The Pink Tax and Women Drivers

On her Facebook thread, a friend of mine presented me with a few questions about the so-called 'pink tax' - that is, the extra amount she believes women are unfairly charged for certain products or services, especially products related to sanitary needs and hygiene. My friend thought the price differential 'unfair', and another contributor insisted that these things should be priced the same.

The problem with saying something complex like a price is 'unfair' is that prices are not just figures slapped on products - they are a very complex nexus of information signals that reveal what people perceive as valuable, and how (in)elastic they are in their demands.  

There is no systematic unfairness, unless you count 'unfairness' as being a world in which different people are price sensitive to different things. Both men and women prioritise different things in their spending patterns, and prices go up and down in accordance with those demands. Sellers will pitch their prices in relation to perceived demand and perceived elasticity. To that end, the products are not as similar as it may first appear, because they mean different things to different people.

Because value is subjective to the consumer, it is difficult to look at the system overall and exclaim it is unfair to one particular sex. Take smellies as a good example. I know very little about aftershaves and perfumes, but it is easy to tell from the range of products available that women value them more than men. There is a greater variety of women's clothes and women's bags for the same reason.

Consequently, just as one could frame the debate in terms of women paying more for similar smelly products, one could equally frame it in terms of men are getting less variety in their smelly purchasing options. But there's a good reason that neither sex minds this being the case. If men cared about how they smell as much as women, there would be as many aftershaves as there are perfumes, and aftershaves would be more expensive than they currently are. The people who lose out in this scenario are not just men or just women - they are men who are price insensitive but more discerning about the variety of products, and women who are price sensitive but less discerning about the variety of products.

Sellers are profit maximisers - they will try to get as much as possible for each and every product. Sell a plain rucksack and you might get £10 for it. Sell an otherwise identical rucksack with a picture of Spiderman on it and it may fetch £15-20. The reason is obvious: boys prefer a rucksack with Spiderman on it to a plain one. If there is a rucksack with a picture of Elsa from Frozen selling for less than the Spiderman rucksack, it is a signal that boys tend to care more about Spiderman rucksacks than girls do about Elsa rucksacks, even though the conceptual difference is negligible. Demands for price equivalence will only be realised if there is value equivalence - and when there is not, expect to see men and women paying different prices for very similar things based on how much they are willing to pay.

Ironically, the genuine cases of unfairness I've seen in the marketplace are when men and women should be paying different prices for similar things but are forced to pay the same price, thereby negating very important differences in the sexes. For example, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) once ruled that the long-established practice of setting insurance prices according to sex is illegal discrimination. The Court's decision forced members of the European Union to introduce a ban on sex-based pricing.

So, in basic terms, car insurers used to yield to market-based risk calculation (using a reliable tool called actuarial mathematics) and offer statistically safer drivers cheaper premiums (perfectly sensibly, as any sane person would agree). Then the EU decided that it's much better to ignore all this data and assent to a spurious anti-unfair-discrimination policy, while failing to see the irony that in penalising statistically safer people for purposes of parity they are unfairly discriminating against safer drivers.

This beyond absurd. The primary measure of unfair discrimination in actuarial analyses is not treating different people differently, it is treating different people the same. Women are statistically safer drivers than men, which means they are cheaper customers, which means to increase their premium to the same as men is to unfairly discriminate against women.

The reasons why women are safer drivers are well known. Women are, on average, less likely to have fast cars, they drive fewer miles, they drive slower, they take fewer risks, and they are less aggressive than men. Giving women a lower premium based on those facts amounts to a simple and rational statistical evaluation of risk.

The same is true of other considerations too - age, post code, miles per year, type of car, and so forth - each of these are important factors in risk evaluation, and the ECJ should leave well alone. The free market is the best tool for eradicating unfair discrimination in business, because pretty much any time a company decided to discriminate against women, black people, gay people, tall people, fat people, or whomever, they would pay for it with a reduction in profits*.

