It’s possible to wonder why we even bother to have government experts if no one is going to pay the blindest bit of attention to what government experts tell us. At which point the TUC tells us that:
Women work two months for free, reveals TUC analysis
New research reveals a 15% pay gap that widens dramatically after women have children
The more ancient among us might remember that episode between that proof of nominative determinism, Sir Michael Scholar, and Harriet Harman:
The note explains that the figure of 23 per cent quoted in the GEO press release relates to
the median hourly earnings of all employees (full-time and part-time combined)
…
Indeed, it is the Statistics Authority’s view that use of the 23% on its own, without qualification, risks giving a misleading quantification of the gender pay gap.
To translate out of bureaucratic politesse, don’t do that, it’s misleading at best and more accurately could be described as lying with numbers.
So, how has the TUC, this 14 years later, calculated the numbers?
The overall gender pay gap is calculated using all median hourly pay, excluding overtime, for all male and female employees
Therefore they’re wrong - either being misleading or possibly lying with numbers, use whichever according to taste and or opinion. As we’ve noted several times before, everyone’s been told not to do it this way yet still they persist. Why do they wish to mislead in such a manner?
Using the same data source as the TUC it’s possible to correct the numbers as we’re supposed to. The gender pay gap for full timers is more like 6%. Among part timers only it is in favour of women. By age shows a similar difference from the numbers the TUC uses. When compared properly across countries this puts the UK gender pay gap among the lower. The importance of this being that all the usual policies advanced to reduce it further don’t seem to do so. The Scandinavians with generous maternity and paternity leaves have gaps little different and sometimes higher than we do. Those places with substantially lower tend to remove women with children from the workforce altogether for cultural reasons. Sure, we could follow those policies but we think it’s not quite what people mean by either equity or the economic freedom and liberty of women.
There is one qualified ray of light in this.
Joeli Brearley, founder of the campaign group Pregnant Then Screwed, said: “This is a motherhood penalty. Women face maternity discrimination because they are seen as distracted and uncommitted to their jobs when they have children, whereas men actually get paid more after they have children.”
Qualified, of course, but the nub of the truth is there. It’s not that women are seen as, it’s that on average and across all women behaviour changes upon the arrival of children. Men do not “get paid more” when or because they are fathers, male behaviour - on average and across the population - changes upon the arrival of children so that men earn more.
That is, we do not have a gender pay gap in any meaningful sense. We have a parental pay gap. It’s possible to repeat the observed numbers from two simple facts. Mothers earn less than non-mothers, all else equal, fathers earn more than non-fathers equally ceteris paribus. Nothing else is required to explain all of the observed differences in pay across gender (or perhaps these days we should say sex if we’re allowed to assume a binary any more), age and everything else. Parental status.
We’re not sure why anyone thinks this is a surprise in a mammalian, viviparous, species. We see gendered differences to the arrival of offspring all around us. And given that this simplicity is all that is required to explain the observed differences then Occam’s Shaving Kit suggests that this is the explanation we should accept.
We might also observe that the standard human economic unit is the household - because of those decades long child raising processes - and so any economic analysis which tries to evaluate individual incomes without incorporating household formation and the reasons for it is going to be more than a little misleading.
But there’s more than just statistical manipulation to consider here in that policy sense. Assume we are right, as we are. Differences in individual pay across gender are explained, wholly, by different reactions to the arrival of descendants. Given that the Good Society is the one which is the result of the millions of individual choices we are at liberty to take then why would we actually want to change this outcome?
Explanations on a postcard to the TUC.