The national consciousness is currently in a state of hysteria over an Auckland electrician’s decision to offer a 12% discount to female customers on account of New Zealand’s “gender wage gap”. For those of you not in the matrix, the gender wage gap refers to the fact that the average weekly income of a woman is lower than the average weekly income of a man.

Although Dan McGlashan proved in Understanding New Zealand that the wage gap is entirely due to the fact that men work full-time jobs more often and the women work part-time jobs more often, and that there is no difference in wages for those men and women who are part of the professional class, the perception persists that women are deliberately ripped off in remuneration for their labour by some nefarious conspiracy of people with Y chromosomes.

Some, like the Auckland electrician mentioned above, seem to believe that this perception of a malevolent bias against women justifies giving women discounts when it comes to trade, in an effort to redress the imbalance in wages.

The real injustice when it comes to differential treatment of the genders is that women live much longer than men do. Females born today are expected to live 3.7 years longer than men do, an injustice many times more cruel than a piddling difference in wages.

The average female can expect to live 83.2 years from birth, whereas the average male can not even count on getting to 80. His average life expectancy is only 79.5.

Another way of looking at it is that the average female gets another 18.2 years of life after hitting retirement age at 65, compared to the paltry 14.5 years of the average male.

Measured in percentages, this means that the average female gets to enjoy 26% more life in their golden years than the average male. This is a disparity that weighs much heavier than that of mere money. Here we are talking about life itself.

We can call this disparity the “gender death gap”. Knowing about this gap in life expectancy, and knowing that there are tireless calls for restitution from working age men on account of the gender wage gap, one question immediately arises: should we call for restitution from pension age women?

It could be argued that, if tradesmen like the electrician mentioned earlier give discounts to working age women on account of the gender wage gap, they also should give discounts to pension age men. After all, the clock is ticking for those men in a way that does not compare to the experience of the female.

Perhaps the fairest solution would be to immediately cut female pensions by 26%, which would equalise the amount of post-retirement money that the different genders got out of the Government.