Of course, we know the probable motive in the ECJ's equalisation of the sexes - it is to guard against people with identical data having different premiums based solely on sex. But that misses the whole quintessence of how competition works in the free market. Suppose we have Jack and Jill, who are the same age, with the same car, same post code, and driving the same miles per year - the ECJ would have it that they should be given equal premiums because to do otherwise would be to discriminate on the only variable factor - sex.

But that is not what happens - while the data picks up facts like age, car type, post code, and miles per year, it doesn't account for those significant differences - speed of driving, risk-taking, aggression and other factors of mentality behind the wheel that make women more likely to be safer and have fewer accidents, and better candidates for cheaper premiums.

The ECJ is guarding against the general being applied to the particular - but this is part of what makes competitive business healthy. In a free market we can work under an assumption of cheaper insurance premiums for a safer driving record at the individual level anyway - so it's a law that only actually compounds what already happens.

But we can extend far beyond that too - competing firms can solicit new custom by offering deals to acquire that custom. This proves very effective in the insurance market: some providers specialise in good deals for modified cars (like my modified Subaru), some specialise in good deals for women, some specialise in good deals for the elderly, some for first time drivers, and so on.

Insurance companies have asymmetry of information when it comes to those vital premium-changers - they have transparency with data like age, post code, miles per year, type of car - but they don't have anything like the same transparency with things like speed of driving, risk-taking, aggression and other factors of mentality behind the wheel - which is where the actuary matters.

A company that's free to offer deals for women is acting on probability related to those invisible factors - but that also means women are free to look for insurers sensitive to such data, as are Subaru drivers, as are the elderly, and so forth. That's how beautifully the market for insurance rewards this innovation.

If women are consistently safer, then they are consistently on average cheaper customers, which rewards those companies that are prepared in response to lower the premium for women. But if the data is spurious and women are less consistently as safe as the premium indicates then those same companies will incur a loss and adjust their women-favoured premiums to accord with that. It's a hugely efficient system that the ECJ hasn't properly factored into its considerations.

On Looks, Height and Higher Wages

When watching the Cathy Newman interview with Jordan Peterson a while back, I recall a moment when it looked as though he was going to suggest to her that if she was much less attractive she probably wouldn't be sitting there on television interviewing him. He did, of course, stop well short of saying that, and it may be that I'm misinterpreting on his behalf. But I do recall a point in the interview when it came across my mind: whether Cathy Newman has ever consciously considered that the job she is doing is itself quite narrowly selected for in terms of physical appearance.

This is all based on well known correlations between positive characteristics, like beauty and height, and higher earnings. Last time I checked, attractive women earn on average about 5% more than less attractive women, and attractive men earn on average about 10% more than less attractive men (it may have changed slightly since then). This indicates that the less-attractive men are penalised more in the labour market than less-attractive women. When it comes to weight though, heavier women are penalised with lower wages whereas men not much so.

But what is the causality here: Do people earn more because they are more attractive, or is it positive qualities associated with attractiveness that make them more likely to be in higher paid jobs? It's just a hunch, but I feel fairly certain that in the vast majority of cases it is not the good looks that are making people do well in the labour market - it is much more likely to be the things associated with good looks that play the vital role in this success. 

 

For an analogous example, I remember reading in a social science journal about 10 years ago that while height is advantageous in the labour market, the people upon whom this advantage is conferred are not the tall in general, but more often those tall adults who were also tall in high school. People who were not that tall in high school, but who went on to be tall in adulthood, did less well on average than those who were also tall all the way through high school.  

 

Similarly, just as being a tall high school pupil engenders confidence and status, I think it is likely that on average more attractive workers are more likely to be healthier, more confident, have a wider social circle, be less insecure and be more outgoing. And if this was the case since their school years, it would be unsurprising that this plays out with higher wages later on, as better looking people have more confidence in looking for promotions and higher self esteem when it comes to demanding more pay.

