The Gender Pay Gap Is Dead

Article here. Excerpt:

'The gender pay gap hit the headlines yet again last week. Government ministers announced plans for national league tables to show the difference in wages earned by male and female employees in any company with over 250 workers. Coverage of this latest attempt to crack down on the apparently blatant gender discrimination that blights the nation’s labour market has been sympathetic. Articles have been accompanied by helpful infographics showing a blue figure atop a substantially larger pile of money than an equivalent pink figure. The intention is to illustrate the frequently referenced statistic that men earn roughly 20 per cent more than women.

Despite the simplicity of this stark inequality, such figures are misleading. The much-heralded 20 per cent pay gap is an ‘on average’ figure that is reached through combining part-time and full-time earnings, and takes no account of age or employment sector. As I have argued before on spiked, when we compare how much women and men are paid for doing the same job for the same number of hours each week, there is no pay gap. Not only is it illegal to pay men more, such a pay gap makes no economic sense. If bosses could really get away with paying women so much less, why would anyone ever employ a man?

In reality, the pay gap is far more complex than campaigners like to acknowledge. It is affected by age, occupation and hours worked. Today, women in their twenties earn more than men of the same age. Significantly, they earn more than men not just like-for-like, but also on average. This means that irrespective of job type or hours worked, young women are likely to take home higher wages. For women under the age of 40 and working full-time, the pay gap is negligible. As government equalities minister Nicky Morgan acknowledged when announcing the government’s latest proposals: ‘We’ve virtually eliminated the gap for full-time workers under 40 and the gap for the over-40s is shrinking too.’'