A gender pay gap?

It has been the law in Australia for many decades that people doing the same job are paid the same, regardless of their gender. A man or woman doing the identical job must be paid the same amount. 

This principle, embedded in the law, is beyond dispute. But reading the report of the Workplace Gender Equality Agency on the so-called ‘gender pay gap’ would lead many to conclude that the law doesn’t exist. 

Indeed, the Agency’s report acknowledges that its data does not compare men and women doing the same job in a company!

Various media reports regurgitated the claim that a gender wage gap exists in Australia without defining the so-called gap. The impression is that a male nurse, retail assistant, or miner are paid different rates to their female equivalent according to their gender. This is simply untrue.

The report is crude and misleading.

All it really does is compare the median earnings paid to employees of different genders.

It does not examine the underlying reasons for the differences. Why do men and women choose different jobs? Why do they choose to work different hours?  These are legitimate questions that an Agency concerned with pay equity should be interested in.

Instead, companies are named and shamed for a misleading assessment of their whole situation relating to men and women.

Why are there so few male primary school teachers? This is a question of real concern to many parents and others. 

Why are some areas of work dominated by females, such as aged and disability care, and even nursing despite an increase in the number of males.

A company providing these types of services is more likely to satisfy the Agency’s criteria than a company in other fields of the economy.

Why do women, as a group, choose to work fewer hours?

It is decades since women had to resign from paid employment when they married.

They are not discriminated against today under various workplace agreements.

The real reasons for the different median pay for men and women have more to do with hours and the type of work.

As last year’s Nobel Prize winner for Economics, Professor Claudia Goldin pointed out, the so-called gender pay gap is overwhelmingly the result of the existence of “greedy jobs”, that is, high-paid jobs that require long and unpredictable hours and often extensive travel.

If the Agency is so adamant about equal numbers of men and women in every workforce, each working the same hours, perhaps it could start at home. Of the 32 employees listed in its report, 30 are women!

Perhaps its employees are selected on a different criterion. 

Missing from the Agency’s analysis is any consideration of the choices that individuals, including families, make about their working arrangements. One and a half jobs are a very common choice because it suits the family requirements for both income and other needs and desires.

Missing from this type of report, which seems to have an ideological foundation trapped in decades-old feminism, is any real consideration of family dynamics and choices.

Instead of appeasing words about ‘doing better’, companies should call out the inadequacy of this report.

But many - with senior management and executives comprising the same woke personnel as many government agencies - would rather genuflect to the zeitgeist than challenge what they know is nonsense.

When cost of living pressures are hitting families, the government would better serve the Australian people by saving the money spent on this agency and reducing taxes and charges elsewhere.

First published in the Epoch Times Australia.