I've also noticed that good looks appear to be more of a priority for employers in businesses where good looks matter more - especially in the service industry. For fairly obvious reasons, consumers are more likely to care about a good looking barmaid or shop assistant or waiter than they are a good looking bus driver or cleaner or financial adviser. Similarly, if all those positive qualities associated with attractiveness help in the labour market, then you would expect to see, on average, better looking people earning more across the board.

But by equal measure, with these determiners, you should also expect to see outliers, where many less attractive people are out-earning their competitors by having positive qualities associated with being the physical underdog - like tenacity, perseverance, diligence, and other efforts that rely less on natural qualities and more on hard work.

I must admit, though, I'm still stumped as to why less attractive men suffer more in the labour market than less attractive women, given the looks are purported to be a more important aspect of womanhood than they are manhood. And I can't find any studies that shed any light on this.

The only thing I can think might be driving this is not that being less attractive is any more important for males than for females, but perhaps that work is, in general, a more important factor in male status-mongering - and therefore more women that are disadvantaged by looks have opted out of the labour market altogether, skewing the statistics.

Another Cracking Policy That Will Do More Harm Than Good

We just recently learned that big business bosses will be forced to justify salaries under new government plans, which include sex pay gaps, top end salaries, and also parental leave policies - the whole shebang. Not only is this is a terrible idea because of the misunderstanding of the facts - it is a potentially damaging idea that will probably harm those it seeks to help.

What's behind the insistence that big companies are now mandated to calculate and publish their ‘pay gap stats’ is the spurious belief that there is an unfair pay gap between men and women (there isn't!) and that the firm's top earners are riding roughshod over the lower earners in the company (they are not!).

Not only have these politicians shown they don't have a very good eye for facts - what's more, even if it were true that there is an unfair sex pay gap or an unhealthy stratification, this policy is too low-resolution to get to the heart of it. Simply getting firms to publish their pay stats won't get to the crux of why, when there are differences, those differences exist. Only by comparing jobs like for like can this policy be illuminating - and this latest idea will not achieve such a thing.

A firm that publishes the mean and median salaries of the men and women in their workforce will omit many vital factors that determine pay, such as experience, qualifications, risk-taking, scalability, and several other minutia areas of the remit. A proposal that looks to redress what it thinks are illegitimate causes of a pay gap that are actually legitimate causes would do more harm than good. 

But that's not all of it - unfortunately, such an injudicious policy may well come with another unintended consequence - one that could actually disadvantage women in the workplace by skewing employer incentives to act against women.

A firm that is forced to demonstrate a 'fair' balance of sheet of equal pay when there is currently a 'fair' balance sheet of sometimes unequal pay is not going to help women, it will only harm both women and men, because some of the important factors that determined legitimate unequal pay (experience, risk, working patterns, qualifications, different priorities, etc) and some of things that determine what people value from a job (flexibility, shorter hours, career breaks, reduced responsibility, working from home) will be undermined.

It will be yet another example of a deleterious effect that comes when politicians stick their noses in where they do not belong.

The Feminists Do Women A Disservice Here - Failing To Understand Why There Are Not More Female CEOs

There has been a lot of hoo-ha in the past couple of days about the reasons leading companies have given for male dominance of boardrooms. Several article writers have gone to town on what they consider pathetic excuses for women's under-representation in the boardroom:

• “I don’t think women fit comfortably into the board environment” 

• “There aren’t that many women with the right credentials and depth of experience to sit on the board - the issues covered are extremely complex”

• “Most women don’t want the hassle or pressure of sitting on a board”

• “Shareholders just aren’t interested in the make-up of the board, so why should we be?”

