Data shows slow gender pay gap decline but more needs to be done

Data shows slow gender pay gap decline but more needs to be done

OPINION

In 1961, American historian Daniel J Boorstin coined the phrase “pseudo-events” to describe a growing trend in journalism and politics.

An actual event, the sort of thing that used to fill newspaper columns, may be a plane crash, a shooting or a fire.

A pseudo-event, by contrast, is a staged event produced solely for the purpose of generating media coverage — think press conferences, pre-planned protests or the release of a research report.

Yesterday, the Workplace Gender Equality Agency released its annual gender equality scorecard, announcing the “gender pay gap” had fallen by 1.1 per cent but that men still earnt 21.3 per cent more than women on average.

This was a pseudo-event about a pseudo-problem.

But every single media outlet (including news.com.au) dutifully reported on it as they do year after year. “Pay gap narrows as employers work towards equality,” one headline read. “Gender pay gap still depressingly wide,” another said.

One columnist argued the gender pay gap was a “crisis we can no longer ignore”. Another journalist wrote that the data showed women were being paid less than “the bloke sitting next to you”.

Except that is completely untrue. It points to the persistent myth that women are paid less than men “sitting next” to them for doing the same jobs.

The WGEA even admits this, noting that its data “does not reflect comparisons of women and men in the same roles — that is, like-for-like gaps”.

While there may be individual cases where women are found to be earning less than male colleagues for the same work, there is no widespread, systemic “gender pay gap” defined in this way — it’s illegal.

Equal pay for equal work has been law in Australia since 1969.

The headline gender pay gap compares average full-time weekly earnings for men and women across the entire population.

It doesn’t take into account industry, experience, education, hours worked, or any of the hundreds of other fairly relevant factors that determine how much people are paid.

In other words, it’s an entirely meaningless statistic.

Critics of the gender pay gap argument say it all comes down to choice — women choose to take time out of the workforce to raise a family, for example, or choose to work in nursing rather than finance.

The counterargument is that many of those “choices” aren’t really choices — not only is there a glass ceiling, there are “glass walls” preventing women from entering higher-paying, male-dominated industries.

According the WGEA, factors influencing the gender pay gap include “discrimination and bias in hiring and pay decisions” and “women’s disproportionate share of unpaid caring and domestic work”.

The left and the right have argued for years about not only whether the gender pay gap exists but even if it did, whether anything should be done about it.

The real question worth exploring is this — when groups like the WGEA talk about closing the gender pay gap, how are they proposing to do it?

It’s safe to say no one believes women should be discriminated against based on their sex when employers are negotiating individual contracts or considering candidates for senior management roles.

There’s also an obvious argument for employers to offer greater flexibility and support so women aren’t forced to choose between career and family.

But eliminating those kinds of biases would only account for a very small percentage of the observed difference in earnings between men and women across the entire population.

That is, CEOs and senior company executives make up a tiny sliver of the entire workforce, meaning even if there were 50-50 representation, the difference to the overall “gender pay gap” would be immeasurable.

The WGEA is very focused on the glass ceiling issue but conflates barriers to women in upper management with the broader pay gap — and they don’t appear to have actually answered how they propose addressing the remainder.

So taking the “closing the gender pay gap” argument to its logical conclusion, how could complete gender parity be achieved?

Should men be forced out of male-dominated industries and into female-dominated industries en masse, and vice versa, until the ratio is exactly 50-50?

Or should the federal government step in and mandate equal pay rates across industries, so that a school is forced to pay a female schoolteacher the same as bank pays a male stockbroker — and conversely, should a factory then be forced to pay a male worker the same as a female GP?

Within workplaces, should employers be required to pay female employees more than their male counterparts doing the same work, to make up for their shorter overall time in the workforce?

All of these utopian solutions would require some kind of drastic, Soviet-style state compulsion and a massive reduction in individual liberty.

The reality is there are innate differences in interests that are always going to result in uneven distribution of men and women across industries.

Often raised in this context is the “Nordic gender equality paradox” — the more “equal” the society, the greater the tendency of men and women to gravitate towards traditional gender roles.

As University of Michigan economics professor Mark J Perry writes, there will always be a gender earnings gap “unless and until there are equal numbers of each gender working in the same occupations, for the same number of hours and with the same years of continuous experience”.

“The only way to close that gap is to get to a point where men and women are completely interchangeable in their family and work roles, and getting to that outcome is probably impossible,” he said.

“And (it’s) an outcome that even women apparently don’t want, given their current demonstrated preferences for career options, work hours, commute times and family responsibilities.”

Or as former UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher put it in 1975, “We are all unequal. No one, thank heavens, is like anyone else. We believe that everyone has the right to be unequal but to us every human being is equally important.”

frank.chung@news.com.au