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

Rod Liddle says that Harriet Harman’s notion of ‘structural pay discrimination’ is nonsense. It is women’s decision to have children that disrupts wage equality

One government proposal which seems to have gone largely unnoticed as a consequence of the credit crunch, Susan Boyle’s triumph on Britain’s Got Talent and flying Mexican pigs spreading their lethal filth hither and thither is Harriet Harman’s plan to remove the wombs from all British women and force them to go to work as stockbrokers and hedge-fund managers in the City of London. How she intends to remove the wombs, and what she will do with 30 million of them when she is done, has not yet been decided. There will be ethical debates, one supposes. But in the interim it is likely that Britain will become the first European Union country with a womb-mountain. They will be stored in a deep-freeze warehouse near Kidderminster. Probably.

Harperson is absolutely determined that British women will achieve everything that British men do, regardless of whether they wish to or whether they are able to. Objections to her proposals are condemned as sexist; women do not achieve exactly the same as men right now because of structural sexism — there is no other answer.

She has been stamping her little feet around recently about differential pay rates between men and women. Men, she suggested, were paid 20 per cent more than women and that was solely down to sexism. ‘You have got to believe that either women are 20 per cent less intelligent, hard-working, less committed to their job, less experienced, less qualified — or you have got to believe that there is structural pay discrimination. We believe there is structural pay discrimination,’ she said.