Vox Populi is in the comments sections not the newspaper articles

We had a little go at the Fawcett Society over their gender pay gap calculation yesterday. What we think is rather fun about this issue is the extreme difference between what the two major left wing broadsheets (not that one of them appears on paper any more) say about the issue and what their readers insist upon telling them about it.

In The Guardian and The Independent there are pieces decrying how dreadfully the patriarchy oppresses women through the gender pay gap. In the comment sections below each there is near no one who is willing to accept even the basic diagnosis. Instead we've, from near all of those readers who could be bothered to give their view, repeated statements of the basic truths here.

There is no pay gap even if there is an earnings gap. To pay men and women unequally for the same job is illegal, the differences in earnings coming from different decisions about how to live life, what to do for an income and how much devotion to attend to that career. That is, the readers have got the point here, even if the newspapers themselves have not.

Yes, we will take some of the credit here for we have been banging on about this for a decade now. And Kate Andrews (who was with us) is indeed mentioned as being mentioned as a source to counter the misinformation.

That the people aren't being taken in by the agitprop we find cheering.

We might also extend this principle a little bit. Near none of the reporting The Guardian has done on the Paradise Papers even has a comments section for people to correct the articles themselves. We assume this is because even the editors know that such sections would just fill up with questions about why it's so appalling that others use offshore but just fine and dandy that the Guardian Media Group and Scott Trust Ltd do themselves.