Giovanni de Dondi was a 14 th century Paduan doctor and clockmaker. His masterpiece, which took him 16 years, to complete, was the Astrarium, an astrological clock which modeled the movements of the sun, moon and planets known to exist at that time. It was, without doubt, an extremely impressive feat.

The clock was a seven-sided structure about 3ft high and the upper frame contained seven dials, which plotted the movement of the sun, moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. The lower frame held a 24 hour dial which recorded ecclesiastical feasts and lunar nodes and, at either side of this, the Summer and Winter solstices were recorded. Dondi used 107 gear wheels and pinions, using near-elliptical wheels to record irregular movements of the planets more accurately.

There was only one slight snag. The clock was based on the underlying assumption, universally believed at that time, that the Earth was the centre of the universe and that the sun, moon and other planets orbited it.

It was only at the start of the 17th century that Galileo changed our understanding of the nature of our solar system when he advanced the theory that the sun was at its centre and that the other planets, including the Earth, orbited it. Galileo certainly suffered many trials and tribulations as a result of advancing heretical theories, but the result of Dondi’s clock being based on a fundamentally flawed premise was that it could not model the movements of the planets entirely accurately and threw up anomalies.

As it was in the 14th century with Dondi’s clock, so it is in the 21st century with the myth of the wage gap. If you believe that the reason that women only earn 77¢ for every dollar men earn (or whatever the figure du jour happens to be) is solely due to discrimination you are going to notice anomalies – evidence which contradicts your world view. There are two possible responses to this.

Ignore it completely or acknowledge the evidence, but dismiss it as an anomaly. Refine your theory to incorporate the anomaly, thus making it ever more tortuous and complex.

Some years ago an article on careers in The Guardian on factors which contribute to, or detract from, job satisfaction cited a professor of sociology from the University of Kent who took the first approach. Noting that in a survey women express higher levels of job satisfaction than men, he parroted the wage gap statistic and dismissed the finding as one of sociology’s great puzzles. You might have thought that a university professor, of all people, would have at least tried to figure it out, but clearly this paradox was beyond someone of even his intellect.

More recently, the classical music writer and blogger, Norman Lebrecht, cited a report which concluded that ‘[t]he average arts employee in the UK is female, 34 and earns less than £20,000 [$33,000]’. I hardly need say that this is a pittance, particularly in London where the majority of jobs in the arts are based, but Lebrecht notes that, despite this, job satisfaction levels are ‘sky high’.

He muses on this and asks some of his female readers about why they are so happy with so little. Back came the obvious response along the lines of ‘it’s because we’re passionate about the arts’. And there, apart from one commenter, who I will return to later, it was left.

Exhibit A for those who try to incorporate the paradox into their grand theory is Polly Courtney. She introduces herself in this first article (both articles date from 2006, but nothing much has changed, apart from the fact that far fewer people nowadays think that bankers walk on water) as an engineering graduate (a STEM subject) from Cambridge University.

On graduating in 2002, instead of pursuing engineering, she was seduced by the allure of investment banking and joined a large investment bank as a graduate trainee. Once there, she quickly grew to hate the job and left after no more than a year. Now aged about 33, she appears to earn her living through writing and occasional consulting.

Despite the high pay, she soon discovered that the job itself was a combination of insane hours and pressure and mind-numbing tedium, but no article of this sort would be complete with some reference to sexism in City institutions and, sure enough, she obliges:

I was the only woman in a team of 21 and this made a difference: I was seen as a secretary, not as a banker. When directors scanned the office for an analyst, I just didn’t seem to be on their radar. I was used to male-dominated environments. I’d been to an all-boys secondary school and worked in engineering.

I’d always given as good as I’d got, but it was hard not to take personally comments such as ‘When does your work experience end?’, ‘You must have slept your way into university’ or ‘Sorry Polly – we would invite you along, but we’re planning to pull tonight.’ I was even told by colleagues that the only reason I got the job was because of my legs.

It was a delicate balance, trying to prove my worth without over-proving it. There are lots of fragile egos in the City, so being too bold can do you more harm than good.

