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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