It is child-rearing, not sexism, that explains the pay gap between men and women

Eunice

the hatred towards women in this article is unbeleivable, typical of a man to use statistics havent u heard statistics lie, I bet if they said men were earning less the story would be different yes?

Hereford

Wow Rod. I can't wait for the leftists to hear about this article and start to comment. It will be wonderful reading. Almost as entertaining as your article, but nowhere near as logical or clear thinking I'll bet.

A. MacAulay

Dear Eunice, statistics do not lie, but their interpretation is open to ideological, political, even unconscious bias. Rod Liddle has used his polemical style to point out that there are other possible interpretations, based on a closer inspection of the categories within the stat.

Further, Ms. Harman misuses the numbers to promote her issue-taking with males generated by her feelings of inadequacy which she projects on to womankind at large. In short, a case of good old Freudian, well sublimated penis envy.

"Old Siggi Freud knew
what makes little girls green.
The wonderful appendage
makes them want to dance and scream.
Its not the only thing
that makes the ladies fraught,
for we also have the power
to think a rational thought."

Women who do not feel that they are genitally "challenged" may take on the option mother nature has made available to them to have children, and if the State does not honour this with consequent support, then it must allow men to earn enough money to support a family.

rod liddle

I don't hate women, Eunice. I like them a lot, especially the very pretty ones.

Mr Green

Eunice:
It's simply a case of comparing like for like.
And yes - the article would be different if the subject header was different!

itstrueekse

Hairperson is a politician, if you hadn't noticed. Facts are therefore of no consequence to her. She is punting herself as the next Labour leader, God forgive her misplaced ambitions.
This is her chosen platform, her opposition will (hopefully) choose more substantial issues.

Tom Callaghan

Eunice, the correct spelling is wimmin, surely?

David Short

Eunice's two sentence contribution shows that she cannot spell, cannot punctuate, and cannot construct a logical question or a grammatical sentence.

If she is 'underpaid', we know the reason why.

Roger Mortimer-Smith

"Typical of a man to use statistics"?!?

Perhaps the single most anti-feminist statement I have ever heard.

Fergus Pickering

Well of ourse. Excellent article. IF my beloved daughter and her estimable partner have children (as I sincerely hope theydo) then daughter will stay at home and look after them because any other arrangement would be over her dead body. Actually partner quite fancies the househusband role but she's having none of it. He will go out to work and bring home the money, thank you very much. That is what men DO. And theerfore... But hell, I don't haveto spell it out. Harriet, of course, being filthy rich, knows nothing of the lives of 'ordinary' people, silly moo tat she is. Ogh, and in my pinion, bringing up children whacks working. I should know. I did it. No effing contest.

john j jones

Eunice, sweetie, you seem to be a little over emotional. Just because you do not like the statistics it does not mean they are incorrect. Are you suggesting men rely on the beastly trick of using facts rather than 'intuition' or 'emotions'?

Of course a clever little thing, that you no doubt are, should be able pop along to the national statisitcs website and check for yourself.

Not Even Likely

Thomas Sowell in the US makes this same point. For single women there is no gap. It is the decision to have children that interrupts the wage-earning-pension-earning process. It's foolish for anyone (most especially for a woman) to insist that it is anything else. That said, it seems unfair to insist that women choose between continuing the human race and having a pension for their old age. Yet large numbers of women make exactly that choice. A few will be able to rely on their husbands in their older years. But many more will be divorced by the time they retire. More still are not able to rely on their husbands/partners when the children are small, let alone in their old age.

It seems like we are forced to choose between two falsehoods. Either the ultra feminist Harriet Harmon one that says social equality still eludes women in the West - or the other one that says motherhood is not useful and necessary work that nevertheless interferes on a practical level with a woman's wage and pension prospects.

J C Baker

Why doesn't Mad Hattie simply introduce a law whereby women are paid 25% more than men? It would be no dafter or more unethical than most of her legislation to date, and would save a lot of time wasted in futile arguments.

Laura

The sad truth is that anyone who expresses this view is leapt upon by most of the media class as 'mad' - yet the opposite is true.

It is pure common sense. Melanie Phillips has been saying the same thing for years and is duly dubbed 'Mad' Mel by the Loony Left, yet when you look at the hundreds who post on this site and on the Mail, it's proof she's one of the few sane journalists we have in this country.

Here she is saying it again this week:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1173775/MELANIE-PHILLIPS-Labour-blasting-Britain-dark-ages.html

Arabella

Decent, modern, educated gentlemen would not share your opinion.
You obviously don't advocate for meritocracy. What a shameful, archaeic view.

Arabella

@ A. McAuley

This article is compensating for something. I wonder what that could be?