This is far from the only allegation of sexist attitudes in the City and I’m sure that there is at least some truth in what she writes, but if you throw together roughly 40 insanely ambitious and driven over-achievers, who are totally unused to coming second to anyone in anything, and tell them that only a fraction of them will succeed, such behavior is probably inevitable. However, the overriding impression from the article is that she left because it was simply a lousy job.

This article was all about her personal experience, but her second article broadens this out and looks at three women of around her age who left jobs in an investment bank, a large accountancy firm and a large City law firm for careers as an interior designer and photography and a job working in an animal shelter. All three left well-paid, but demanding and stressful, careers for a better work/life balance, but much less money, and none of them regretted the switch.

Polly Courtney notices an obvious connection between the three of them – that they are all women – and also that men do not make these sorts of career changes in anything like the same numbers. However, just when you suspect she might be onto something, she executes a neat feint and body-swerve to avoid the obvious conclusion and incorporates this anomaly into her theory.

You see, men don’t give up secure, well-paid jobs for insecure, poorly-paid jobs because they are stupid, greedy or cowardly. They are cowardly because they lack the courage to make the leap into the unknown, preferring to ensure a soft landing by finding a slightly less stressful and high-powered, but still well paid, job in, say, a smaller firm of accountants or lawyers.

They are stupid because they have ‘cornered themselves into an area so specialist that their skills are no longer transferable’. This mystifies me because, when I think about the three women described above, I ask myself what skills they transferred from their old into their new careers. The accountant who became a photographer would be able to do her own books and accounts and, possibly, her tax return, but that is about as far as it goes.

They are greedy because, she muses, their lifestyle might have become so expensive that they cannot afford a pay cut. She doesn’t elaborate on this and I dare say that some of them might enjoy a bachelor lifestyle involving penthouse flats, fast cars and 4-star weekend breaks in Venice, but we all know that there are alternative explanations.

Polly Courtney performs some impressive contortions, but, like Dondi’s clock, maybe a better approach would be to revise her basic premise. It is a basic tenet of feminism that a woman’s true calling is a career and that childcare is a distraction which society has imposed on them. If women choose to prioritise childcare they are the victim of a false consciousness, i.e. the patriarchy has brainwashed them.

Feminists believe this for two reasons; first, they are themselves usually driven individuals who are very career-focused and they do not, or ideologically do not wish to, understand why other women might make different choices, and, second, this is the choice most men make. If we make the alternative assumptions that individuals prioritise happiness and satisfaction, if possible, and that individuals are different and have different priorities, things fall into place much better.

Many women choose highly-paid careers, such as medicine or law, but they do so because they find them very satisfying and the fact that they pay well is a bonus. Many men also choose these careers for the same reasons.

However, many of the careers which professional women choose, such as teaching and arts administration have high intrinsic job satisfaction, but are relatively low-paid. Similarly, women who prioritise childcare do so because their desire to be with their children is stronger than their attachment to their careers. The question is, why do men not choose the low-paid, but satisfying, alternatives in anything like the numbers that women do?

The answer is that happiness does not usually derive solely from work, but also from other factors, and in particular, often from family life. Everyone has a different preferred work/life balance, but, if that it is not available, they will usually choose family over work, if possible.

However, a work/life balance still assumes a reasonable standard of living, even if individuals are not particularly materialistic, and these articles feature middle-class individuals with middle-class aspirations, who benchmark themselves against other middle-class professionals, rather than, say, construction workers, and aspire to a nice house in a nice neighbourhood. Furthermore, once kids are thrown into the equation, this demands a certain standard of living, because most parents have aspirations for their children, if not for themselves.

Individuals therefore seek job satisfaction, but do not generally do so at the expense of achieving the above material goals. A woman can have a relatively low-paid job and still achieve these, since, having a high-powered career is neither a disadvantage nor an advantage in dating, whereas women place much more importance on a man’s earning capacity. This brings me back nicely to Norman Lebrecht’s blogpost and, in particular, to the comments of Arundo Donax (who happens to be me posting under an alias).

