THE pay-gap debate has long centred on the on the premise that although matters have improved since the 1960s, women still earn less than men doing the same work. The economics of this claim are most dubious. Were it the case, the best thing an entrepreneur could do would be to appoint an all-female staff and then watch their profits outstrip those of their competitors. In reality, the disjuncture reflects many things: women moving in and out of the workplace more in the course of a career; part-time employment, undertaken to accommodate family life; and the reluctance of some women to ask for higher pay coupled with an equal reluctance of (mainly male) managers to hand it out. But could this be changing, at least in some demographics?

Until now the data have shown that women in Britain consistently under-earn relative to their male colleagues. According to the Office of National Statistics, the gap now stands at 10.5% (an estimate revised up from 9.1%). But new research indicates that the future of women’s pay may be rosier than this figure suggests. An article in the Spectator by Liza Mundy predicts that in a generation’s time, British women will be the richer sex.

Pointing to the rising levels of female graduates, more stay-at-home fathers and a generation of more career-minded females, Ms Mundy says that women born after 1985 have caught up with men. For a start, overall numbers are rising. Britain’s workforce is 46% women, a 9% increase in 40 years. Traditionally male sectors such as industrial work are declining. Ms Mundy points to the rise of a knowledge-based economy that is more gender-blind and to young women getting more places at elite universities than they did, with potential higher earning power to follow. Though she admits the pay gap still exists, she points to last year’s finding in an annual survey of hours and earnings that women between the ages of 22 and 29 actually earn a 2.5% higher median hourly rate than men.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission, however, says that although the pay gap may be small at the start of their careers, women can expect to lag on the pay scale ten years later. Indeed a Chartered Management Institute survey last year found that junior male managers already earned £500 more a year than their female counterparts, and that at current rates, women’s pay would take 98 years to catch up. So who is right: the Tiggerish Ms Mundy or the Eeyores of the EHRC? We won’t really know how much has changed until the babies of 1985 are at least a decade into their careers. But earning more than men when they are in their twenties might just give women a taste for parity.