The apparently unfavourable comparison between the pay of men and women, and the ensuing debate, has been rambling on for years.  Various nauseating phrases like ‘pay gap’ and ‘glass ceiling’ have been used and persist, including in articles out this week (here in the Irish Times and here from a recruiting firm).  Whether or not women in general have been paid less for an equivalent job in the past is hard to quantify precisely – there are of course some well-known cases, but these seem few.  Either way, nothing can defend the actions of those who sought to instigate such a disparity.

But despite ‘equal pay for the same job’ problem having been done away with some time ago—and it really has been, any impropriety on that score would (rightly) have employers being sued until they were naked, obviously—the debate still exists.  A recent report in the Society Pages, tweeted by a female friend, is a good example.  The essence of the argument is that women and men of the same age do not have the same pay.  This is not only possibly, but probably, true, but it is not unfair.  Let us analyse it stepwise.  These statistics are an average of the pay received by men and women, a given point after leaving University.  Do the statistics take account of a man and a woman of the same ability, experience and qualifications in the same pay structures?  Of course not – although useful, it would be ludicrously complicated to do, and the sample sizes would probably be too small to make it statistically significant.  On top of this the laws that have been in place for some time mean that gender does not influence the pay for a given job.  So, 10 years after University, two equivalent brains, one belonging to a male, one to a female, will do equally well, accounting for luck.

But what, if at the age of 31 years, our female example takes two years off to have a baby?  We will assume she, like our male example, is married, and that co-incidentally, our male example’s wife also has a baby at about the same time.  If our example woman then goes back to work two years later, by the time our two examples reach 35 one will have had 8 years’ experience and the other 10.  And so when they are up for promotion to middle or senior management, which will get the post?  The one with more experience will get the job.  Add to that our example man may have done not only more years, but more hours-per-year in that time: how many fathers have you met who have said that having a baby on the way focuses the mind?  I know plenty.

Although this example is broadly true, and includes two factors general statistics do not, it is of course a simplification.  Changes in priorities with age, and a possible second child, would influence things further.  However, if the meretricious notion that doing more work means getting paid more is borne in mind when interpreting the statistics, the fact that men apparently earn more than women is explainable at least partly because men in general spend more time at work.  There should not be any shame in that.  If anything it proves that meritocracy, the only acceptable status quo, really does exist: you do more hours, you get more pay and experience.  An obvious comparison would be between men and women of equivalent years of experience and qualifications, rather than just male and female.  Have any studies been done on that I wonder?  I could not find any.

The most important point is one I have not really touched upon yet.  That point is based on the idea that a comparison of men and women should be done on financial grounds.  This idea is plainly revolting.  The message from such a comparison looks, for all the world, like ‘Money is how we measure success and personal value, men earn more therefore they are worth more’.  How vile could a gender imbalance be?  This sort of idea pervades both sides of the debate – both radical feminists and tabloid loonies alike – and thus heavily implies that it is a waste for a woman to take time off from a career to have a baby and mother it (yes that word is also a verb).  Well it f***ing isn’t.