• “My other board colleagues wouldn’t want to appoint a woman on our board”

• “All the ‘good’ women have already been snapped up”

• “We have one woman already on the board, so we are done - it is someone else’s turn”

• “There aren’t any vacancies at the moment - if there were I would think about appointing a woman”

• “We need to build the pipeline from the bottom - there just aren’t enough senior women in this sector”

Not only are most of the above dismal cop-outs, they fail to do any justice to what's really going on, and why there aren't more women in leading roles in FTSE 100 companies. Previously on here I've been through the reasons why the sex pay gap myth is one of the crassest examples of non-thinking currently going on in the debating sphere (see links at bottom of page) - but the reasons why there are not more women in top jobs in FTSE 100 companies is a bit more subtle, slightly more complex, and actually, in my view, more of a credit to women than the feminists realise.

To try to summarise it in a nutshell: the main reason there are not more women in top jobs is because, on average (and remember, we are always talking about on average here - there are always exceptions and outliers), women have better reasons than men for not wanting to be in those jobs. Those reasons are evolutionary, biological, sociological and cultural - and they are, in many cases, examples of where women have a better grasp of well-being and quality of life than men.

To see why, consider a typical man whose preoccupation is climbing the greasy pole of career success. His life consists of working 70-80 hours a week, under highly competitive and stressful conditions, which often involve ruthlessness and one-upmanship, and a narrow focus on a single pursuit. He may well make it to the top, but at what cost to other areas of his life - family, friends, emotional well-being, kindness, empathy and a generally balanced life?

And we all know what the primary phenomenon is that drives people to the top - the pursuit of status; it's the ultimate peacock's tail. Status-mongering is hard-wired into male evolution - for reproduction and survival. In the modern age, humans have developed a socio-cultural sophistication that enables them to be driven by things other than genetic biological stimulus - but status is here to stay, and probably always will be.

Status doesn't dominate your chances of passing on your genes as it once did in animal hierarchies, but it does play a key part in assortative mating. Because women generally desire socio-economically upwards pursuits in the men they wish to have children with, status is a much more important thing for men than it is for women, which is why men are generally far more competitive than women, and why this plays out in the workplace statistics.

In fact, someone (I forget who, possibly a character in a movie) made an interesting observation whilst standing by the Hudson River looking over at the Manhattan skyline - he said that pretty much the whole thing has been designed, bit by bit, by the driving force of the male pursuit of sex and genetic propagation: that it's one big agglomeration of peacocks' tails.

Men are generally more interested in status, and will regularly invest time and energy in pursuits that are traded off for many of life's other rich tapestries of experience. There is a lot more to this complex subject, from both sides (obviously!!) - but the myopic narrative peddled by feminists that women are so unfairly underrepresented in the workplace, and the blinkered attempts above from representatives of leading companies trying to have a stab at the matter, are both inadequate to the task of explaining this.

With a plot of normal distribution (shaped like a bell curve) the data points tend to be close to the mean - so for example, in human height, most adult humans are between 4ft 5 and 6ft 5. But not everyone is; some people are 6ft 8 or 6ft 9, and they are mostly men. In other words, if you met someone on the street who is 6ft 8, it is overwhelmingly probable that it's going to be a man.

Similarly, if you heard that someone had been arrested for road rage, it is overwhelmingly likely to be a man. The differences between men and women in terms of aggression is not as large as the difference between the number of men and the number of women who are likely to be in prison for a violent crime, because at the furthest extreme end, the majority of the most violent people in society are male.

Like the above examples, you are going to find that, on average, the outliers in terms of individuals pursuing a status-driven career to the top of a FTSE 100 company are mostly men. Women are, on average, less likely to be driven by status (and more power to them for seeing through the superficialities of status-mongering in my view), and are therefore less likely to be in the boardroom.

That may change - and boardrooms may benefit hugely from having far more female representatives - but I doubt it will change that much, because many smart people do not want to climb greasy poles, work 70-80 hour weeks, spend very little time with family and friends, and scale their career so far upwards that they end up sacrificing many of life's other rewarding pleasures. It is very likely the case that more of these smart people are women than men.

A close analogy may be in the school playground, where all the testosterone-filled lumps are trying to court the relatively empty prestige of being a star on the football field, while all the smart kids are sitting on the outskirts devouring calculus, chemistry and Cervantes.

