Is The Gender Pay Gap Real?

Are women really getting paid less than men for doing comparable work, or are we all being blinded by statistics, which as Aaron Lowenstein said are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive but what they conceal is vital.

For example, according to the National Statistics website“The gender pay gap (as measured by the median hourly pay excluding overtime of full-time employees) widened between 2007 and 2008.

However, in a recent paper for the Institute of Economic Affairs, Professor John Shackleton, of the University of East London, pointed out that single, widowed or divorced women earn more than their male counterparts, but the pay gap between men and women in families with three children was 19 per cent.

He also states that men earn more money than women because they work longer hours, put in the overtime, go out of their way to seek high pay and promotion and don’t stop working to have families.

Hmmm. So which report (both, I have no doubt based on statistics) is right? An impossible question to answer without ‘stripping off the bikini’ i.e. without looking at the information that was collected, how it was collected, how it was analysed, and what the analysts’ theories were when they began their research.

A huge amount of legistlation dealing with women in the workplace has been passed based on the kind of statistics that say women get paid less than men. And I am sure a lot of the statistical information is correct; and a lot of the legistlation is required.

But having spent 10 years working as a management adviser to hundreds of small, medium and large organisations, I know for a fact that a lot of the legistlation is, as Professor Shackleton states, counterproductive.

I hate to think of the number of employers, male and female, who have looked me in the eye and stated that they will not hire women of a certain age and stage in life, because they are likely to want to have families; thereby costing the company more than other employees.