Gender pay gap calculations don't make sense?

[sunshinecloudyday]

I'm really looking for opinions and for anyone to enlighten me to why I cannot understand why the gender pay gap is calculated this way (see image).

It doesn't take into account men and women doing different jobs or working different hours, which I think it should.

Why aren't men and women doing exactly the same jobs for the same hours compared?

It said on the news that the gender pay gap at Ryan Air was around 72% males higher than females. But if more males are pilots and more females are flight attendants I can reasonably expect there to be a difference. It isn't Ryan airs fault they chose different jobs, so the companies shouldn't be punished? Instead shouldn't we focus on why men and women choose different jobs and work patterns and aim to even this out at the root of the problem?

It doesn't take into account different working patterns, e.g. if one employee is full time and the other works 2 days a week I would expect the full timer to be more likely to get a bonus?

If more women choose to work part time due to childcare surely that is their choice and they will understand their career may take a temporary hit. Men also have the option to take paternity leave or work part time also but again I don't see why the company should be punished for this or why the calculations are not adjusted to show this?

I feel like maybe I'm missing something?! Please enlighten me - I want to fully understand the situation before I talk to others about this....

Yes, to close the GPG, we also need to move men into lower paid jobs.

That is not a change that can happen in a short space of time.

We also need to be talking about not just executive levels. There are huge other areas of predominatley male spheres of work where no one is taking about women.

I have had quite a bit of work done on my house over the last few years - plumbers, electricians, decorators, carpet and flooring installers - all men.

Most of these men have been self employed or in small businesses. So will not turn up in any survey.

But all these self employed trades jobs could be very flexible. Why no public debate?

I realise a gender pay gap exists. But, generally speaking women are paid the same as men if they’re doing the same job. I understand the need to break the system, that still exerts pressure on women to be in traditionally ‘female roles’ and thus potentially make choices that lead them to earning less then males. However, the way the issue is portrayed by the media just pits men against women and vice versa; and it’s probably done Bruce’s those types of headlands sell. At the end of the day the working class are all exploited. So what is needed is to raise class awareness, and smash capitalism. ✊🏻

wildduck - possibly, but we are beginning to see it - men who are the lower earners in couples are increasingly likely to be the one to go part time or stay at home.

In order for this some high paid jobs not to be seen as "mainly for men, with a few exceptional woman doing them too", we need more lower paid not to be seen as "woman's natural job", but if that means in traditionally female jobs, men have to be priority in hires, that's not a bad thing overall!

As much as anything else, the Phase 8 thing is a sign of weak communications and/or HR. I know a lot of HR directors and senior comms people who have spent a lot of time with the data before reporting and who worked hard to create insightful messages about their gaps and what, if necessary, they are doing about it. My instinct is that Phase 8, knowing they had a great breakdown in terms of senior women at the top and that they're a major employer of women, simply didn't think about what they might have to do to explain their gender pay gap. Which is a pity, because while their pay gap is massive, some of the supposedly smaller ones are more worrying to me - the ones where the senior leadership is all men etc.

CorbynsComrade - even if that's true that men and women in equal jobs are paid equally (and honestly, I don't believe it even if it is illegal to pay women less), the problem is much more about WHY there aren't more women in senior roles. And we can all point to childcare and caring as issues, which is legit, but I think it goes much deeper than that. Women without children, or who have come back to work after children to the same hours etc are still having to fight that much harder for promotions etc. Study after study shows that women (and people of colour) can have the same performance but be judged more harshly, reducing their opportunities for promotion (and the bigger salaries) and then, in time, leading them to self-select out of those organisations.

None of this stuff is simple. And there's no single answer that will solve everything. The current data requirements are a good step to shine a light on a systemic problem and each firm has to look closely at what they're doing to solve it (or whether they need to eg Phase 8). For example coaching and mentoring for women throughout the organisation to increase their chances of promotion, training for senior teams on how they review/rate women, actively head hunting/recruiting women etc.

As much as anything else, the Phase 8 thing is a sign of weak communications and/or HR

I disagree with this. All of the information about how equal things are at each level is on their website. I think it's more a sign of The Guardian's editorial policy, who have been most vocally critical. It seems you can't offer a rational analysis of any company that has a gap. Gap = bad in their eyes. Anyone with any understanding of mathematics could point of these issues in an article. They often are in the comments, which is why they've stopped allowing comments. Same with other issues such as trans issues. Honestly I don't know why I keep reading, they just wind me up at the moment

Another thing that can have an effect can be age gap relationships, I'm not necessarily talking a massive gap but it's fairly common in my social circle for a gap of a decade or so. All younger woman, older man.

I'm in my 40s now so maybe this is less common with younger generations now. My DH is just shy of 10 years older than me so when we had children my career was still fledgling and he had much more experience and the salary to go with it.