Paula

Silly me. There I was thinking that a man and woman decided to have a baby not just the woman.

Men should be offered the chance to take the year off so that a couple can decide who is going to be left at home holding the baby whilst the other one can continue up the career ladder

Vic

Must say, the comments are more amusing than the article, which is, like many articles of this nature, peculiarly selective in its conclusions.

It is heartening to learn that women without kids do, at least in the UK, earn as well as men.

However, Mr Liddle carefully ignores (while slamming Ms Harman's proposals, possibly because they are far short of the necessary intellectual and sociological honesty demanded of leaders, but that is not obvious from this article), is the fact that women who 'choose' to have babies lose out on income, computed with a lifetime earnings comparison against men. He concludes that it is because they 'work fewer hours...less long-term commitment to the job... and... therefore are less hardworking'.

What an extraordinary and convenient conclusion. Also rather stupid, no less than Ms Harman's proposals, sadly. But then, Mr Liddle has no position of responsibility (not surprising, given his obvious intellectual strengths) nor one of accountability, so he is free to say what he pleases.

Perhaps society (not individual employers, necessarily, nor the State, necessarily, for neither is exactly equated to Society as a whole) needs to find a way to 'pay' women to have babies, because there are only two alternatives. 1. that men have babies as well (a bit difficult, especially in light of Mr MacAulay's observation) or 2. that humans stop having babies at all. The second, too, while perhaps not unwelcome to someone of Mr Liddle's persuasion, is not likely to bring about a win-win situation for humankind.

But I am sure that Mr Liddle will, in a future outpouring, come up with a practical solution that will benefit all, instead of merely complaining about someone else's hare-brained ideas.

Merlyn

Extraordinary misogyny by Rod especially liking the very pretty ones, and accusations of penis envy by A. MacAulay. I would say that men secretly envy the ability to create children. That is their inadequacy. Our society has pressured women like Harriet Harman into becoming men through lack of respect/ or fear of them [and witch hunts]through the ages. If at any time in Earth's history we needed the feminine perspective of intuition [ it would be now. Look at the mess men have made, endless wars, nuclear weapons,economic incompetence, ecological disasters to name but a few. These are "man" made and may have brought us to the end times.I say Joanna Lumley for P.M...and men better jump to attention or do better.

Peebz

love the idea that "it is women's decision to have children" ... I always thought that men had something to do wth the decision and the process, yet it is women who are disadvantaged afterwards with a rediculous notion that they 'should' stay at home to look after the child... and don't give me any of that bull about natural order of things or worse still any cr*p about attachment theory.
Men are also disadvantaged in that if they wish to stay at home to look after baby then they get 2 weeks paternity leave only.
As for statistics not lying... I believe there is a well know saying that was attributed to Benjamin Disraeli, something about "lies, damn lies and statistics"
Our society is patriarchal in its construction, this has meant the subjugation of women for centuries, women should be paid the same wage for doing the same job, the legislation for this was passed in 1970! if companies are still flouting the law nearly 40 years on they should be made to make things transparent, if they are not practicing sex discrimination they they have nothing to worry about, do they?

Arabella

An all round A realistic, feminist perspective on strategic studies. Well said Merlyn.

rod liddle

Merlyn - I was joking about the pretty ones. I would have thought, as a wizard, you might have worked that out.

Vic - we have to live in the real world. If a woman takes a year out of work then she is bound to fall a little behind the progress of those who do not, men or women, even though her job will be kept open for her.
My solution? Well, I think that there should be absolutely equality of "parenting allowance", which would at least level the playing field. But even then, in the end, many more women than men will find the pull of child-rearing more compelling than the pull of their careers, and that's down to basic biology. That's just a guess, of course.

Merlyn

Rod, unfortunately that joke has gone too far for too long by too many men.
Its the grandmother wisdom of all the ancient tribes that was respected.
These days grandmothers are put out to pasture in some home by the Brits.
We need a bit more of the feminine co-operative culture and less of the masculine competitive/combative culture, before its too late.

Sea Rafique

I cannot believe Rod Liddle had the nerve to publish this crap. If women did not CHOOSE to have children, than where would the next generation of workers come from. Whoops sorry was that immigration - more problems there mate!

Peter Hood

Eunice, employing the argumentum ad hominem will not suffice, although this has for sure typified British politics for quite sometime now.

If you want to be heard you must demonstrate the truth of your remarks, or you will attract fire.

Peter Hood

'Grandmother' wisdom? Please spare us the idealised, soft lens, filtered new age psychobabble. Knowledge is accumulated over time by *people*, not by repeating myths, although 'Merlin' could always show us some form of proof to substantiate its claims.

