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Lies, Damned Lies and

Monday, 11th February 2008

Misleading Parliament. One of the things I'm a teenie little bit obsessed about is the way in which the gender pay gap is reported in this country.There's the facts and then there's what people actually say.
Take this, from a Parliamentary committee, a report released over the weekend.

The Women and Work Commission, set up in July 2004, had a very broad remit to examine all the causes of the continuing gender pay gap in the UK (at that time, a gap in mean hourly earnings between men and women of 18% among full-time workers and 40% among those working part-time).

That's the opening sentence of their introduction. And it's wrong. They are clearly stating that there is a 40% difference between the wages earned by women working part time and men working part time. This isn't true, the number is actually 11% for the private sector. (You can check this here if you are so minded.) One of the groups who gave evidence to the committee was the Fawcett Society and in their online information they put it this way:

The hourly pay gap between women and men stands at 18.4% (compared to 29% in 1975). And for parttime work, the gap has hardly changed at all over the past 30 years – it was 42% in 1975 and it’s 40% now.

This is also incorrect. Here's how it was originally put by the Equal Opportunities Commission.

Part-time women earned £8.68 on average, and comparing this figure with men’s average full-time earnings of £14.08 gives a part-time gender pay gap of 38.4%.

You see how it has changed there? The original comparison is between part time female wages and full time male wages, and called the part time pay gap. Why their comparison was not between part time female and full time female wages, or between part time female and part time male, well, you've got to think that it was deliberate obfuscation, don't you?

For the point is that we have both a part time pay gap (as the Women at Work Commission report itself noted, it costs more to employ part timers than to employ full timers, so there is naturally a difference in the wages offered per hour) and we also have a gender pay gap. Conflating the two isn't helpful.

But much more importantly the way it was phrased has led to this confusion: we've now got the Parliamentary Committee report stating something which is clearly untrue, and yet it is said report that any future legislation is likely to build upon. So whatever we do decide to do about it all will be a castle built upon sand, for if we don't start with the truth of the matter then we're never going to be able to solve it, are we?

Quite how we solve this all is really rather another matter.