Women often work in the public sector because it offers relatively secure work, flexible working patterns and a chance to build up a decent income in retirement. The gender pay gap is smaller and the public sector offers more opportunities to combine a proper career with caring responsibilities.

Oh look, the head of the TUC agrees with us.

So, could we please have a little less of this “it’s all caused by discrimination” please?

And once the extra time women spend shopping and in the bathroom is added to the leisure hours count, British men have only ten minutes’ more spare time a day than women.

The figures come from an international analysis of how we use our leisure time by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the club of the world’s richest nations.

Its report divides time into work, unpaid work, personal care and leisure.

Essentially this is a collation of international time use studies. Nothing very new in it for anyone who knows of the existence of such time use studies.

However, I’ve been looking through the OECD site and can I find the report? Can I heck. So, anyone got a link to it?

Now get in the kitchen and make me a sammich.

Research by the Fawcett Society has found that women working full time earn, on average, 17% less than men: 83p per male pound.

Not only is that unfair, it is illegal.

Bit of a blunder really, eh?

For a start, the law says absolutely nothing at all about the legality or not of a difference in average wages. It’s about a difference in specific wages for a specific job based solely upon gender (and under some definitions about “equal pay for jobs of equal value”).

Secondly, once you add in the differences in years in workforce, hours at work, levels of education, levels of human capital, choices between flexibility and wages and choices about jobs and careers to pursue then there’s actually none (or at worst, very little) of the gender pay gap which remains to be explained by discrimination.

Now there is indeed a social attitude that underlies all of this. The expectation that when children arrive (if they do) that it will be the women who take the time off not just to have them but to raise them. One can shout and holler about this as much as you like but it is pretty embedded in our society. And it’s that which leads to almost all of the other things listed above which then leads to the 17% average gap.

It just ain’t taste discrimination any more. It’s how households divide their labour which is causing it.

Sad day when the editorial of a national newspaper can pump out lies from a pressure group, eh?

Decent day though when you see the comments. Some 50% of them as I write are calling out the newspaper on that error. The newspaper reading public seems better informed than those who write newspapers.

Fashion Election Special: Sarah vs Samantha

Their husbands are preparing to slug it out at the ballot box, but which of the first ladies of British politics will top the glamour polls?

A massive extension of maternity leave across Europe was last night voted for by the Womens’ Rights Committee of the European Parliament to make it compulsory for employers to pay mothers for a minimum of 20 weeks on full pay.

You couldn’t find a better way to do it really.

Increase the (potential) cost to employers of hiring women of child bearing age and you’ll both reduce the number they’re willing to hire and the wages they’re willing to offer them.

Well done, eh?

WHEN Yitta Schwartz died last month at 93, she left behind 15 children, more than 200 grandchildren and so many great- and great-great-grandchildren that, by her family’s count, she could claim perhaps 2,000 living descendants.

Doin’ it right rilly.

FEMINIST Labour MP Harriet Harman is in line for the annual Rear of the Year award.

Yes, yes, yes.

You can add to the gaiety of the nation by nominating or voting here.

Pass it along folks. Let’s make this thing happen.

What I will be very interested to see is whether this is true:

The Fawcett Society, which campaigns for equality between men and women, welcomed the move. Ceri Goddard, the chief executive, said: “There is a huge appetite among fathers to spend more time with their children. This extra choice is a good thing.”

Give it a couple of years and we’ll be able to see whether loads of men do indeed take such leave. I suspect that they won’t….and that the next stage will be calling for it to be mandatory so as to promote gender equity.

It is already being talked about, after all.

Discovering the women were ­trafficked, pimped or otherwise coerced would appear not to be so ­effective. Almost half said they ­believed that most women in prostitution are victims of pimps…..

The presence of a pimp does not indicate either victimisation or coercion. A pimp can be simply an agent and be working to the advantage of the prostitute (and it is thus an example of a mutually beneficial voluntary exchange: even the division and specialisation of labour):

Where pimps are active, prostitutes appear to do
better, with pimps both providing protection and paying efficiency wages.

Further:

Our analysis also sheds light on issues of organizational form. Perhaps
surprisingly, in two of our neighborhoods that are side-by-side, prostitution activities are
organized along completely different models. In Roseland, there are no pimps and
women solicit customers from the street. Just a few blocks away in Pullman, all women
work with pimps who locate customers and set-up tricks, so that the prostitutes rarely
solicit on street corners. Under the pimp model, there are fewer transactions, but the
prices charged are substantially higher and the clientele is different. Prostitutes who
work with pimps appear to earn more, and are less likely to be arrested. It appears that
the pimps choose to pay efficiency wages. Consistent with this hypothesis, many of the
women who do not work with pimps are eager to work with pimps, and indeed we
observe a few switches in that direction over the course of the sample. Pimps are limited
by their ability to find customers, however, so they operate on a small scale.