Peter Hood

Sea Rafique, are you telling me that women are compelled to have children? I have a friend with a £50,000 salary, and she chose not to have children. Are other women enslaved by their reproductive organs? If you argue in favour of this line of reasoning you fortify chauvinism. YMLT think this over.

A.F.

Wombs will be transplanted to men,problem solved.

Mike

Don't you mean Harperoffspring, lest the syllable "son" cause offence to the excessively sensitve. Will the legislation permit the prosecution of the NHS because the majority of nurses are women?

Chip Sviokla

I do appreciate how those disparaging statistics only do so in the case of Mr. Liddle. Harman's statistics about pay gap? Those are Gospel not to be challenged. Of course the irony is clearly Harman is the one twisting the statistics to "prove" a point...Harman's use of the alleged pay gap stats without the context of hours worked is EXACTLY what was in mind when statistics were famously denigrated as lies.

Not Even Likely

I would agree that women are now largely equal with men in the workplace, at least where children are not involved. I would also agree that there are many who ascribe to an unfair ultra-militant feminism and there are many who ascribe to false notions of an idealized past where women's wisdom was respected. (Unfortunately, that has not occured at any time in recorded history, so there is clearly no tradition of it prior to recorded history.)

However, it is false and foolish and dangerous to pretend that raising children is not valuable and necessary work, and that it is all right to continue in a system that penalizes women who do it.

Merlyn

"there are many who ascribe to false notions of an idealized past where women's wisdom was respected. (Unfortunately, that has not occured at any time in recorded history, so there is clearly no tradition of it prior to recorded history.)
Well actually it was, in American Indian culture and Egypt, before we had monotheism and a male God with his male priests who could not cope with the feminine unseen wisdom -that is available to anyone who is willing enough to let go of their self importance and say " I don't know how to do this, show me".
These male priests wanted power/authority over all of us, so they took away any vestige of the natural innate ability of wisdom that the feminine had by being superior and terrorizing, ostracizing and then murdering any women who were unwise enough to openly display their natural wisdom.
Men are terrified of it. But if we go on as we have done suppressing this we will be sure to destroy ourselves with the masculine drive to power.

dave strange

brave man all the harpies will be giving you hell, i bet you had a few stiffeners before writing that. and had second thoughts when you pressed send.
Although your a sexist pig i must say from my experience your right. I work in an industry thats dominated by women running successful companies in positions of power. But they are all single and ball brakers(i'll leave a pseudenom). Whereas my wife who made the decision for the two of us to reproduce, and is equally driven and a ball braker decided to prioritise her family first.
Harpie harman is not a We when she is talking for women but her version of women, or at least all the ones most men know. Not the crew cut moustachiod ones she communes with.

paul gilboy

reading the comments starting to fly in your best bet is book that month in tijuana you promised yourself

Jez

Been thinking.

There's a difference between a girl/women not been able to do something and not wanting to do something.

Just the same as me and other UK site personel not really embracing the enthusiasm the government has for us all to lose our livelyhoods on building projects and jump into the sectors that are expanding;

KFC, Dominoes, Tesco etc etc.

Any women could actually do anything a man could workwise i reckon.

Lever-points. Simple solutions to moving larger objects. That's the key. H&S also; there is a (sometimes difficult) rule that no one should lift anything above 20kg. If you are to, then you need to get help/have adequate contingencies to safely move the load.

If girls were to move a little more into the construction / machine industry sector (if one survives) then they could in theory move through the ranks easier. Maybe even have kids in the interim of site bod to management.. maybe.

It's the data juggling pen-pushers that want to get paid less. Beedin' layabouts.

;))

A. MacAulay

Merlyn, you're wonderful! Even being locked up in block of ice for a couple of millenia by that ball buster, Morgan le Fay hasn't taught you that there's no fool like an old fool.

Here's the antedote to your 70's, Atlantis style twaddle. Go buy as many womens magazines as you can find, categorise the article content into themes, and ask yourself if these themes, if pursued, would make our world a better place.

Arabella, I'm compensating for my deep disgust and dislike of social engineering through the passing of idiotic laws which will only further the muddling of the already muddled, by getting a wee bit angry, which I sublimate with irony. If irony is foreign to you then stick to ironing. Your girl friends will take you for an over-achiever when they see your husbands smooth white shirts.

