A statistics scandal in the gender pay gap
A Masterton man who is selling what he believes could be the last can of Black V is hoping for a comeback for the discontinued drink.
Chris Clement listed the can on Trade Me with a $1 reserve and had 66 bids yesterday, taking the bidding to $255.
‘‘I’ve been blown away by the positivity,’’ he said.
He would donate half the money to Gumboot Friday.
Clements has had the can for 21⁄2 years, after his partner bought it for him as a gift. ‘‘I loved it and said it’s the only energy drink I’d ever drink again.’’
The drink was dubbed the ‘‘black horse’’ by V Energy and has a double hit of taurine with a strong coffee flavour.
It was dropped from the range more than nine years ago and replaced by V Graphite, which was dropped two years later.
Clements, and other commenters in the Q&A section of the listing, hoped the attention the auction was getting could help the resurgence of the Black V and bring the can back to shelves.
‘‘You either love it or you hate it. But looking at the traction this auction has got maybe V Energy will hear the call and bring it back,’’ Clements said.
Other products brought back to life through consumer power included the popular Fruju Tropical Snow, Tip Top Dessertalicious Ice Cream and Snifters, which were redesigned in the shape of Pineapple Lumps.
V Energy’s manufacturer, Frucor Suntory, was approached for comment.
Managing director of First Retail Group Chris Wilkinson said nostalgia was a driving force in the consumer psyche as people harked back to childhood memories. ‘‘That’s been driving demand for products and experiences that were once cherished and popular – taking people back in time,’’ he said.
Brands had recognised and leveraged the phenomenon strategically, such as bringing back products for a limited time.
‘‘The limited-time nature and potential scarcity of this drives demand and can make the products coveted purchases.’’
Clements said people had called for him to donate all of the proceeds, but he was a single parent raising three children working part-time and ‘‘struggling like a lot of Kiwis just to get the bills done’’.
The auction closes this morning. gender pay gap. Let’s be clear about that, before New Zealand’s chief statistician has a conniption.
The gender pay gap is reported at 9.2%. This is reached by comparing the median hourly rate of a man to a woman. It irons out the bias by using hourly, not weekly wages. The median ranks us in order of high to low hourly rates and picks the person sitting bang in the middle of the queue.
The median man earns $30.85 per hour and the median woman earns $28 an hour (versus the average man earning $37 an hour and the average woman $33 an hour).
I could have presented the opening statistic in reverse. Men get 42% more than women, or women produce 29% less than men. It’s numerically the same. I’m simply changing the denominator of the equation.
Did I choose a bigger number to get a better headline? No. I simply presented it through the female lens.
I’m interested in what it would take for women to catch up to men. I don’t think any part of the audience (men included) is interested in the fall required to equalise earnings in the opposite direction.
The gender pay-gap statistic of 9.2% has been well honed by our nerds in Wellington, but I still think it contains a major lie in the calculation. That sounds harsh, but hear me out.
Statistics New Zealand describes the maths as ‘‘The income of males minus the income of females, divided by the income of males’’. It’s the last six words I take umbrage with. This is known as the denominator of the equation. We are comparing the difference in earnings to the male income. It’s madness.
Men earn $2.85 an hour more than women. By dividing that by the male hourly rate of $30.85 we discover women earn 9.2% less than men. Eureka, what does that tell us? Absolutely nothing useful. Who is interested in the size of the wage cut required to achieve parity with women?
Women want to know what size pay rise is required to achieve parity. We need to make the denominator our own hourly rate. So we take $2.85 and divide by $28. Our hourly rate needs to increase by 10.2% to level up.
Doesn’t it make far more sense to say the gender pay-gap is 10.2%, not 9.2%? The female lens versus the male lens again.
The male denominator is scandalous in this situation. It downgrades the gender-pay gap and reports a useless number to the audience of both men and women.
To release the embedded lie, you take the official statistic of 9.2 and divide it by the result of 100 minus 9.2. Expecting every woman and every employer to recalculate the pay gap is nothing short of cheeky.
Back in 1998, when New Zealand’s gap was 16%, things were worse. The bigger the gap, the bigger the error with the equation. Women needed a 19% pay rise to achieve parity.
The presentation of statistics is important and should be designed to be useful for the audience. I’m sure those in charge of methodology will claim we need to adhere to an international standard to make the lie comparable.The male lens is hard to unwind once it’s entrenched.
In some ways, other statistics suffer the same issues. A 25% fall in the sharemarket requires a 33% recovery to recuperate losses. If house prices fall 20%, it takes a 25% recovery to square up.
In the case of these stats, investors physically lost the amounts being reported. With the gender pay gap, women were never at the level of men, and the only statistic that matters is the climb to parity.
Janine Starks is a financial commentator with expertise in banking, personal finance and funds management. Opinions are a personal view and general in nature. They are not a recommendation for any individual to buy or sell a financial product. Readers should always seek specific independent financial advice.