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Tim Worstall Contributor


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The Gender Pay Gap Is Pretty Much Dealt With

Good news on the gender pay gap front. In the UK at least we don’t seem to have any evidence that there is actually a gender pay gap. Therefore we can say that the problem is pretty much dealt with. It is still true that the average (whether median or mean) wages of all men and women in employment are different but this isn’t the same thing as there being a gender pay gap. The crucial distinction is whether the pay gap that does exist is a result of something being done to women, in which case we’d probably like to work out how to stop that happening, or whether it’s something being done by women in which case, well, it’s just one of those trade offs that people can make with their freedom and liberty.

The numbers come from the latest ONS report in the UK:

Women typically reach the height of their earning power at the age of 34 – while men’s salaries carry on rising until they are 50.

The difference is due to women returning to work part-time after having children, according to the Office for National Statistics.

Official figures also reveal the gender pay gap is now ‘close to zero’ – though only until the age of 30.

The interesting thing about these two findings is that they support each other in leading to what is almost certainly the correct conclusion about gender pay differences. That they’re not to do with gender per se, but concern motherhood.

The UK data that we have on gender and pay is rather rich. ONS breaks it out, in regular reports, into part time and full time work, by gender, public sector and private and also by age cohort. There are other studies that look at the wages of, say, lesbians, or never married no children women in their 40s. And all of these studies lead towards very much the same conclusions.

There’s no real discernible gender pay gap up to the age of 30. It is also true that the average age of a first pregnancy carried to term is a little over 30 years old these days. We know that there’s a fatherhood pay premium (fathers earn more than non-fathers), lesbians earn more than heterosexual women (all of these are averages, of course) and never married no children women in their 40s make more (fractionally, a percentage point or two more) than men of the same age. All of this is pointing us towards the idea that it’s the children that are causing that pay gap.

And there’s good reason for that to be true too. Firstly there’s the simple break from work itself (one year statutory maternity pay for example, many women take more time than this) and that’s going to lower future earnings to some extent. Further, there’s many more women working part time than there are men. A goodly portion of those women are mothers of small children. A deliberate attempt to trade income for the flexibility desirable in being the primary carer for young children perhaps. And yes, for good reason part timers are paid less per hour than full timers.

When we add all of these effects together there doesn’t seem to be any room left for female pay to be lower than male as a result of employers discriminating against women. Further, when we look at pay rates for specific jobs split on a male/female basis we don’t really see any different in pay for those same jobs. There are a couple but they’re just where we would expect them. For example, men do get paid more for heavy manual labour: something that we would expect with the male generally greater musculature.

Which brings us back to that original question. We can indeed see differences in male and female pay but the really interesting question is whether it is something done to women or something that arises as a result of the actions of women themselves. And, from the UK evidence at least, it really does seem to be something that comes from the choices that women make about childbirth and child rearing.

Of course, we can still go on and insist that the societal presumption that women will be doing most of the hands on child raising is in itself sexist, even patriarchal. But this isn’t something that’s exactly unusual in a viviparous mammalian species nor do we have any great evidence of a human society that wasn’t so organised.

Womens’ pay, at least, seems to be determined by the choices that women themselves make about the work/life balance. And the truth is that it’s not a gender pay gap but a motherhood one. So perhaps we can stop fretting about it quite so much?

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