Bloggers4Labour

Via Action Without Theory, I read that Michelle Stanistreet (who works at the Daily Express, of all papers), is standing for Deputy General Secretary of the NUJ, and has this to say:

Despite the fact that the UK has had equal pay legislation for thirty years the average pay of women is still only 82 percent of the average for men. [...] The government says firms should do equal pay audits - but they don't have too. The law should be changed to make it compulsory.

(The BBC has since posted this since I wrote the bulk of this post.) Anyway, three different points, there. Starting with the last point, I think there's an indisputable case for the Government or an independent body to audit pay across all firms, as it's in the spirit of the existing anti-discrimination legislation, and is the best way to cut off discrimination at source. We know that some companies offer different wages for employees who differ only in their gender: for example, to cover their losses if they have to support a female employee in maternity. Companies naturally try to find 'alternative' ways around these commitments, but I think it's a perfectly reasonable extension of the rights of parents not to be discriminated against by employers, and for the Government to enforce the law as it stands. I suspect few on the left would disagree on this ideological and practical point, nor not be happy to defend the costs of the scheme to the public.

Besides which, forcing employers to account for all their workers, however poor their conditions, must be a good thing.

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Logically, "the UK has had equal pay legislation for thirty years" is unrelated to "the average pay of women is still only 82 percent of the average for men". The aim of that legislation was not to equalise pay rates across the economy between men and women, or any other selected groups, but to ensure equal treatment of individual employees within particular workplaces. Since those workplaces neither individually nor even in aggregate reflect the entire population in all its diversity of employment, we can't jump from "we pay Alice the same rate as Bob" to "average female wages/income must equal that of men".

Before we look at the evidence, what about the principle? To be honest, I don't think I care whether men and women - across the entire economy - earn either the same average wage or income. Though the kind of people who audit companies don't have to be so crude, us lot use average income as a statistic to guide us to instances of exploitation, injustice, and thwarted ambitions. Those are the things we care about, not the average itself, surely?

Why should anyone care whether I earn more or less than a (putative) twin brother? You would expect us to make different decisions over a lifetime, have different luck, different preferences, and so on, so the comparison would be irrelevant. You'd expect my sister to have career- and life-preferences that were even further from mine. By all means interject with cries of 'gender socialisation' and 'false consciousness', but bear in mind that the male-female-equal-pay crowd is not the preserve of Marxists.

Perhaps you believe that my sister simply ought to earn the same as me. Firstly, this is far from a mainstream view. Secondly, what if one of us marries someone who earns twice what the other does - should the family income of one sibling be equalised with the other's instead? We're talking about wages/incomes here, not the benefits system. I doubt Michelle would want to commit to something of this nature.

Can we agree that if Z is the difference between male and female average pay, then Z = E + D, where E is the exploitation factor to be targeted, and D is a factor that reflects difference in attitudes and preferences between the sexes (I'm assuming luck, etc. is evenly spread)?

Some appear to believe that Z = E, and that clamping down on discrimination will eradicate the pay gap. Makes sense: men and women are the same, aren't they?

My claim is that clamping down on discrimination - as we should - will still leave a substantial D, and thus a substantial Z. It depends partly upon the type of job: the lowest skilled jobs, those with the lowest attractions and levels of commitment, should have very low difference between the sexes.

However, because men and women select different types of job for themselves, we cease to be able to compare. Perhaps a City trader should earn no more than a teacher. But until the day the traders are hanged from lampposts from one end of London Wall to the other, and the public service ethos is rewarded, the differential is there, and simply selecting your job increases the overall gender pay imbalance, irrespective of any discrimination. The evidence does indeed show that men are far more likely to become traders - and less likely to become teachers - than women, and there's nothing that equal pay legislation can do about that.

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What of the facts? Thomas Sowell's Economic Facts and Fallacies sits before me. His rebuttal of the "discrimination is the reason for pay differentials" argument is comprehensive rather than elegant, and he hammers away at it for 31 pages, but this is a pretty clear conclusion:

[In the USA] Comparing never-married women and men who are past the child-bearing years and who both work full-time in the twenty-first century shows women of this description earning more than men of the same description. As far back as 1969, academic women who had never married earned more than men who had never married, while married academic women without children earned less, and married academic women with children still less. For women in general - that is, not just academic women - those single women who had worked continuously since high school were in 1971 earning slightly more than men of the same description

This being before the era of affirmative action. The reason, of course, for comparing never-married individuals is to strip out the effect of pregnancy, home-making, and so on, until only gender is left. That's not to devalue pregnancy or home-making, but to emphasis that these are voluntary things, and to identify how important gender itself is. If the above is true, women who put their career first cannot then be lumped together with women who don't.

Now, I don't have equivalent statistics from the UK, but I suspect that those who cling to the 82% figure don't have much more in their locker, either.

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So is eliminating the gender pay gap really impossible, then? Of course not: as we've seen, once you compare like with like, a different picture already starts to appear. Forcing employers not to conceal pay rates, separately, is also a good thing. However, as long as we stick to the existing statistics, then unless gender employment preferences and/or the country's employment structure changes dramatically, only increasing compulsion - or breaking the spirit of existing equality legislation by favouring perceived losers - will eliminate the apparent gap:

Under plans to make workplaces more diverse, Ms Harman wants to allow employers to appoint people specifically because of their race or gender.
The proposals would only apply when choosing between candidates equally qualified for the job.
But it means, for example, women or people from minorities could be hired ahead of others in order to create a more balanced workforce.

I shouldn't complain, working as I do in an office which is 95% male, but even if you can prove the existence of sexism or racism, introducing new sexism and racism to tackle the existing problems just exacerbates illegitimacy rather than confronts it, and it stokes up resentment for the future. Let's treat people as individuals and kill off 'Identity Politics' once and for all.

Labels: economics, equality, identity politics, Income, logical fallacies, pay, Thomas Sowell, USA