Merlyn

A.MacCaulay, agreed most women's magazines are pretty inane. By the same token, most men's magazines are are sexist, offensive, and inane. Although in both you might stumble upon the occasional intelligent article.In fact our whole media is pretty dumbing down.
What you are doing is just patronizing the female sex. I am talking about the feminine principle, which has been lost to us all and desperately needs to come back before we destroy ourselves with an overdose of the masculine principle i.e.greed,competitiveness and self importance as opposed to genuine service, co-operation and receptivity.
Women's inferiority is bred into them from childhood, as it has been done through the ages. But take one look at the "statistics" of girls achievements at school as opposed to the boys and you will see the rudiments of that natural intelligence that we quickly stamp out through dumbing them down to think that they are only here to please men.
Another "statistic" is that more women seek divorce than men.
I work in adult education. I have 3 times more females than males in attendance.
It is not about pushing women into male roles, its about reminding them and the males of their innate gifts and talents before they went into the machinery of commerce.
As far as being frozen in ice for a couple of millenia, I am pleased to say I am thawing out nicely and live in hope that all mankind releases its old vengeances, put down their weapons and agree to differ.
As the French say, vive la différence.

Arabella

@ A.MacAuley:

As I am British I wholeheartedly understand irony, and as a student, I iron very little of my own and nothing of anybody elses. I was merely insinuating that your views were archaeic...

and that you may have recently purchased a sportscar.

I do apologise if I cannot identify with your views but I am young and very few gentlemen my age harbour the same thoughts. But then again, perhaps they dare not in my company.

charles

Excellent piece Rod.

I would merely point out that the misandric Harman has been stirring up hatred towards men for almost two decades now.

She comes up with phony figures in order to demonise men by suggesting that they are cheating women in some way. Millions of women are outraged because they think that they are being cheated - and so they vote for Harman.

It's the oldest trick in the book.

Demonise some group. Claim that you will tackle the problems that they cause. And watch the votes flow in.

A. MacAulay

Arabella, just in case you are studying Germanisitik, you can fill in the rest of this quote from Michael Graeter yourself.
"Porsche? Ich brauche keinen Porsche,..........."

My views may be archaic but not anachronistic. Test the true nature of your young gentlemen by offering to iron their shirts. No man with any self respect lets a woman iron his shirts.

Jez

Arabella;

I'd just like to tell you how genuinely relieved i am that a young, well educated person is actually reading and contributing to something other than The Guardian.

(i don't mean that as an insult to any hypersensitive Guardian huggers out there)

I think a more balanced / less inflammatory approach to 'Random Harriet' can be found in The Sunday Times today;

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/minette_marrin/article6211396.ece

"The Blair Babes are a constant shock to the self-esteem of any sensible woman. When one of them comes on the Today programme, twittering and wittering like a flustered schoolgirl, unable to answer a hard question but equally unable to deflect it with any skill, merely gabbling irrelevantly another text that teacher taught her, my heart sinks."

MM ends on this;

"I don’t need a white woman to represent my views and wishes, even though I am a white woman. I need an intelligent, responsible person of any colour or sex, someone of experience and broad understanding."

I don't think anyone, anywhere can disagree with that;

The right person for the right job, regardless.

Far-Left Socialism (from a prejudicial viewpoint by me) seems to grab something, slowing squeeze the life out of it (for about a decade or so) then leave whatever it's buggered up, crumpled dead on the floor.

It shrugs it's shoulders, re-invents itself and then moves onto a new victim to wipe-out.

Hasn't the Far-Left.. sorry 'the Liberal Left' (or ‘NuLab’ maybe?) as they're known now, had enough examples of total & utter failure to bounce off this past hundred years, for them to hang up their Cuba t-shirts and get a real job? (crunch permitting that is)

As a compliment Arabella, you seem to have certainly got a few of the Colonel Blimp's here rattled.

:)))

Juana la loca

Even when I try to read this with an open mind he loses me, the final statement says it all though...

"the reason women are paid less than men is precisely because, on average, they do work fewer hours, they do show less long-term commitment to the job, and they therefore are less hard-working than their male counterparts, on average"

He needn't have bothered trying to force this argument, who is paying this guy to publish his babble? and why? What does this say about "the Spectator"?...

Arabella

I do not study German, and understandably he revels in life, as does every other happy person.

Seeing myself equal to that of a man in a busines environment has not yet proven a bad thing.

Thank you for the Gandalf-esque wisdom. There will always be competition between the sexes, but argument this is about equality and fairness to stakeholders.

Arabella

P.S. Hat-hair Harman doesn't need to tell women there is pay inequality, this has been going on for years and as far as I am concerned, new labour has had twelve years rectify it.

Stewart Mackay

Dear A. MacAulay

I agree that if woman are to have children then men have to earn a wage that enalbes them to suport a family.

The leftist would not understand this or simply chooe to ignore it.