At the time it just didn't seem feasible to do it any other way than for me to work part time and juggle the childcare. Seventeen years later I do question these decisions constantly because they have left me in a shitty and precarious position should anything happen to him (it's been further complicated by a SN child - I haven't worked at all for the past couple of years).

I don't have any easy answers but it's frustrating as hell and I sometimes wonder what the point of having a uni education was (slightly hyperbolic I know because I enjoyed it and education is always a good thing).

Can I ask why do you think so many organisations that have spent so long banging on about the sexism and injustice of the gender wage gap er.....all have a gender wage gap, even though McDonald's and Kentucky Fried Chicken managed to not have one?

NATIONAL UNION OF TEACHERS 16%
BBC 16%
THE GUARDIAN 12%
LABOUR PARTY 4%
UNITE 15%
GMB 32%
And yet.... McDonald's 0% and Kentucky Fried Chicken 0%.

I think another structural inequality these figures highlights is that the workplace continues to be set up in such a patriarchal way. If you don't work full time (or want to) you are completely overlooked.

In a basic sense - Bringing woman in to the work place has been on patriarchal terms - this is what worked for men for years but does it actually work for women?

If you let me have a home/work balance will I be happier? Motivated? Work harder during my part-time hours? But instead you are overlooked for promotion, discouraged for applying and talked down to.

Because KFC and McDonald's employ huge numbers of low income workers that are equally male and female. Teenagers get jobs there and there's no sex preference. So they balance out the sexes of the executives. This would impact both mean and median. If only boys or only girls worked in either of those jobs it would be different. It's mainly all the teenage boys working there that cancel out the male executives that leads to no gap.

In banking the reason more women are not in senior roles is that until the 80s most made married women resign and then reapply in their married names thus starting their service again. They also prevented part time workers from going into managerial roles and banned married women from taking up prestigious placements. It’s why you don’t see the same ‘cashier to CEO’ stories for female bankers as you do with male ones.

Traditional working practices, particularly in well paid jobs, assume a wife. It’s not a problem to work late or travel if you have somebody working 24/7 to ensure your home life runs smoothly.

Even if you share domestic responsibilities equally, you aren’t going to have as much support as somebody whose partner is a SAHP, and few men are SAHPs.

It’s not just a case of women being more ambitious - expectations of men need to change too.

The Guardian, the Fawcett society, and quite a few posters on here spent years blaming outright sexism for the ‘pay gap’ which they calculated as simply being the difference between the average earnings of all men and the average earnings of all women.

They completely ignored inconvenient data like career choices, hours worked, subjects studied, time away from the work place an so forth or in short not comparing like for like. Even when the ONS published a report in 2014 that showed women between the ages of 22 - 39 actually earned marginally more then men they largely ignored it because it was 'off message'.

I think finally we are getting to the point where a much needed discussion can be had without having various vested groups shouting you down.

I singled out the Fawcett society and the Guardian as they have appalling form for deliberately ignoring unhelpful facts and spinning others to suit their 'its sexism' agenda when discussing differences in pay when the reasons for pay disparity are often a bit more nuanced and complex.

I mentioned the ONS report as that actually went to the trouble to do proper statistical analysis and compare pay for like for like jobs. The Ryanair data cited on page one, for instance, shows that there is an imbalance between the number of each gender who become pilots and those who become cabin crew. It also is clear that cabin crew get paid a lot less. But this is far from providing a chain of causation and differentiating between social structures and mores, inherent bias, and company policy.

A discussion needs to be had as to why for instance so few young women study STEM subjects, the imbalance of paternity leave, or the lack of women wishing to pursue senior management positions. Instead we get a moronic argument in the Guardian two days ago titled: "Using the figures reported so far, we’ve converted the gap into the number of days women effectively work for free", it's an utterly disingenuous use of the published data.

Merrymouse - do you think that “career choices, hours worked, subjects studied, time away from the work place” are free choices made by women, or do you think that women are socially conditioned from a young age into choosing certain subjects and careers and into believing that women should be the primary carers for children?

Do you really think that there is a “lack of women wishingto pursue senior management positions” or do you not think that women are overlooked for promotion, or experience sexism by recruiters, or lack confidence to even apply in the first place, or employers failing to see that it’s perfrclty possibly to work flexibly whilst holding a senior role due to engrained long hours/presenteeism cultures?

But these arguments fallacious as they may be stir resentment, sell papers, generate clicks and win votes. Men who try to present an alternate view are met with howls of being sexist and women who do are met with accusations of internalised misogyny and being handmaidens.

I think posters up thread have drilled down to the quick of it attitudes within relationships need to change re: childcare, but no government can legislate our relationships and marriages. The change needs to be a cultural one and not a political one.

Someone posted that the workplace evolved to meet the needs of men and I think there is some truth to this, but I'd ask how on earth can it be any different? In the end it comes down to a matter of time. Someone who commits more productive hours will progress and acquire valuable experience more rapidly, even if they are less naturally talented than someone who puts in less time at the coal face. If someone can re-write the book on economic theory that somehow resolves the time problem I'm all ears, and raring to take a crack at it, but until then it's just theory.

