By Jordan Holbrook: As readers of this blog, you have evolved to such a state that you no longer rely purely on your limbic system when interacting with the world, you have advanced to such a stage whereby you have grown a prefrontal cortex and developed higher thought. This has resulted in your understanding the so-called #PayGap is nonsense.
I have covered the #PayGap in some detail recently (here and here) and I have also modestly annihilated the concept here but, why should I be the one to deconstruct the myth of sex-based direct-discrimination in the Pay Cheque? Why should I act as the mouth piece of thought and reason when I can ascend myself to a higher being, a voice that is above all when it comes to statistics, data and numbers!?
Yes, that’s right, I am talking about the Home Office’s Office for National Statistics!
I wish to refer the reader to their latest document which discusses the Pay Gap, the document that all feminists run to when they want to prove this alleged discrimination, it’s the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings: 2017 provisional and 2016 revised results. In Section 7, we find Gender Pay Differences, this is what feminists cite when backing up their arguments.
In the first paragraph we find:
The gender pay gap is calculated as the difference between average hourly earnings (excluding overtime) of men and women as a proportion of average hourly earnings (excluding overtime) of men’s earnings. For example, a 4.0% gender pay gap denotes that women earn 4.0% less, on average, than men.
Hmm, I have noticed something odd. They do not refer to the Pay Gap as women and men being paid differently for the same work rather, men earn more money than women. They do this because “using hourly earnings better accounts for the fact that men work on average more hours per week than women”. According to my research, the average male work-week is 34% longer than the average female work-week (25.7 hours vs 34.6 hours). In fact, the document’s title refers to earnings rather than pay, maybe there’s a reason for that.
They also split the data into part-time and full-time and comment how men earn more in full-time work and women earn more in part-time work. They also note how both these pay gaps are closing down towards zero:
In April 2017, the gender pay gap (for median earnings) for full-time employees decreased to 9.1%, from 9.4% in 2016 (Figure 6). This is the lowest since the survey began in 1997, where the gender pay gap was 17.4%, although the gender pay gap has changed relatively little in recent years.
For part-time employees separately, we see a different pattern, whereby women are paid more per hour, on average than men. However, as with the full-time gender pay gap, this part-time gender pay gap moved closer to zero, from negative 6.1% in April 2016 to negative 5.1% in April 2017, as earnings for part-time men increased by more than for women.
Deciding that isn’t enough, the ONS then goes full nuclear on any idiot who thinks they can use this data to prove some kind of feminist talking point:
It should be noted that the gender pay gap figures presented in this bulletin do not show differences in rates of pay for comparable jobs, as they are affected by factors such as the proportion of men and women working part-time or in different occupations. For example, a higher proportion of women work in occupations such as administration and caring, which tend to offer lower salaries.
RIP all feminists.
The fun does not end there, the ONS discusses their methodology in greater detail in the document Guide to interpreting Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE) estimates, whence they say in Section 9, ‘How can the gender pay gap for all employees be higher than the gender pay gap for full-time employees?’:
The gender pay gap estimate is calculated as a differential proportion of two median estimates, the middle points of the data, one for female and one for males. The composition of the male and female employee workforces are quite different, with more women working part-time than men (42% compared with 12% respectively – source: Labour Force Survey, Quarter 2 (April to June) 2017, Table EMP04). Because the hourly earnings of part-time employees tend to be less, on average, than the earnings of full-time employees, this means women are more likely to receive lower hourly rates of pay. It’s this fact that helps explain why the gender pay gap for all full-time and part-time employees is greater than the gender pay gap for full-time employees only.
This should be obvious to all, if the median is the middle point of the data and, as 42% of female workers are part-time compared to 12% of male workers, this means the median female worker will be earning less than the median male worker. It’s so obvious it hurts that feminists can’t grasp this.
However, despite the fact this should be overwhelmingly obvious, the ONS know that there are certain people (typically feminists but they’re too PC to outright name them) who cannot grasp basic maths. So, to remedy this, the ONS says:
Consider the following fictitious example (shown in Table 2) representing the male and female samples collected on the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE).
The male sample contains more full-time employees, while the female sample contains more part-time employees. When considering the full-time employees only, the majority of the male sample is used, whilst typically only the higher earners of the female sample are considered. Due to this, when taking the medians, that is, the middle point of the selected sample, the gender pay gap is relatively small.
When all employees are considered, the typically lower-paid part-time workers are included, of which there are more lower-paid female workers than male. As a consequence, this causes the gap to increase (usually as a result of the female median decreasing).
Sweet Lord, I could not have put it better myself. Here is the fictitious example they use:
This is all too delicious.
And that is where the ONS leaves it, as shall I. So, I wish to actively state what the ONS is subtly implying: STOP USING THIS DATA TO TRY AND PROVE YOUR IDEOLOGICAL NONSENSE!!!
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