Further reading on the fallacy of the so-called 'unfair' sex pay gap:

The Truth About Sex Pay Differences - Things Aren't As They Are Made Out To Be

Career & Maternity: When The Irresistible Force Meets The Immovable Object



Labour Hits Turbo On The Stupid-O-Meter

I've not held back on my criticisms of Labour's madness over the years - but this latest bout of intellectual and empirical insanity truly has to the worst idea they've ever had the gall to float in the public domain. In fact, in terms of political policy, I'm going out on a limb in saying that, from memory, it is probably the worst idea I've ever heard from politicians - equivalent of wanting to fine unicorns for stealing flowers from the bottom of the garden.

The latest hair-brained idea from Labour is to punish firms for not closing sex pay gaps. Apparently, under a Labour government, and driven by shadow equalities buffoon Dawn Butler, firms will have to prove they are taking action to close the pay gap or face a fine.

They will need lots of luck finding such a thing, because if reality ever does kick in they will discover that there is no sex pay gap. It is illegal to pay women less than men for doing the same job. The Equal Pay Act of 1970, the Sex Discrimination Act of 1975, and then later the further codified Equality Act of 2010 all protect workers from unfair discrimination if their remits are the same.

What does exist is an earnings gap - which is a statistical weighted average based on the life choices men and women make, and the numerous things that comprise the differences in terms of personalities, aspirations, wants and life choices. An earnings gap is precisely what you'd expect to see when men and women are free to make decisions that suit themselves and their families.  

So this is both a non-existent problem, and worse, a non-existent problem that even if it were a problem would not be the fault of employers, much less something for which they should be penalised. In what is turning into a very long list, this is surely the very worst example of half-witted politicians misdiagnosing a problem, and then positing a truly illiberal, wholly asinine solution to it.

 

 

Adding More Weight (Pun Intended) To The Sex Pay Gap Myth

Regular readers of economics will know that despite common myths to the contrary, the reality is there isn't much of an unfair pay gap between sexes. As service-based industry has emerged more prominently, coupled with increased technology that make domestic jobs less time-consuming, and women's lib, the wage gap that used to exist has narrowed so much that it has equalised. In fact, if you measure just male and females in their 20s and 30s, females earn slightly more. Obviously this tails off in the late 30s and 40s as motherhood becomes the primary driving force in the re-introduction of a wage gap - but it's not to do with discrimination, it is to do with biology and life choices.

There's an interesting paper from health economist Heather Brown who observes that single women with a higher BMI (body mass index) tend to earn higher wages than similar women with a lower BMI. Married men also have a wage rate that is positively related to their BMI - the more weight they carry the higher their wages tend to be. The opposite is true for single men and married women - there is a negative correlation between their age rate and BMI - the more weight they carry the lower their wages tend to be.

Why is this? The most likely reason is that being overweight doesn't disadvantage men in the market for marriage to anything like the same extent that it disadvantages women - but it does encourage women to invest more in their careers to compensate for the disadvantage in the marriage market. Or to put it another way, very attractive slimmer women have a much higher likelihood of marrying financially well off men than overweight women, which means according to Heather Brown's studies they do not have quite such high incentives to invest in their careers as women who are disadvantaged in the marriage market.

Studies by Pierre-Andre Chiappori, Sonia Orefice ad Climent Quintana-Domeque also show that as a result of this, overweight women are more likely to marry low-income men. If single, heavy men know that a) they are less likely to marry, and b) if they do marry they are more likely to marry a low-income man, it makes sense that there would be a pattern whereby heavier women invest more in their careers.

The flip side of the coin, however, is that all the slim, attractive women under-investing in their careers because of expectation of marrying higher-income men may be affecting the 'pay gap' statistics - but in a way that makes the lack of a sex pay gap even more substantiated. That is to say, not only is it not the case that there is no sex pay gap due to discriminatory forces, it may well be the case that women in their 20s and 30s are earning slightly more than men even though a significant number of them (those with a lower BMI) are under-investing in their careers due to future marital expectations.

