AIBU to think many Mumsnet posters seem to be high earners?

Also, this post has irked me, why are you so happy to believe their partner could be earning more but not a woman, she must be lying. The stats for high earning men will be below average too.

Everyone’s rich online. Reddit does the same (but with men).

Yes this is absolutely true, if I deigned to call my salary high (which I do think it is) I’d have my arse handed to me.

My very rudimentary maths gets me to 400,000. If even a fraction of those women are on Mumsnet you could still plausibly have hundreds of women earning over £70k posting on here. It really isn’t that much of an outlier.

Exactly this is my beef too: people assume that the OP’s husband or partner must be the breadwinner. Why?

You’ve put people on benefits below the very poor. In fact many people within the “medium” and “low” levels receive benefits of some kind - cos the government recognises that salaries in this country don’t allow people to support themselves.

I don’t see either being a majority on MN, I feel like I see a complete mix every day.

My salary falls just under £100,000 but stock pushes me over. It's taken a long while to get up to this amount.

However, the likelihood of me getting another job with this amount is very unlikely so I live well within my means, and any long term financial planning I make with a £60k figure (mortgage/savings etc etc).

It IS a high earner. Those are the stats.
It’s irrelevant to then discuss your outgoings. For this thread anyway. 80K is a high earner. We all understand tax and cost of living.

While I don’t disagree with you that the salary pyramid is problematic. Almost all business have a pyramid structure to their staff – that’s the best way a business operates, vis-a-vis much fewer higher earning jobs, much more plentiful lower earning jobs.

The taxpayer ‘subsidies’ a business in myriad ways. Tax breaks, retail mark ups, innovation grants, capital allowances, employment allowance …

That is still 400,000 women. Are you really expecting the posts to reflect society? 2% will be over £70,000 or whatever? Of course not. As has been said MN itself has always meant more MC, SE. Then you’ve got the fact threads talking about income will disproportionately attract statistical outliers because who wants to be the 155th person to say £38,000? It’s like holiday threads; if you read that you might assume everyone goes on safari or to Thailand, lots of people do, but equally thousands of people go to Butlins, but it’s less interesting to say that on those threads.

Women on high salaries can be in abusive relationship too and struggle to leave.
Domestic abuse isn’t the purview of any specific demographic.

I just detest this idea that a woman is lying if she says earns more, maybe it makes people feel better? I just find it a really odd reaction, I’ve been on forums a long time, when I was an average earner I never assumed people were lying, I was genuinely interested in what they did and what I could do to earn more.

@Thepeopleversuswork sorry I very lazily read the first line of your post and ran with the rest 🤣 I can’t edit my post now, but if I could I would remove the words disagreeing and would say “exactly!” And then go into my representative and holiday point lol.

No. A high earner is a high earner wherever you are and whatever your mates earn and whatever your outgoings are.

DD worked hard at school and at university - she won an academic award for being the highest achieving student last year (post grad STEM degree) but I doubt she will be on 6 figures any time soon as she has no interest in the type of careers that pay those kind of salaries.

LOL. I think we're in agreement here.

I'm also enraged by the assumption that it's not possible for a woman to earn above the national average which you see so much on here.

That's the choice she made then. Dh made the choice to maximise his earnings to provide for his family.

But even in London and the south East they will be massively outnumbered by those earning nearer the median salary
Its not as if its 75% of women in London earn 100k + ....but averages out to 1% nationally!

But how is vilifying higher-earning employees helpful?

An employee who isn’t using tax avoidance schemes, receives no means-tested benefits and earns £60k or more is already making a substantial contribution through tax and NI. They are paying their way. Why should they pay more to subsidise lower-paying employers or those who could work but won’t?

I am pretty sure we can acknowledge that some workers are not paid enough without painting a target on the backs of those earning more than them, especially when they aren’t responsible for the pay disparity.

Seems reasonable to me that people should focus on why people are being paid less not attacking people who earn more than them. For the avoidance of doubt, I earn nowhere near six figures.

Sure, they will be in a minority (possibly a small minority). I'm sure it's a fraction of the overall Mumsnet population but I'm not arguing that they represent an average.

The contention on here seems to be that anyone who says they earn over £100k pa must be lying.

I just find it frustrating that after something like 40 years of mass female participation in the workplace, rising incomes for women (at least until recently) and women increasingly becoming family breadwinners people find it impossible to conceptualise that a woman could have a high salary and want to pull down any woman who says she earns a lot.

Indeed, but you have implied that people who aren't high earners haven't worked hard at school. Other posters have also said this higher up the thread.

People know what their friends earn when they are Nursery workers, teachers, NHS workers etc as those are easy to look up. I don't know any people in law, finance etc where salaries seem wild, so for me it's fairly easy to guess family income.

Because of the gender pay gap. I'm not happy about it at all. But it exists. Should be that that irks you not me, pointing out the stats.

That’s not how the gender pay gap works. There are still lots of women earning well. Not everyone’s male partner is earning more than the woman, and even if they are it doesn’t mean the woman isn’t also a high earner.