The Gender Pay Gap

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Whatever your view on home-makers, models or body hair, it seems there is one thing on which everyone can agree: men being arbitrarily paid more than women is a very, very bad thing. However, the fact that no one today seriously argues that men should earn more for doing the same work is no impediment to politicians, feminists, academics, or celebrities; the statistical savior, the gender pay gap, provides an opportunity for everyone to flaunt their feminist credentials and to show that women still experience institutionalized sexism. Indeed, the desire for the gender pay gap to exist is so powerful that the facts have been ignored in the pursuit of consensus; here’s the good news you’ve probably not heard: for young women across the western …show more content…

These headline-grabbing statistics about a smaller but still existing pay gap are continue to be used by politicians and campaigners in their handwringing over the dire status of women and girls today. However, what is not reported is that such statistics are arrived at by conflating the earnings of women of all ages, all occupations, and those in part-time and full-time work. The reality is that for Britons aged under 40 and working full-time, the gender pay gap is around zero; since 2009 women aged 22 to 29 have earned more than men. The headline gender pay-gap figures also ignore the fact that, across the West, more women choose to work part-time: in the UK, 43.2 per cent of women work part-time compared with 13.7 per cent of men. It’s long been the case that most part-time jobs are comparatively low skilled and low paid. Happily, this, too, is beginning to change as a significant proportion of women are now securing well-paid professional jobs before shifting to part-time work when they have children, where their skills and experience are changing the part-time employment landscape in favor of increasingly skilled and higher-paid work. Of British women aged 30 to 39, 38.4 per cent work part-time compared with 8.4 per cent of men, but the gender pay gap for this group is actually -8.2 per cent – despite a significantly higher proportion of them working in lower-paying, part-time

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