UK women aged 40 and older will not experience the closure of the gender pay gap until after they reach state pension age, according to a report by the Fawcett Society.

The Equal Pay Day 2023 report, “Making flexible working the default”, found that on average working women take home £574 a month less than men – or £6,888 a year.

Blaming a lack of flexible working in well-paid, high-quality jobs, the report found that women were forced to put up with less fair and less equal working arrangements in exchange for the flexibility required to balance their caring responsibilities.

Of course, this leaves us open to the charge of merely being misogynist brutes. Which we even could be.

But let us cast this complaint in a different way. Same meaning, just different words. Those who decide to live their lives in different ways get different jobs which pay different amounts of money. There, we’re sure we’re all shocked this happens in a free, liberal and market economy. We’re also entirely unsure about how this could ever not be so if we are to maintain that trinity of free, liberal and market.

After all, it is not necessary that women shoulder those caring responsibilities. Such things as househusbands do exist. Paternity leave is a thing - and we’re entirely happy to be identified as one of the sources for why it does.

To be liberal is to insist that all should have choices. To be free is to have choices. A market economy is the only form that actually works with our species. That some exercise those choices, freedoms, in a manner that leads to a fuller but lower paid life is, well, it’s just one of those things really. It’s not just the difficulty of what we might do about it, it’s the far more important question of why would we do anything at all?

We centrally, politically that is. For of course a possible solution is that women sort this out for themselves. As, we very strongly suspect, they already have. If women only mated with those who did shoulder at least half of those caring responsibilities - or even all of them - then this problem of the unequal burden and outcome would not exist. That it does might lead to assumptions about expressed preferences.

So ladies, the solution is in your well, hands isn’t quite the right physique part but….