Fewer transactions for higher incomes with less danger of arrest: it’s very difficult to say that this is either coercion or victimisation.

Unless, that is, you want to say that anyone taking a cut of the wages earned by the sweat of another’s brow (perhaps not the correct bodily part) is exploiting them. But in the English scenario one could run that the other way around. Prostitution is not a criminal offence. Pimping is. So the prostitute is earning higher wages for less work by the pimp exposing himself (or in the case of madams, herself) to the risk of prosecution and fines or jail time (and yes, I know someone who has done jail time for running a web site connecting escorts with customers under such laws). We might even say that the exploitation is running the other way.

Until this point is addressed by Bindel I’m afraid that I’m not likely to take anything else she says on the subject seriously. And this is entirely separate from the lunatic assertions she’s made about trafficking (seriously, she’s insisted that the presence of foreigners is proof perfect of trafficking. Does no one read Gary Becker any more? Given the cost to social capital of the profession of course people tend to do it away from home.).

Newsweek recently noted that worldwide, women’s income is expected to grow by more than $5 trillion by 2013, thanks to rising female employment and a narrowing pay gap: most household spend is already controlled by women,

Interesting point all too often overlooked.

Women do indeed, on average, earn less than men. Yet they control the majority of spending.

Perhaps we need a campaign for gender equality in disposing of the dosh to go along with the one in the earning of it?

Labour MP: ban shops from selling ‘sexist’ pink toys to little girls

No, really, it is vital:

“Since the early 1990s manufacturers and retailers of children’s products have fabricated restrictive boundaries of what it is to be a girl in today’s society.

“As a result body image obsession begins younger and younger and beauty is valued over brains.”

D’ye think she might have done women’s studies at the local Poly?

The government’s bust, billions globally are still mired in poverty, the Greens are gearing up to castrate the economy in the name of Gaia and we’re all supposed to go and worry about the dye used in plastic toys?

As Douglas Adams pointed out, the one thing a human being cannot afford to have in this universe is a sense of perspective.

GIVING women a lengthy period of maternity leave could mean they miss out on highflying jobs, a new study has revealed.

The findings from three continents show that the more family-friendly a country tries to be, the less its women succeed in the workplace.

I’ve been pointing this out to people for years.

British women fare better on the career ladder than in Sweden where a woman can take 60 weeks’ paid leave. There only 31.6% of managers are female.

Both, however, lag behind the United States, which has no statutory paid leave. To qualify for 12 weeks off without wages, they need to work in the public sector or for a firm that has at least 50 other employees within a 75-mile radius. American women occupy 42.7% of the top posts in their country.

Australia is the only other developed country that has no paid maternity leave, although women will be paid 18 weeks of the federal minimum wage from January 2011. Its women occupy 37.1% of managerial jobs.

The study from the Research Institute of Industrial Economics in Stockholm, Sweden, is entitled Why Are There So Few Top Female Executives in Egalitarian Welfare States? It says women in Anglo-Saxon countries where maternal leave is less generous climb higher up the career ladder than in Scandinavian nations where years of female-friendly legislation may have inadvertently disadvantaged women.

Blindingly obvious when you think about it.

If the gender pay gap/glass ceiling is a result of the deterioration of human capital by taking years out of the workforce then those places where women take more years out of the workforce will have bigger such problems, won’t they?

Our second lesson from economics: there are always trade offs.

The average female board director took home £178,246 in salary, bonuses, benefits and pension contributions in the 2008-09 financial year, while the average male director received £357,358.

So they’re getting 66% of men’s pay, or 50% less than men.

I think we can all draw up the list of the usual suspects who will blare this little statistics around the country, can’t we?

And I think we can also draw up the little list of those who will fail to note the next point:

The Reward Technology Forum (RTF) which compiled the study claimed that part of the explanation was that the majority of women on company boards were non-executive directors who are paid less than executives.

Of the 218 female board members in the FTSE 350, 83pc or 181 of them are non-executives.

“Executive director” and “non-executive director” are two entirely different jobs. The former is a full time insider in hte company, running at the very least a division of the company plus sitting on the board. The latter is a part time outsider, brought in to provide some oversight on the board. They’re really not comparable in any manner.

For men and women doing the same jobs:

RTF said the average salary for female finance directors last year was £357,588, whereas male FDs were paid £353,044 on average. Similarly, female chief executives had an average salary of £612,000, compared with £563,968 for men.

