BBC: Gender, pay and 'misleading' stats

Article here. Excerpt:

'Equalities Minister Harriet Harman has been accused of over-stating the plight of women in the workplace: using misleading statistics to make it look as though female workers are having a tougher time than they really are.
...
But I am reliably informed that when the National Statistician Karen Dunnell went to the Government Equalities Office last November and told them that their way of calculating gender pay differences might be confusing and potentially damaging, the GEO ignored her and published anyway.

So instead of the Office for National Statistics (ONS) pay-gap figure of 12.8% (hardly something to crow about), the department put out a press release in April this year which stated that women are paid, on average, 23% less per hour than men.

Now a letter has been sent to Harriet Harman by Sir Michael Scholar, the chair of the UK Statistics Authority (the official watchdog on the use of government stats), saying that her use of the 23% figure "may undermine public trust in official statistics" and "risks giving a misleading quantification of the gender pay gap".'