Common sense has vanished into the ‘pay gap’

THERESA MAY has once again demonstrated that she is the new Harriet Harman, not the new Margaret Thatcher. Her ridiculous enthusiasm for last week’s frenzy about a ‘gender pay gap’, and her claim of a ‘stark division’ between the pay of men and women, are embarrassing.

The measure used, a crude average, told us nothing about the truth, which is that most employers obey the law enforcing equal pay for equal work, and try as hard as they possibly can to employ and promote women. Clumsy quotas may actually hurt women, as employers try to game the figures by giving low-paid, entry-level jobs to men, while appointing women to senior well-paid posts.

State nagging will not make things better. A serious conservative Premier would listen to the most thoughtful voice on the subject, Kate Andrews of the Institute of Economic Affairs. She has shown that the statistics demanded by Mrs May’s Government conceal far more than they reveal.

They mainly show that, for whatever reason, women have different career patterns from men. In many cases, this is because women choose to do so. As Ms Andrews points out, this could be because women have more sensible ideas than men on the right balance between life and work.

When she explained this on the BBC, her ‘impartial’ interviewer finished the exchange by contradicting her. How can we have a proper debate on anything in this country when everyone has been taught what to think, but almost nobody knows how to think?