Quite, our humongous gap disappears (aslthough there is a further discrepancy in favour of men in the allied benefits packages).

Liklihood of point 1) appearing in CiF or Polly or the like, near 100% I would think. Of 2), under 50% and of 3) near zero.

The study examined the pay of 1,015 doctors working for the NHS, in medical research at academic institutions, and for organisations such as private healthcare providers. While part of the pay gap is due to age and experience, between 40% and 50% of the difference is caused by discrimination, the study found.

One of the report’s authors, Dr Anita Holdcroft, emeritus professor of anaesthesia at Imperial, accused male NHS managers of taking advantage of the poor negotiating power of women. Referring to what the report describes as a “hostile culture”, she gave the example of women with children who have limited room to manoeuvre because managers know they are unlikely to uproot their family and move elsewhere. By contrast, men can win pay rises by threatening to leave.

That people with different economic power (I’ll leave if you don’t pay me more) get different wages is not in fact evidence of discrimination. Or at least, not in the sense that it is being used here.

In the other sense, it is of course evidence of discrimination: the employer is discriminating between those with different amounts of economic power.

Among Britain’s 40,521 consultants, men on average earn £13,729 more than similarly successful female colleagues. That pay gap worsens the longer a female consultant has worked. Although more female than male consultants earn between £62,500 and £95,000, more men than women have salaries between £110,000 and £190,000.

The report ain’t out until Friday so I can’t see how they reached those figures. But I would bet that there is at least some occupational segregation there. Surgeons tend to get paid more than other consultants, surgeons are more likely to be men than other consultant specialties. For “consultant” is not one job.

However, much more important is this:

What is being found is that the female consultants treat 20% fewer patients than their male counterparts. It might be to do with working hours, with child care responsibilities, or it might be to do with methods of treatment.

If productivity is being measured by patients seen (which doesn’t sound unlikely in our target driven culture) then by the way that productivity is being measured female consultants are less productive than male. So, of course, it’s entirely natural that they should be paid less.

In future, ONS will highlight the following measures:
• All female employees’ median pay compared with all male
employees’ median pay
• Female full-time employees’ median pay compared with male
full-time employees’ median pay
• Female part-time employees’ median pay compared with male
part-time employees’ median pay

The fuller report is here.

And those numbers are?

The measure for all employees showed a pay difference of 22.5 per
cent in favour of men and the pay difference for full-timers was 12.8
per cent in April 2008. When looking at part-time employees, the
difference was -3.5 per cent, meaning that part-time men were paid
less on average than part-time women.

And the real meaning of this? Fuck off Harman you lying cow.

And that goes double for the Fawcett Society and the EHRC.

Long but worth reading.

It’s a very good description of why there are so few women at the very top. The compromises that have to be made to get there simply aren’t palatable to many women.

(Perhaps I should add that they’re also not palatable to many men: I’m certainly not, in common with millions of other men, willing to spend the 60-80 hours a week it requires to get there…..even if I had the talent or ability, something which is obviously unknown as I’ve never been interested enough to try and find out.)

Today is the day when women stop getting paid:

Women will effectively work for nothing for the rest of the year because of the difference in pay with men, a study claims.

As I say, there’s a certain glory in having one of your gambits copied.

There is an interesting little point they make:

‘The Equality Bill offers a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reform equal pay law and stamp out the pay gap. We urge the Government to place a legal duty on employers to check for and rectify any gender pay gaps – a measure supported by the vast majority of the British public. Women must also be given greater access to justice by enabling representative actions and the use of hypothetical comparators in discrimination claims.

There’s three stages to this gender pay gap. Firstly, that men and women, with the same qualifications, doing the same hours and the same job, get equal pay. This has largely been achieved: there are a few where greater male physical strength leads to still higher male pay and there are a few (nursing seems to be one) where women earn more than men.

Then there’s equal pay for jobs of equal value. This is more difficult as of course rampant free marketeers like myself would point out that wages are the valuation of a job. Thus if wages are not equal then the jobs are not of equal value. However, that battle has been lost and there are indeed comparisons made between, say, council dustmen and council dinner ladies. So be it.

However, what they’re asking for there, with “hypothetical comparators” is that there doesn’t have to be another job which can be shown, even with the odd standards of version 2 there, to be of equal value. They get to just make it all up. That might well be a step too far.

