Suomy looks at what exactly is a “significant” gender pay gap.
Clip from The Drum, featuring Simon Brehany and Dee Madigan, aired Tuesday April 5th
Simon Breheny is the Director of the Legal Rights Project and Director of Race Has No Place at the Institute of Public Affairs.
Dee Madigan is the owner of Campaign Edge, a creative advertising agency who has an extensive background in social and political marketing. As stated on her personal website, and is obvious from the lack of substantiation behind her claims, she “lives in the twitterverse”.
As Simon mentions, the 17.3% figure that feminists religiously quote as the gendered pay gap is a Mean Average weekly normal full-time earnings of all persons of each sex from every industry and occupation, all lumped into one figure as follows.
Even when this factsheet that feminists quote does break down the figures into a like for like basis, for some reason the figures revert to including total weekly earnings, which also includes the elective variables that females tend to not take up as much, things like overtime, inflexible work hours, salary sacrifice arrangements and irregular bonuses (of course, a person who does more overtime, is bound to get a bigger bonus) as shown below.
One is left to wonder what types of people would be interested in taking up a career in gender equality statistics reporting and if they might have any conflict of interests to declare..
I don’t suppose it would be, umm, feminists?..would it?
While there is no readily available genuine “like for like” analysis of the Australian wage figures from an official source, Time magazines Money pages have previously made a table using an ‘apples-to-apples’ comparison of the USA pay gap that is left, after accounting for the factors that Simon mentions in the clip, using data provided by salary research company PayScale. Here are their calculations of just how “significant” the real gap is.
While it is true there is still a gap left over, there is still one factor that cannot be quantized readily, that is the ‘negotiation skills’ factor.
And one is obliged to wonder, is it reasonable that females should have a lower negotiation power than males, given that they do generally take time off from their careers to enjoy being an at-home mother more often that males do, is a small difference in negotiating power reasonable?
The simple fact remains, it is illegal to pay one person a lesser rate of pay than another person for the same type of work done on the basis of their sex.
Any instance that can be demonstrated before the Fair Work Ombudsman that discrimination is happening because of an employees gender, can be and is prosecuted under law.
(all images are hyper-linked to their original sources)
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