Furthermore in relationships biology rears its ugly head. If a man wishes to focus on career excellence he is at liberty to put off having children climb to the top of the pile, accrue vast resources and then marry a younger woman with whom to have children with. How do you correct for this? Women can roll the dice and try to do the same, but then might see those accrued resources consumed in what could ultimately prove to be futile IVF attempts. Furthermore women trend towards dating across, or up relative to education and socioeconomic status, so they are less likely to date a man whose time would be best spent running the home and doing childcare.

I guess as a thought experiment we could design a matriarchy, that is a system that was designed specifically to cater to women, and women's biology (completely forgetting about men for a moment) provide women with the maximum possible choices and then once that is done see what parts are actually compatible with the current system, and what things would need to give and make the case for why any change would be better.

Furthermore women trend towards dating across, or up relative to education and socioeconomic status, so they are less likely to date a man whose time would be best spent running the home and doing childcare.

This is an important observation that is rarely discussed. I have yet to hear women say "what I am really looking for is a nice but non terribly ambitious or successful man who like nothing more then to be a stay at home dad while I work full time"

Yes and this compounds in the workplace as these successful and ambitious women with equally successful and ambitious husbands are scrabbling around trying to keep all the plates spinning in the air can find a less capable man who has a full time stay at home housewife soar past them as he can focus unfettered in his career.

Time is a resource so maybe the discussion needs to be reframed as a time gap as opposed to a wage one, so rather than examining just income you look at work + childcare + lesuire time and ask what are the demands on women's time relative to men? It also makes the conversation cultural as opposed to purely economic. It also would I suspect unite women of differing economic levels.

Again I'd like to steer away from money a little bit, mainly because the rebuttals at a societal level would reveal a fair bit of wealth transfer upon divorce, and I think there was a study out of America that showed women control the majority of spending decisions, as in more dollars are spent by women than men.

The crucial component for me is agency, not even necessarily the concept of free choice which I think gets so intimately intertwined with race, socio-economic class and many other things that it's practically impossible to give a fair shake to outside of academic circles, and most certainly not in the forum of public debate. How many people honestly make free choices? The concept really only exists relative to others.

My point is and I think it's easier to make the case in terms of biology that even if you give women all the free choices in the world, you still run up against the brick wall that women's fertility has a much more limited window compared to men's and this has had a knock on effect throughout human social evolution.

Consider a hypothetical relationships thread for a moment. Man and woman both have high flying careers both early 30s woman posts that dh doesn't want children yet and she agonises over staying with him. He's said it wouldn't be the end of the world for him if he didn't have children, and that she desperately wants to start trying. It's not an easy equation to balance. Biology hands men a stronger negotiating hand more often than not.

I think a lot of women evolve people pleasing tendencies precisely because there will often be a shortage of men her own age to procreate with with the inclination to have children at the same time and with the same drive that she does. Another thought experiment: what if every man were legally obliged to take a pill around the time of the menopause that rendered a statistically similar number of them to women as unable to conceive? I think you'd see a pretty fucking rapid rearrangement of social/political/economic systems to accommodate for this.

In a way talking about gender/sex pay gaps is always going to only ever amount to slight adjustments in the margins until we find ways to correct for biological differences. Women's choices have always been underlined by biological pressures men simply don't have.

Well the only way to fix this is to completely change peoples partner preferences (which really won't happen on a large scale)

The average age difference for couples in the UK is between 3 and 5 years (with the man being older). Women also prefer men who are more successful than they are or at least on par with them.

Ultimately it does come down to the choices people make, relationship choices.
When that inevitable conversation comes up about who should be the main carer will the person who is earning more and/or further along in their career due to age be chosen? Unlikely

Which is why I don't think companies should have such negative press about their gender pay gaps, it is out of their hands.

My particular bugbear with it all is that the left co-opts these inequalities on behalf of women whilst claiming to be champions of women. Misdiagnoses the cause to corporate culture, wage gaps etc it gives them an extra stick to beat business with, but of course as its a problem that can never be solved (as they are deliberately looking in the wrong place), it just stirs up ever more discontent and resentment and wins them ever more votes.

We can and should work to promote cultural shifts, making fatherhood aspirational for little boys, and make sure children grow up aware of biological realities. I'm often struck by the mixed rhetoric of how resentful some women can be about how good hands on father's are lauded as positively heroic when this illicits hardly a notice when a woman performs the same role. The difference is how everyone praises a woman who breaks a glass ceiling here or there and for blazing a trail, yet if you said "I don't see what the fuss is about men do this all the time?" it would be seized on as a horrendous belittling of women. Anyone who swims upstream against the current of societal expectations and potentially steers attitudes to a better place should be recognised imho.