Especially as, if we go and look at the actual press release, there’s a number of troubling statements:

the overwhelming majority of the British public supports the introduction of a legal requirement on employers to conduct pay audits in order to stamp out the gender pay gap

Well, you see, there’s no evidence whatsoever that such pay audits would in fact stamp out the gender pay gap. To take as an example, Sweden, a society which takes such matters a great deal more seriously than we do. Their pay gap (by a different measure) is around 15% while ours (on that same different measure) is around 17%. If the gender pay gap is something as deep rooted that a society like Sweden cannot root it out then pay audits (and I’ve no idea whether Sweden has them or not…ah, actually, the Fawcett Society itself says they do have them. So they’re not a solution.) aren’t going to manage it. So the answer to the question is meaningless. It’s like asking “would you support the growing of cucmbers in order to extract moonbeams which will cure cancer”? As moon beams won’t cure cancer nor will pay audits stamp out the gender pay gap.

“48% of men and 32% of women believe that on the whole men and women receive equal pay for doing jobs of equal value. This suggests that they are unaware of the gender pay gap”

No, it doesn’t. For that’s a case of petitio principii. First it is necessary to prove that the gender pay gap is caused by jobs of equal value not receiving the same pay.

When they are told that “women are paid on average 23% less than men for doing jobs of equal value”, 94% of the public agree that it is important to eliminate the gender pay gap

Similarly: what is at issue is whether the statement about the pay gap is true, not whether people believe it to be morally wrong if that statement is true.

The (mean) average gender pay gap in Great Britain – including full-time and part-time work – is 21.2%.

Oh dearie me. They’re still going on about the mean gap when they’ve been told very forcefully that they shouldn’t be talking about the mean they should be talking about the median. You’ll recall that the Statistics Authority got very het up about this and actually issued a rebuke to Harry Harperson on the matter?

The reason being (and come along now girls at the Fawcett Society, math isn’t all that hard you know!) that we’re trying here to describe the experience of the average person. That is the median, the average person, the middle person in the population. When we describe wages we really shouldn’t be describing means because there is an absolute lower bound (of £0 per year) while there is no upper bound. As we know that the very tippy toppy of the income distribution is dominated by men then using the mean will give us very skewed figures for that mean as against the median.

From memory the correct figure here is actually 12.8%, which is the median gender pay gap.

We urge the Government to place a legal duty on employers to check for and rectify any gender pay gaps –

And that is really rather a huge demand. “Any gender pay gaps”? Even those that come from differences in working hours, working patterns, human capital, choices made by the workers themselves?

And now here comes the big lie:

The pay gap is caused by discrimination (the single largest cause), a lack of flexible working and the undervaluation of traditional women’s work).

No, discrimination is not the largest cause of the gender pay gap. If anything, it’s the smallest cause of it. Further, you’ll actually find that flexible working is one of the causes of that pay gap, not a solution to it: for some women value flexibility of working hours over pay. Thus they make a trade off and get flexible working hours and receive less pay for the hours that they do work. This is known in the real world as making choices and all choices involve both costs and benefits.

But the important thing to concentrate on is that big lie: that the largest single cause is discrimination. No, it ain’t, it just simply isn’t. The largest single cause is “children”.

If this is the level of analysis that the ladies at Fawcett are going to try to bring to matters of public policy: you know, this never mind the damn facts, that’s just soooo male, I know, I can feel it instead, then they can bugger off back into the kitchen and bake me a pie.

Y’all can come back into the front room and rejoin the adults when you’re prepared to consider the real world evidence but not while you insist upon whatever you’ve cooked up in a kaffeeklatch.

Women who do not have children should be allowed to take maternity leave, allowing them time off from the workplace, according to a study.

Why would it be only women who would be aloowed to take a sabbatical?

But it’s also a rubbish figure concocting a fallacious average. You can’t average out the two sectors because there are five times more unskilled workers in the private sector – most manual jobs have been contracted out from the public sector. The state sector is far more highly skilled: ONS figures show only 8.6% of people in the private sector are in professional grades, against nearly a quarter in the public sector. Comparing grade for grade, they are paid 70p an hour less for working for the state.

OK, arguendo, we’ll accept this. We cannot simply compare private sector and public sector wages. Those averages we get from the ONS for mean and median pay in public and private sectors. For they are different people, doing different jobs, with different levels of responsibility, training, working hours and all the rest.

Fine. That also means that we cannot take those same means and medians from the ONS on the differences between male and female wages because they are different people, doing different jobs, with different levels of responsibility, training, working hours and all the rest. Thus the squealing about the gender pay gap is based upon faulty figures.

That really is something of a problem then, isn’t it? Either we acept the argument that public and private sector workers are not some homogenous lump, in which case we must do the same with men and women, or we use the figures that do treat them as a homogenous lump in which case we must do the same for public and private sector workers.

As the man said, comment is free but facts are sacred: as is logic.