Tim Worstall

A time warp of 1970s sexist attitudes is driving women in their late thirties from careers in science and technology and undermining key sectors of the economy, according to an international study.
Researchers claim to have discovered a “hidden brain drain” as women opt out when facing a choice between family life and pushing for promotion […]

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Is Sir Salman:

"It’s strange, given that I’ve been married four times, but I actually don’t think marriage is necessary," Sir Salman told the writer Kathy Lette in an interview for Elle magazine. "Girls like it, especially if they’ve never been married before – it’s the dress. Girls want a wedding, they don’t want a marriage. […]

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Amanda Marcotte has her first book out.
There’s been a certain, umm, consternation shall we say, about the accompanying illustrations.
Here.

Snigger. Oh Lord, what were they thinking?
Well, here’s what the publishers say.
Readers will know that I’m not exactly a fan of Ms. Marcotte’s work and thinking (yes, this is that famous British understatement) however, her response I […]

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Vicki Woods:

I can’t ever read another survey about that other great curse of modern women, which is widely misrepresented. The fact that women have both a) a gender pay gap and b) babies annoys a great swathe of right-thinking women (if "right" is the word, which it probably isn’t) who cannot or will not do […]

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Despite decades of anti-discrimination legislation and changes in company rhetoric, women, whether they are in New York or Shanghai, find their pay cheque contains on average sixteen per cent less than male co-workers. That is the official figure, derived from applying a standard method across sixty-three countries. However trade unions in a number of countries […]

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Polly’s got it!
It’s a motherhood gap, not a gender pay gap!

The Office for National Statistics reported yesterday that women in their 40s earn 20% less per hour than their male counterparts. This is the motherhood penalty - and the more children a woman has, the wider the gap. Young women start out earning almost the […]

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Now, it’s true that she won’t be able to claim maternity pay as she’s employed as a freelance, but, umm, this is a problem that a large number of businesses face:

No sooner had the newsreader Natasha Kaplinsky announced that she was pregnant than the applications to stand in for her started to arrive.
“It’s a very […]

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Surprisingly, it’s in the New Statesman.
It’s quite fun seeing the writer (Richard Reeves) pottering along and saying all the right things…the gender pay gap is indeed caused by the career breaks and the subsequent preference for part time working amongst women caused by child bearing and rearing. Firms are not acting irrationally when they downgrade […]

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The G:

But this week, TUC research found the difference between men and women’s pay still more than trebles once women reach their 30s, prompting the accusation that bosses enforce a "motherhood penalty".

Eh, it’s the evil capitalist bastards enforcing a penalty?
How about it’s people taking time out of the labour force, reducing their human capital, increasing […]

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Ante-natal classes are failing to prepare women for the painful reality of childbirth, a study claims today.
New mothers are often shocked at the "intensity" of the agony they experience in labour, researchers from Newcastle University found.
"Unrealistic" expectations also led many to believe that they wouldn’t need pain relief during childbirth.

We’ve had decades of hippie dippy […]

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There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.

Fathers and mothers will both be able to take more than six months paid leave together after having a baby, under radical Conservative plans to make the party appear more family friendly.

Whether this is a good thing or not is really rather for others to decide: I’m […]

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Lookie here:

The difference between men’s and women’s pay more than trebles when women reach their 30s, TUC research revealed today. It found women leaving school at 16 and going into a full-time job earn 9.7% more than their male contemporaries. But from the age of 18 - and throughout the rest of their working lives […]

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The ITUC has released a report on the gender pay gap around the world. On average it’s 16%. I’ll go into it in more detail later, but this little bit jumped out at me:

Many believe education is the key to closing the gap, but on the contrary, one of the most sobering findings of this […]

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Sweden
Stable, with small increase from 84% (1995) to 82% (2000) (figures refer to monthly pay).
Increasing.

UK
Gradually narrowing, from 76.6% (1990) to 80.6% (2000) (UK0104126F) (figures refer to hourly pay).
Narrowing.

Umm, if even Sweden can’t eradicate it, why the angst here?

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However, female workers in Bahrain actually earned 40 per cent more than men, according to the ITUC’s findings.

So, er, the solution to the gender pay gap is to discriminate against women to the level of a Gulf Arab state?

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Melanie McDonagh puts it about right:

Well, not so fast. There are two ways of looking at these figures. One can be summed up by The Guardian’s take on the story: "Study finds a third of mothers slip down the career ladder". Another might be that some women are deciding to walk right off, or indeed […]

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The "yummy mummy" is an unattainable ideal that puts too much pressure on modern mothers, a study has revealed.

You mean you can’t have it all?

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Women managers wanting to work part-time after a baby are seeing their talents and qualifications wasted because they can only find employment well below their skill levels, according to the most comprehensive UK study of the impact of motherhood on careers.
Almost half of women professionals who downgrade to lower skilled part-time roles move to jobs […]

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Millions of highly-qualified women see their careers collapse once they have children because employers will not let them work flexibly or part-time, a new study claims.
One in four professional women leaves her job after starting a family, with almost half having to move into jobs where the average employee lacks even A-levels, it says.
The research […]

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From the upcoming Economic Journal,

Women in Britain who work part-time have, on average, hourly earnings about 25% less than that of women working full-time. This gap has widened greatly over the past 30 years. This article tries to explain this part-time pay penalty. It shows that a sizeable part of the penalty can be explained […]

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