Career & Maternity: When The Irresistible Force Meets The Immovable Object

On Thursday in this Blog post I set about dispelling one or two myths about sex pay differences. It was a popular blog post, generating about seven times as many hits as an average blog post of mine, but it did come with a bit of heat as well as light, mainly to do with the issue regarding how prospective employers may sometimes discriminate against women in their thirties to avoid taking on someone who might soon become pregnant and need maternity leave.

I explained in a subsequent debate that while it is illogical for employers to discriminate due to sex, there are conditions under which they might be driven to discriminate due to maternity. A critic thought that inconsistent, but alas, there is no inconsistency - this only goes to show a misunderstanding of the important difference between sex discrimination and maternity discrimination. Fairly obviously it is not in the interests of an employer to discriminate based on things like sex skin colour, sexuality, and so forth, but it can be in their interests to discriminate when other factors, like maternity, come into it.

To give you an illustration that makes the point even clearer - an employer might not be discriminatory at all when it comes to young black men but he might choose not to employ a particular young black man because he happened to have four different children by four different women. The same is true in the case of women - an employer may not have any reason to be biased against women in general, but he may have a reason to be biased against women with a high probability of being pregnant soon.

The difference between the first case and the second is that in the case of the black man he could have changed the fact that he was irresponsible enough to father four kids by four different women, whereas a woman who soon wants to be a parent can't change the fact that biological evolution has conditioned that only women have babies.

So, the upshot is this; in life we have this issue to contend with - the immovable force of female biology coming up against the irresistible force of businesses needing to make decisions that are best for their firm's survival, and that in life this sometimes causes a conflict of interest. Despite this, one of the key basics of economics is that sometimes problems that look like they need solutions are in fact non-problems that just describe different people wanting different things or making different life decisions.

What I really want to get across here is that I'm always happy to hear people's views on problems in society, and I am open to hearing solutions - but a lot of the time people want to tell us problems and not attempt to offer solutions. Sometimes it's clear to me that they are non-problems, sometimes they are small problems with no realistic solutions, and sometimes there may well be solutions to make things better - but either way, my interest in these so-called problems dwindles if no one wants to talk about solutions.

Despite some impassioned reactions to my blog, anyone who thinks the maternity pay gap/discrimination situation is a problem that needs changing must at the very least tell us how they think things should be changed, and explain why it's practical - not just complain about the situation with no recourse to resolve it. It's no use saying things are wrong without first establishing that there are things that can be done that actually will help the situation without harming others, and also that there are actually realistic solutions to any problems identified.

The 'without harming others' point is so essential and so often missed - you cannot artificially put things in place to protect one group in the employment market without artificially hindering another group at the same time. For example, there is another group in particular that gets penalised when would-be mothers get artificially protected - that group is the women that don't want any children but may miss out through discrimination to account for all the women that do. As things stand if you're a 33 year old woman that doesn't want kids, you are highly unlikely to require a career break, which means there's no reason for you to be discriminated against. But your prospective employer won't know that, so he or she is likely to believe you have a high probability of being a mother, and may act accordingly.

What's the solution then? The truth is, I don't think there is one (except through some kind of binding contract - of which more in a moment), and I've not heard any single detractor suggest a solution, they've been too busy trying to convince me that there is a problem but offering nothing further.

Control is beyond your control

There are two main reasons that an economy is impossible to command efficiently from on high. The first reason is that the entire nexus of economic activity is just too complex and too diverse for any politician to get a handle on. The second reason is that human beings, even when acting rationally, are still very difficult to map to a final theory of predictable behaviour. Without having full knowledge of the entirety of society and every detail, even a world in which every human acted rationally for the majority of the time would still leave us unable to arrive at a gland slam model on which to base any kind of sovereignty.