This provokes indignation from Chrissy Kinsella, who seems to think that I am addressing her personally and am making assumptions about her, despite the fact that, to the best of my knowledge, I have never met her. I therefore point out very carefully that, whereas a man will tend to play the percentages and stick with a high-paid, but stressful and possibly unsatisfying, job in order to maximise his chances in dating, for a woman the strategy of choosing a satisfying, but poorly paid, job and finding a man to be the primary breadwinner is a game plan with good chances of success if that is what she wishes to do.

Polly Courtney’s observation that men are far less willing to give up the pay and perks of investment banking might not be so much about financing their current lifestyle, but of signalling to potential mates their ability to finance an affluent lifestyle in the future. Similarly, in her first-mentioned article above Polly Courtney refers to the behavior of some of her male colleagues at a party, where the status of working for a big investment bank seemed to matter to them. This is standard alpha-male behavior which can be observed in any BBC wildlife documentary set on the plains of East Africa and is designed to simultaneously attract females and ward off male rivals by saying ‘I’m the big beast around here’.

This also explains why low-paid jobs remain low-paid. The neoliberal assumption relating to pay is that it should be determined solely by market forces. The fields which are female-dominated tend to be those with high intrinsic job satisfaction and, if they can be filled by offering £20,000 p.a. there is no need to pay more. Society does not pay women poorly because they are women, but because they are willing to accept jobs with low pay, whereas men who would like to do these jobs, but are not willing to do so for the pay offered, are excluded.

Many of these jobs are in the public sector or in sectors which rely on funding from governments or other precarious sources and there are therefore strong political incentives to restrain pay levels. The fact that more than 3 in 4 arts administrators are female might not matter in the grand scheme of things. However, the same forces which inhibit men from careers in arts administration are also those which contribute to the lack of male teachers, which is one of the major contributory factors to the problems boys face in education.

The above points are illustrated by a letter in Private Eye, a satirical magazine which has been published for more than 50 years. In March 2014 teachers held a one-day strike in support of a pay claim and Private Eye printed a strip cartoon about the strike. This provoked the following letter from ‘Steve’:



I really enjoy Scene and Heard [the general heading of the section in which the strip cartoon appeared], but I had to write in about the one from the teachers’ strike as what was said doesn’t represent the real world, or that one problem with teaching is the unions are consistently , loudly, wrong about everything. A good example is pay : they argue for a national payscale and claim they stick up for teachers. But the payscale would keep me earning far less than I am.

I do a good job and am now earning about £35,000 [$58,000] (I’m in my fourth year of teaching) while their payscale would have me starting on £21,000 [$35,000] and now earning £27,000 [$45,000] regardless of how good or bad I was at teaching kids, as it was an automatic progression. I would not do the job for that money and my school would not have a single physics teacher as a result. Is that what they want?

I’m sure that Steve does do a good job, as he claims, but the reason why he earns £35,000 is that there is a shortage of physics teachers and it is necessary to pay a premium to recruit them into teaching. It is also no coincidence that physics is a male-dominated STEM subject. Physics graduates have well-paid alternatives, but so do arts graduates, even if these are in careers unrelated to their studies.

However, if sufficient graduates eschew these opportunities in favor of teaching at £21,000, salary levels will not rise, and those that do so are predominately women. Men tend to hold out for higher salaries and, because physics is male-dominated, teaching jobs in physics would remain unfilled at that salary level.

Herein lies the difficulty in addressing the wage gap. Jobs in which women are under-represented are well-paid high status jobs which are very competitive. There are sufficient well-qualified women to fill these posts, therefore all you need to do to is stop men from applying through, for example, all-women shortlists for parliamentary seats. It is no good trying to get more male teachers, nurses or social workers if men are unwilling to apply for these jobs and making them willing to apply, as we see above, costs money.

Once you have to throw money at a problem to solve it, the solution becomes less attractive. Just like Galileo’s theory, everything now makes perfect sense. I just hope that I don’t suffer like him if one or two of my colleagues find this post!