keeping their home smart, gathering stuff, looking after the children, while the men go out and hunt. The women usually cook what the men bring back.
Most women, in all the surveys I have seen, would rather be at home looking after their children than out at work. But sadly we have too many single-parent families today, and most of those are headed by a mother, and in two-parent households, governments have organised things so that today so many families need two incomes to survive.
GENDER PAY GAP IS A MYTH
I also want to suggest that this ‘gender pay gap’ might actually be a myth. After all, it’s illegal to pay a man more than a woman for doing an equivalent job.
So how do the Government come up with their 80% figure? Well, they just take a average of what every man earns and compare it with the average of what every woman earns, then round it up to the nearest 10%.
But men do more dirty and dangerous jobs, that pay more – and kill many of them. Many women – probably too many for the government’s liking – actually want to bring up their own children. Taking time out of a career inevitably impacts on earning ability.
And when you read about the real differences between men and women, you find that men are more driven and focused on achievements, while women are more concerned with relationships.
Lastly, if more men than women prioritise work, as the figures seem to show, won’t that, coupled with natural testosterone-fueled ambition, impact on relative earnings?
NEGATIVE PAY-GAPS
According to the Office for National Statistics, the gender pay gap is actually 9.4% for full-time employees. It only rises to 19.1% (not 20%) when part-time employees are included. And for part-time employees, they say, ‘the higher rate of pay for women than men results in a ‘negative’ gender pay gap’. The Government are not campaigning to address that problem, or seeking to raise the pay of young men to equal that of young women.
According to the Guardian newspaper, there is a negative gender pay gap among the young. ‘The pay gap is low or slightly reversed among 18 to 39-year-olds, but the gap for hourly earnings grows from the age of 40 onwards, reaching its highest point for women in their 50s’, said the paper. This is precisely the point where women are taking time out of their career for family reasons and men are nearing the peak of theirs.
The Government protest that after decades of equal pay acts, Britain still has the sixth-highest pay gap between men and women in the EU. But even this claim is highly simplistic.
The European Commission say: ‘A high pay gap is usually characteristic of a labour market which is highly segregated, meaning that women are more concentrated in a restricted number of sectors and/or professions (e.g. Czech Republic, Estonia and Finland), or in which a significant proportion of women work part-time (e.g. Germany and Austria)’. Both of those, to a certain extent, would apply to the United Kingdom.
The BBC’s Mark Easton asked ‘which jobs have more women than men‘, and he linked to a 2012 report from the House of Commons Library. (Click on the PDF to see the full report).
Another pay gap is never talked about. It is the gap between what people earn in the private sector and in the public sector. According to ONS: ‘Private sector earnings have remained consistently at around 85% of public sector earnings since 2009.’
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In Scotland, the women always vacuum clean the castles while the men go out hunting.
And you call this the men working, while the women are at home caring ?
But seriously, ask a busy mum how busy she is, and her husband might be a poet or something .
Down south, women vacuum other women’s houses whilst they go to the gym. The latter either earn enough to pay another woman to do their dirty work (all women are equal but some are more equal than others), or else their husbands pay for both gym fee and cleaner, or else they are living the high life having robbed their erstwhile husbands through the divorce courts.
I’m a busy mum – my husband works very hard to support this family – if he wants to write poetry too, what does that matter? Churchill wrote a prize-winning history of Britain whilst winning tthe war….
But a more typical scenario is that the woman who vacuum cleans the other woman’s house as well as her own has a husband or boyfriend who is a full-time poet. Yet writing poetry does not really occupy a forty-hour week in the normal sense.
While Adam writes his verse, and Eve earns what she can,
Who then is the gentleman ?
Presumably Adam, very much so, although he may look a bit scruffy.
I think you will find that Churchill’s “History of the English-Speaking Peoples” (which devoted huge chunks to the USA) was written mainly in the 1930s and 1950s. Churchill didn’t actually win the Nobel prize (in 1953) for this book, which wasn’t actually finished, but more particularly for his very successful History of the Second World War, written after the war was over of course, and when he was no longer prime minister.
I do not know, on a personal level, any part-time poets yet alone full-time ones. The poets my children are expected to study as part of GCSE English are certainly the scruffy sort who contribute absolutely nothing postive to this country…..Maybe you have a grudge against somebody?
I find that women who clean other women’s houses are either the breadwinner (divorced, widowed or got an ill husband) or else have hard working, working class husbands. Other women going out to work have pushed up the cost of living for all women so that the poor cleaner has no choice in the matter.
It’s sad that you think poets contribute absolutely nothing positive to the country. It seems to be you that has a grudge, against poets for some reason.
Men as a group earn more than women as a group.
Men as a group pay even far more tax than women as a group.
Women as a group receive far more from the tax coffers than men do as a group. (child benefit, child tax credit, free female-specific cancer screening etc to name a few).
Last figures I read somewhere were something like 80% of govt payouts go to women but women only contribute 40% of the tax to fund the payouts – happy to stand corrected as I am reeling these off the top of my head..
How about addressing and rebalancing THIS ‘gender gap??
That sounds GREAT ! We should obviously subject women to a higher tax rate than men, or perhaps lower their personal allowance.
It’s the same with the unemployed and the chronically ill. They get far more from the tax coffers than they contribute. The only way round this which comes to mind (I don’t know if it’s been tried before) is to have institutions in every town where they are forced to work long hours at whatever they can do, with the proceeds going to the Government or the Local Authority. Perhaps the Church of England could run these places, which could be called “workhouses” perhaps, and the profits could go to the Parish ?
Careful – you are implying that women need looking after, if you class them alongside the chronically ill – and that will not do in this egalitarian age…you sound like a patriarchy!!
And why shouldn’t the unemployed work for the money they receive from the tax coffers? I really cannot see why they should be paid to sit around doing absolutely nothing when there’s plenty of work needing doing. We could have twice as many cleaners in the hospitals, elderly people could receive twice as much care at home, the army could be recruiting instead of reducing…
Actually, I quite like your idea of taxing second-wage earners at a higher rate than the main breadwinners. Mothers might then stay at home to look after their own children and free up some jobs for the fathers in households where neither parent goes out to work.
Institutions where people are forced to work long hours…well, that is happening and it’s all going under the fancy name of volunteering – i.e. working for nothing. ‘Contributing to the community’ is one of the indicators councils use for measuring young people’s ‘wellbeing’. Have no doubt, we are living in a communist state.
My last remark wasn’t intended to be taken entirely seriously .
Once you start regarding man and women as living together in families, rather than in separate communes of men over there and women over here, such male vs female statistics become irrelevant. I know that single-parent families muddy that water, but such a view is much more realistic for the majority.
Yes, I agree with Stephen (as so often). Men are supposed to have spent most of history being in charge of the family, but when you look at a great deal of fiction and history written over the years, especially about working class or generally “ordinary” people”, this seems to have been far from always so; the husband and wife work together, and the wife may be subtly dominant.
In the case of aristocratic women, although some may have been horsewhipped or shut up in convents etc, many seem to have pursued surprisingly independent and influential lives in their own way, with much control over men. Since the middle ages, widows with something of a business to inherit have often gone it alone with every success.