More details on the wage gap fiction

Article here. Excerpt:

'The recruitment consultancy Robert Half decided to get some early PR out of International Women's Day this Tuesday. It published an analysis of salary rates in the UK for men and women concluding that women will earn £298,064 ($422,267) less than men over their lifetimes, a gender pay gap of 24%.

The press release has already been written up by the Evening Standard, The Guardian, and here at Business Insider.

The problem with this statistic is that ... it's rubbish.

The gender pay gap in the UK is just 9.4% and getting smaller every year, according to the Office for National Statistics, which does an annual survey of men's and women's wage rates specifically to monitor discriminatory pay.

And yet, the media persistently reports that women earn 20% or 30% less than men. The BBC made this exact claim as recently as February.
...

The obvious trend in the chart is that once you hit your 30s, men start getting paid more. "From 40 upwards, the gap is much wider, with men being paid substantially more on average than women," the ONS says. The main reason: "This is likely to be connected with the fact that women who have children often take time out of the labour market."

It's not just that having kids hurts your earnings in later life, either. It's the work you choose to do, the ONS says. "It should be noted that the figures do not show differences in rates of pay for comparable jobs, as they are affected by factors such as the proportion of men and women in different occupations. For example, a higher proportion of women work in occupations such as administration and caring, that tend to offer lower salaries."

The overall point here is that yes, men do earn more than women. A lot more: Men get an average of £567 a week in Britain compared with £471 for women. That is, actually, a 20% pay gap. But men get that extra money because they don't work part time as much, because they work more overtime, because they don't take time off to have children, and because they tend not to work lower-paid jobs as much as women do.'