Ed

I'm a 27 year old male, and my partner is 29. She earns more money than I do in her chosen career, she is bloody brilliant at her job and should be able to think about having a child without the knowledge that she will take twelve months maternity leave, and arrive back a step down the career ladder.

Therefore, make it easy for us by granting men equal paternity rights. I'd be happy to stay home and do the nappy changing, but currently that option is economic suicide.

But then the Labour Party is too dogmatic and ideological to acknowledge that there is an "outside the box" option.

charles

@Arabella

No, gender pay 'inequality' has not been going on for years.

Feminists like Harman just claim this to be the case so that they can get women to vote for them.

What Rod Liddle says in his piece about women being less likely to commit to their careers is not something new.

And it is this lesser commitment that throughout the years - throughout history - is the reason why women earn less.

In fact, however, women spend some 70% of ALL the money that is spent in the economy, and they also receive many state handouts that men do not receive.

charles

@Paula - who said "Silly me. There I was thinking that a man and woman decided to have a baby not just the woman."

In modern western society, the man has no choice at all. Women, alone, decide whether or not to have babies.

james

Ed ... It is good to hear that your partner is doing so well financially.

But why should those of us who earn less (perhaps also having partners who are fulltime housewives/husbands) have to support you and your partner?

How many children and, hence, years of maternity leave, should your partner be entitled to take and still expect not to lose out career-wise compared to people who have continued to work without a break?

RW

@Vic "However, Mr Liddle carefully ignores ... the fact that women who 'choose' to have babies lose out on income,"

Rod Liddle did nothing of the sort. On the contrary, he made it abundantly clear that women DO lose out by choosing to have babies.

That was one of the central points of his piece.

Maybe you should read his piece more carefully.

lindsay

NotEvenLikely said "However, it is false and foolish and dangerous to pretend that raising children is not valuable and necessary work, and that it is all right to continue in a system that penalizes women who do it."

The system does not really penalise women who have children. For example, we pump tens of billions of pounds every year into supporting them; health, education, social services etc.

If anything, the system penalises those people who do not have children and who would prefer to devote much of their lives to their jobs.

You seem to want to penalise these people for having made such a choice.

Paul Worthington

Britain has become a place where it is dangerous to disagree with the consensus of NL, the BBC, Guardian, and other zones where controversy is not wanted. Bad for your job prospects, at least. So I will play it safe and make only a positive comment. Looking at the UK government and the above mentioned institutions, it is very gratifying to see that discrimination against the terminally stupid from holding jobs in high places has been overcome. Natural selection, however, may come back into play when things start getting tough as the new ice age starts.

Margaret C

As a woman I find Harman's belief that women are pathetic downtrodden creatures who can only survive and prosper with the crutch of positive discrimination and handouts and deeply insulting.
I don't get paid as much as my husband because I prefer to bugger about at home.

A. MacAulay

I did comment on Merlyn's response but it has disappeared into the aether. I did want to make the point that football has done more for peace and understanding in the world than the passive, shallow cargo-cult consumerism, horoscopes, deoderant ads, fashion plates and how to find the perfect man articles which are all of such central and vital interest to women. (I recently sat in a doctor's waiting room) So get real, Merlyn.

If family life is a value-conservative treasure, then its about time that the Conservatives thought about how to protect and nurture it, instead of sliding along behind on the slime spoor left by Left and its apologists.

Fergus Pickering

Why not leave things as they are? Children get born and grow up, some of them turn out as nice as Arabella obviously is. Why do we need to CHANGE? All we have to do is change back all the horrid things the Labour government has done in the last dozen years and then change absolutely nothing at all. Oh, Arabella, archaic doesn't have an 'e'. You are thinking of archaeology. I thought you might like to know.

Reinet Moolman

Unfortunately the assumption that women will end up having children has indeed introduced a glass ceiling. As a female working in the male dominated mining industry most of my female collegues (who never intend to have children) and myself have consistently experienced structural discrimination simply based on what we might do in future. My salary is only close to that of my male peers because I work twice as hard. Attending a promotion interview recently, I was asked why I was so ambitious as for a woman I have done "well enough".

charles

Reinett "Attending a promotion interview recently, I was asked why I was so ambitious as for a woman I have done "well enough"."

That sounds unfair.

But what about, say, a teacher?

Is it fair on the children to choose a woman for their teacher who is likely to abandon them in order to have childen over a man who would likely not do so?

Do the children not count for anything when it comes to such matters?

I merely ask the question - without knowing the correct moral answer.

Bling Crosby

A well written article as usual Mr Liddle. Speaking as an employer I am buggered if I am going to be told who to employ by a jumped up delusional halfwit like Harman.