Humans are often selfish but they will also act selflessly, particularly when there are selfish gains, but also for sporadic acts of kindness at a cost to themselves. They often have strong moral convictions in one area of life (it is wrong to avoid taxes) but relax their moral convictions in other areas of life (like being willing to cheat on a partner). They will often behave one way when caught up in a group collective, but depart considerably from such behaviour at an individual or familial level. They will be quite prudent in spending money on things they need, but in times when status-mongering or social gain is in front of them they will spend quite recklessly. The upshot is, let humans loose in society and they become a mess of contradictions and opposites.

One relatively small element of this complex society is each individual woman's life choices. Some women will choose an uninterrupted career over motherhood; some will choose motherhood over any kind of career; some will choose motherhood and an interrupted career; and even on top of well-intentioned plans some women will fall pregnant unexpectedly when they didn't plan to, whereas others will plan to fall pregnant and find it never happens.

Society isn't a giant piece of clay that can be moulded exactly as a potter wants it to be - it is a multi-faceted network of activity in which millions of people, including business owners (who themselves have a family and staff to think about), have to make local decisions most conducive to their own survival and well-being.

Consequently, then, legislation that seeks to protect some citizens in the free market against the free choices of other citizens in the free market only usually occurs by harming the latter group - most of whom are individuals trying to make the decisions they can to secure the solvency of their business and the jobs of that business's employees.

Although all I've said favours the contrary to what I'm now going to say, if you have got this far and you still are insisting that some kind of solution be put in place, then all I can say is, when you get a situation like this, where there is a clear distinction between maternity discrimination and sex discrimination, the most obvious solution is some kind of binding contract. After all, let's not forget, an agreement between an employer and an employee is already a binding contract, so if you really want to ensure the artificial protection of one group in society then a binding contract could be the only answer that can be entertained, short of becoming a nation that can arrest people for thought crimes.

The advantage of a contract is most conferred on all the women who don't want kids but who may be treated as they do, but it would also bring transparency to thousands of employment contacts that looked to protect women who didn't yet want kinds and employers who feared they might. If you think it's a problem that requires an interventionist solution (and personally I don't) then that might be your best solution.  And if it isn't you're perfectly welcome to comment below and suggest your own solution. But for goodness' sake, please do give up this habit of telling us all about the problems without first working out the following:

A) Whether they are actually problems or just facts about differences in life.

B) Whether, if they are actually problems, they are problems that can be solved without making the situation worse, or another group equally worse off.

C) What, if they are actually problems that can be solved without making the situation worse, or making another group equally worse off, you are proposing as a solution.

Then, and only then, does this become a proper debate that sheds light instead of heat.

The Truth About Pay Differences Between The Sexes - Things Aren't As They Are Made Out To Be

David Cameron wants to force companies with over 250 employees to disclose sexes pay gaps. He's doing this because he has swallowed the ubiquitous myth that women are systematically unfairly discriminated against in the workplace. 

The reality is, there isn't much of an unfair pay gap between sexes, despite common myths to the contrary - although there used to be, but for good reason. Britain has changed a lot in the past few decades, from a manufacturing-based economy to a service-based one. When physical labour was the driving force in the economy, male labour was valued higher, so it was easily understandable why there was a sexes pay gap.  

However, as service-based industry has emerged more prominently, coupled with increased technology that make domestic jobs less time-consuming, and women's lib, the wage gap has narrowed so much that it has equalised. In fact, if you measure just male and females in their 20s and 30s, females earn slightly more. Obviously this tails off in the late 30s and 40s as motherhood becomes the primary driving force in the re-introduction of a wage gap - but it's not to do with discrimination, it is to do with biology and life choices.

