Equal pay for women

OPINION: This issue has been around for what seems like forever, and don’t think it will be resolved quickly.  I see a new report had come in which has found about a 15% gap in pay which they cannot account for.  None of the standard reasons seems to apply.  Paula Bennett has been quick to arrive at the conclusion that this difference is simple male bias and she could well be right but it would be nice to have a better explanation than that so something might be done about it.

In many areas, the problem is relatively easy to solve if men and women are doing the same type of job and job sizing formulae can be readily applied.  If differences persist then at least the influence of the formulae can be investigated.  Either the formulae are flawed or they are being applied in a wrong or biased way.

I some areas it is almost mission impossible because the job area is dominated by women, so you have to find an external comparator which is more open to both men and women with no bias, eg. does being a carer equate in any way with some other job.  The legislation refers to this but there are real difficulties in finding valid comparators.

There are elements of personal choice involved which make comparisons difficult as well.  For most men, for example, career paths are simple, but for many women, they are complicated by having breaks when they are giving children or bringing up a family.  Different firms treat situations like this in different ways.

The intriguing suspect of the latest report for me is that it seems to apply to Government departments as much as to the private sector.  That really does surprise me as equal pay is a well-traversed issue in the public sector and I would have picked it to have mostly disappeared.

I think we are left with a situation where actual cases (what might be called lynchpin cases) need to be investigated in detail to find out what is going on and maybe someone will do that.  Acceptable cases would have to have a willing employer as a participant and should avoid cases where there are obvious reasons for differences.  It would be even better in a way if a larger package of cases were selected at random for analysis but I can see problems with getting employers on board if that it was done.  Getting inside the problem in these kinds of ways is far better than just stopping at doing general surveys.

Maybe at the end of the day, the residual explanation is bias but I find that hard to accept without some real evidence.  During my life, I have been an employer of both men and women and I have to stay that my preference is to for women and I have paid accordingly – they are generally smarter, more intuitive when it matters, better at dealing with people and harder workers.   And I have never differentiated pay on the basis of gender.

So, go figure!!

Bas Walker 

This is another of Bas’s posts on GrownUps.  Look out for his articles, containing his Beachside Ponderings.