The gender pay gap? It’s time we all started to man up!

IAM not supposed to be here, you know. Newspapers were meant to be a stepping stone to television, which was where the real money and shiniest futures were said to lie for story hunter-gatherers in the early 1990s.

Yup, TV was where I was headed. Could feel it in my bones as I lit out for Glasgow in my new Slater menswear duds to meet important people in plush offices and nail the job interview. Knew I was on my way when I shook their hands and felt that firmness, looked them in the eye and glimpsed that promise. They gave the job to a woman. Not that I saw it in those terms back in 1992. Her gender did not even register in my thinking a year or two later when she outgrew Glasgow and moved to network TV in London, commanding silly money, dressing like a princess, while I toiled away on £15,000 in Aberdeen.

No, my thinking was good luck to her. You win some, you lose some; I’m still standing...

Only recently, and then only occasionally, have I begun to confront the fact it was a woman who landed the job I had wrongly imagined was mine.

Little things set me off, such as Emma Watson, the very attractive and enormously wealthy 26-yearold actress telling Elle magazine how hard it is to be an outspoken feminist these days – so hard, in fact, that ‘there were a couple of days when I just didn’t want to come out from under the duvet’.

Sisterhood

Little things such as the same Miss Watson saying that embracing feminism is like opening a ‘Pandora’s Box’ where some people applaud you but others only want to criticise. Do you know, it all got so much that the actress who played Hermione in the Harry Potter films had to take a year’s sabbatical to allow ‘the chemistry and structure’ of her brain to undergo some very necessary changes.

Reading about a multimillionaire stage school graduate’s struggle on behalf of the sisterhood reminds me that, when she was a toddler, I went for a job in television and a woman got the role.

That’s just the way it was in the 1990s. Candidates presented themselves for interview and the one reckoned to be the best, male or female, was offered the job.

Yes, we just had to get on with it back in those days and accept that this was how employment law worked.

We had to recognise that this was no longer the 1950s; times had a-changed. We’d had the Pill, The Female Eunuch, bras ablaze and, by 1970, the Equal Pay Act.

Sexism was on the run, no doubt about it.

Now I do not suggest 1970s or even 1980s Britain quite attained utopia status in the gender equality in the workplace stakes. But by the 1990s we were getting quite good at understanding the concept that women wanted careers.

We were making excellent progress on equal pay, too. I did not know anyone then and certainly have met no one since who seriously believed that men should earn more than women for doing the same job.

Had we come across such a bounder we might have struggled to know how to characterise him until we remembered that, in the early 1970s, they were called male chauvinist pigs. There is a reason the term has fallen into disuse.

So, yes, those latter-day feminists marching forth in blissful ignorance of the number of decades late they are to the party do play havoc with the chemistry and structure of my brain.

They mean the good fight still goes on? How unenlightened, then, must have been the age when a woman beat me to the big bucks TV job? How disastrous a candidate must I have been to lose out to a woman in man’s world?

But, of course, the good fight goes on – long after it was won. At the Scottish parliament, the economy, fair work and jobs committee prepares to furrow its collective brow over the latest UK figures which show there is a 6.2 per cent differential in median hourly earnings between men and women in full-time work.

Indeed – and here’s the headline, sisters – the narrowing of the pay gap has been so slow these past decades that, on current trends, parity will not be reached until 2069.

Scandal

That will be only a year short of a century since the 1970 Equal Pay Act was brought in.

A scandal, yes? No. The scandal is the knee-jerk assumption that something is wrong unless the pay differential is balanced perfectly at zero.

People, not governments, decide how best to organise their working lives around growing families, childcare issues and the like. Governments ensure that, as far as possible, equality of opportunity remains the watchword.

Nature, not government, decrees that women bear the young in our species. Governments and people work within these confines because there is nothing either of us can do to change them.

If the upshot of all this is that in the year 2016 men tended on average to be paid 6.2 per cent more than women then we should try to remain calm.

We should remember who is Prime Minister, who is First Minister and who leads the Scottish Tories and Scottish Labour.

We should remember Miss Sturgeon’s Scottish Cabinet (never mind the quality, feel the perfect gender balance).

We should consider that Tilda Swinton is the current favourite to take over the Tardis in Doctor Who and that, however volubly anyone protests, it doesn’t always have to be a problem that female nuclear physicists are thin on the ground. It only needs to be a problem if a male chauvinist is stopping them from doing it.

So the pay gap is 6.2 per cent.

The real news is the battle is over, the points well taken. Long ago.