Let’s play ball over women’s salaries

WIMBLEDON is over for another year, the Tour De France has crowned Chris Froome the winner for the fourth time and England’s women have won the World Cup Final in a thrilling victory against India at Lord’s.

You will also note that the match took place in front of a sell-out crowd.

So, why are women all over Britain revolting? Well, despite their ability to pack out Lord’s and thrill the nation right down to the final minutes of a match they should not have won amongst other notable sporting achievements (far too many to mention), women are not getting paid what they deserve. Fact.

The news and current affairs programmes are less interested in these stunning achievements and more interested in the furore that has been caused by the BBC’s publication of its top earners’ salaries. Gender pay reporting legislation requires employers with 250 or more employees to publish statutory calculations every year showing how large the pay gap is between their male and female employees.

There are two sets of regulations.

The first is mainly for the private and voluntary sectors (from April 5, 2017) and the second is mainly for the public sector (from March 31, 2017). Employers have up to 12 months to publish their gender pay gaps. STUDENTS designing and building their own racing car have been given a boost.

Team Hare – Huddersfield Automotive Racing Enterprises – is taking part in Formula Student, a competition providing undergraduates with the chance to get involved in motor sport engineering. Team Hare, based at the University of Huddersfield, is one of hundreds of student teams involved in the global competition.

Compressors specialist Thorite, which has a site at Barge Street in Huddersfield, began supporting Team Hare three years ago when managing director and former Huddersfield University student Stephen Wright agreed to help with specialist tools and funding.

This year, Thorite is a silver level sponsor and – in addition to specialist tools – also provided the team’s Driveline Manager, Jake Stanley, with a place on the two-day foundation in Caught up in the middle of all this is poor old Gary Lineker who has suffered the ignominy of being splashed all over the tabloids whilst sunbathing in the tropics with little more than his budgie smugglers and his infamous grin to protect him. The pin-up presenter appears to have been born with some Teflon infused into his sun-kissed skin. Having escaped public hangings that others with perhaps less charm (and an inferior agent) would have been massacred for (no, I’m not really bitter), he seems to have finally come a cropper. Perhaps hardly surprisingly, he badly judged the mood of the nation by responding pneumatics course which is run by the Thorite Academy.

This proved extremely valuable to Jake as the Team Hare car has a pneumatic paddle gearshift on the transmission and the course uses the very latest pneumatic control systems.

The Thorite Training Academy has been in existence for more than 30 years. Courses last from between one and three days, with the two-day foundation in pneumatics course being the most popular.

Formula Student is run by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers and is heavily supported by leading manufacturers in the automotive industries.

Team Hare consists of students studying mechanical, automotive and electronic engineering at the University of Huddersfield. They have built the car from scratch and will compete in a number of events throughout Europe. to the question of “fairness” by grumbling that he was disappointed that Chris Evans earned more than him. Oops!

And so, to the point. Women are revolting everywhere.

The BBC’s published report has created not a stir but a tsunami as celebrity female presenters are leading the way supported by furious MPs egged on by Mr Corbyn himself.

Inequality is wrong. Race, creed, colour, age, gender and all other forms of discrimination are wrong and any responsible employer will uphold the law regardless of their size or reporting requirements.

Let’s hope that this summer is remembered for both the cricket and the closing of the gender pay gap.