An easy way to tell the public that there is a discriminatory sex pay gap is to distort the picture by including the maternity/child-raising years in the overall figures. The pay gap over their careers factors in women leaving work to have children, and taking part-time jobs in motherhood. This skewed reality is a bit like a school publishing pupils' attendance records, including the summer holiday in their statistics, and then claiming pupils are spending lots of weeks not attending school. To get a fair statistic on school attendance you must obviously only include the weeks when pupils are due to be in school. Similarly, to get a proper reflection of sexes pay, you must focus on the comparison when both men and women are pursuing careers with both eyes on the job market. That's why, when this is done, the years between ages 22 to 39 show women earning slightly more than men. From the ONS report:

"Hourly earnings figures reveal that, in April 2014, women working for more than 30 hours a week were actually paid 1.1% more than men in the 22 to 29 age bracket and, for the first time were also paid more in the 30 to 39 age bracket. So women in full-time work aged between 22 and 39 are now, on average, earning 1.1% more than their male counterparts."

It certainly is the case that people's differences do contribute to different decisions having to be made in society that will affect their career and job prospects. But what we mustn't let people get away with is the idea that businesses systematically discriminate unfairly at will. Let me explain why that notion is wrong.

When Minister for Women and Equalities Nicky Morgan says "Businesses need to value diversity in their workforce and pay attention to the role of women in their organisations.” - she is being disingenuous in trying to claim to be on the side of women by painting a slightly false picture of the extent to which businesses do value both sexes equally. For fairly obvious reasons employers would not discriminate against women because it wouldn’t be in their interest to do so.

While there'll never be a completely fair market, nor a perfect solution to the dual desire of motherhood and optimal career pursuits, it's logical that businesses won't discriminate against women for the sake of it because if they do they will lower the pool of quality, and their profits too. Suppose there are two free schools - one set up by Jack and one by Jill - and 40 teachers for hire (20 women and 20 men). Jack is a misogynist and Jill isn't, so Jack discriminates against the women. Who is likely to have the better staff list of teachers? Clearly it's Jill. Jill looked to hire the best staff out of a male & female pool; Jack looked to hire more men, meaning he increased his chances of picking sex over quality. This plays out all through the market. A restaurant with a sign saying "No women" (pretend it's legal) would lose out on half the population's custom, and more once you factor in all the males that would go somewhere else because of it. Unfair discrimination is bad for business, and any half shrewd business person knows this, so would be a fool to discriminate.

There are other wage differentials to note, but they are driven by other factors, namely the differential in abilities and in preferences. Men and women are different in a number of ways - and it's no bad thing that those differences are reflected in market patterns. There are substantially fewer female bricklayers or garage mechanics than there are males, just as there are substantially fewer male nurses and primary school teachers than females. The reasons are primarily down to abilities and in preferences, not systematic discrimination.

The same is true of other work factors - risky work, manual work, driving work, outdoor work, long shifts and unsocial hours - it's not that there are no women in these roles, it is simply that males outnumber them, again due to abilities and preferences. Equally, if you focused on the skills and preferences for, say, social care, bookkeeping, personnel officers and child-care workers you'd see a similar pattern in the other direction, with women outnumbering men in those roles. Naturally, the labour value of all these jobs is dictated by all the above factors and more.

Moreover, generally you'll find two other key reasons why men earn more on average than women do. One is that women tend to be less competitive than men, because they do not have he same biological and socio-cultural needs to be as concerned about status as men do. The other reason is that men are, on average, more likely to put their skills towards more scalable earnings (inventing, engineering, technological advances, etc) - because men are much more geared towards working with things, whereas women are more likely to work with people (as ever, these are all on average, there are always many exceptions, of course).

The upshot is, yes, I grant you, evolution has made females prisoner of their biology in respect of child-bearing - but nevertheless having children does affect women's roles and pay, which is why, as women are having children later, there is no evidential pay gap between women and men in the first two decades of their working lives, but an evident one as women go into their forties, and often work less, or take on lower paid roles for parental flexibility.

Generally, discriminating harms discriminators too - and while some people are arguing that the sex make-up engenders discrimination, the reality is that sex make-up engenders outcomes that in most cases (most, but not all) aren't discriminatory at the root.