Cult of victimhood drives the gender pay gap hysteria
WE LIVE in a golden age for female advancement in the workplace. Never before in British history have women had such freedom over career choices or such opportunities for success. Yet this success story is obscured by the narrative of grievance from selfstyled equality campaigners, claiming discrimination.
Their orchestrated despair is exemplified by the mounting hysteria over the so-called “gender pay gap”. Last night was the deadline for companies with more than 250 employees to submit to the Government their data on their own gender pay figures, an arbitrary timetable that has been accompanied by emotive political blackmail. While Theresa May talked of her fight against “burning injustices”, Equalities Minister Baroness Williams of Trafford threatened businesses with fines “if they do not comply” with the state’s agenda.
This dogma-driven furore represents the cult of victimhood at its worst. The social justice warriors like to pretend that when it comes to pay women suffer brutal unfairness at the hands of corporate misogyny. To support their thesis they trumpet the statistics such as the claim that, on average, hourly earnings for full-time male workers are 9.1 per cent higher than for female ones.
BUT the much-vaunted pay gap is a myth. It is a phantom problem created by ideologues to expand the scope for virtue signalling, social engineering and institutionalised bullying. For all this week’s shrieking in the media there is no hard evidence that women are being routinely paid less than men for doing exactly the same job. Indeed such discrimination would be against the law, both under the 1970 Equal Pay Act and the 2010 Equality Act.
The overall percentage difference in hourly pay reflects not crude prejudice but the different work patterns that many women tend to follow. It is inevitable that female employees who take career breaks to have children, or adopt flexible or shorter hours because of family responsibilities, should have reduced earnings compared with men who focus more heavily on their careers.
To paint such a reality as a form of macho oppression is the height of propagandising dishonesty.
The hollowness of the campaigners’ case is exposed by other findings, such as the point that the pay gap is almost nonexistent for women under 39. Just as tellingly, the hourly earnings of part-time female workers are on average 5.1 per cent higher than for male parttimers, something that could not happen if gender discrimination were truly rife.
The “pay gap” proselytisers also ignore the fact of women’s career choices, which mean that high-paying, demanding jobs do not always attract a gender balance in recruits.
A classic example can be seen at the airline easyJet, which has reported that women’s hourly pay rates in the company are 45.5 per cent lower than men’s. But there is a simple explanation. Pilots, who are paid £92,400-a-year, make up a quarter of easyJet’s UK workforce but only six per cent of them are women. In contrast women comprise 69 per cent of easyJet’s cabin crew staff, who are paid on average £24,800.
This goes to the heart of the “gender pay gap” delusion. The campaigners are not comparing like with like, for all authoritative studies show that men and women enjoy equal pay for the same work if they have the same experience, skills, education and ability. Desperate to avoid this truth, the zealots resort to wild generalisations or hide behind their own spurious concept of “equal value”, which holds that different jobs should be treated the same.
That was the theory behind the high-profile resignation of the BBC’s Carrie Gracie as China editor, claiming to be the victim of discrimination because her financial package was lower than that of the BBC’s North American and Middle East editors. Her actions led her to be hailed as a crusader for women’s rights even though she remained in lucrative employment at the BBC. “The fearless leader of the battle for equal pay,” was how one newspaper described her. But her self-important stance had no real credibility. Other editors earned more because they were on air far more, had more influence as broadcasters and had much greater public appeal.
SADLY the virus of entitlement is spreading across Britain. A large number of female supermarket staff are now suing their employers – including Tesco, Asda and Sainsbury’s – for alleged discrimination because as checkout assistants they earn less than warehouse workers, who are predominantly men. Yet the jobs are very different in their requirements and duties.
Part of the inspiration for this legal action stems from a case at Birmingham City Council, where a group of dinner ladies complained that they were paid less than refuse collectors and street sweepers.
Birmingham Council had to fork out more than £1billion in settling the claims, with municipal services badly hit as a result. But this is just a small part of the price that our society is beginning to pay for this vast exercise in doctrinaire intervention, dressed up as the quest for equality.
Rather than punishing businesses with this ideological racket the Government should be concentrating on the real injustices in our midst, such as the neglect of the elderly or rising violent crime.
‘Salary discrimination is against the law’