UK Men’s Movement

P.O Box 16168

Glasgow G13 3WA

Date 18.4.01

A critical analysis, by UK Men’s Movement, of the document,

'The Gender Pay Gap: a Research Review by Damian Grimshaw & Jill Rubery'

- EOC Research Discussion Series 2001

-Key Points:-

Why work?:-

The document above begins with a number of implicit assumptions. As with any premise, if it is invalid, then any conclusions drawn from it will be invalid also. The authors assume that there is a gender pay gap, that it is of benefit to society that women should not be ‘financially dependant’ on their husbands. They also appear to assume that the main aim of all economic activity is, or should be, to ensure that there is pay parity between males and females. We believe that each of these assumptions are, in fact, invalid.

By matrimonial law, all assets of a marriage are shared and jointly owned. Thus, a woman benefits even if her husband earns considerably more than she does. Even in separation./divorce, a woman can benefit from the financial claims made on her husband by matrimonial law and by DSS legislation. Thus a married partner is ‘financially dependent’ in law despite Grimshaw & Rubery’s concepts of social engineering.

Rather than a family being a co-operative unit, and the indispensable building block of society, the EOC’s , and these authors’, view is that it should be a competitive antagonistic group where wives compare and contrast their earning power against their husbands. This way leads to an atomised society where people live on their own, a growing problem in the UK, to nobody’s benefit.

People almost always work through necessity. In many households where one spouse, often the husband, has a very high salary, the other may choose not to work at all, or at least not for pay. Britain’s charity shops are filed with wives from such households who volunteer to help out in the shops for a few hours a week, drawing no salary and acting out the role of shop assistants. Their lives are far removed from the many people who are forced to work at checkouts for 8-hour shifts, five or six days a week, every week. Thus, people work to live, they do not live to work. This makes the so-called ‘lifetime earnings loss’ so absurd. If couples plan their lives so that the woman has children and then has the option of,

(a) no work

(b) part-time work

(c) full-time work after a family rearing gap,

then that is their concern.

Calculating a fictional loss of earnings is to ignore the fact that many people prefer to spend time with their own children and any childminding is being proven by research to be damaging to the well-being of children. Children thrive better in the care of their natural parents. Again, it is worth noting that the ‘replacement rate’ i.e. births vs. deaths, in the whole of Western Europe including the UK is so low that we are facing a steep population drop, and an ageing population with more pensions to be paid.

Like with Like:-

Time and again, this document fails to compare like with like. Overtime payments are included to expand the supposed gender pay gap ( page (iii) + page 16). rather than straight, and honest, full-time hourly rate of pay comparison.

Men generally, and (particularly married men) work more overtime at premium rates. They also earn more bonus, commission, or accept more unpleasant (and therefore wage enhanced) conditions.

Full-time males are compared with part-time females. Why? (page iii).

However, the biggest blunder is made in comparing the situation in different countries, where this is clearly invalid. Britain in 2001 is a vastly different place than it was is 1979 when the Thatcherite revolution commenced.( We will compare the situation then and now without comment on whether it is ‘good’ or ‘bad’).

The decades since Thatcher’s 1979 victory have expanded the gap in wealth between the top and bottom of our society considerably, unions have be weakened, many older traditional industries have been dismantled, including shipbuilding, steelmaking, mining, heavy engineering. Britain became a net importer of manufactured goods for the first time since the start of the Industrial Revolution. These effects put several million full-time skilled workers, mostly men, out of work.

Thatcher’s policies put a far more competitive edge, and harshness, into British working life and converted us, far more than before, into a USA-like economy. The protections given to workers declined. She quadrupled the time period before an employee could claim unfair dismissal, from 6 months to 2 years. Significantly, she has reduced the welfare cushion for workers. SERPS has gone and pensions in the future will have to be more self-generated than before. Thus, if a comparison is to be made with any country today, it is with the USA & Canada, with their similar economies as well as our close historical and cultural links. When Grimshaw & Rubery do this, they find that the gender pay gap is bigger (page viii + page 20), and this is not surprising when one thinks of their highly competitive North American economies, with minimal welfare cushioning.

Grimshaw & Rubery prefer to focus mostly on the other EU countries, mostly the Western European ones and Scandinavia.

These countries have a high welfare base and a seemingly lower ‘gender pay gap’. There is a dark cloud on the horizon, though, and it is looming up rapidly. The projections over the very costly pension and unemployment benefits in these countries are gong to mean that in a few years from now, their GDP will be unable to pay for them.

Let us look at two of these, praised by Grimshaw & Rubery,

1/ Sweden:- Sweden has had a very high tax regime for decades to pay for its high welfare packages. The ageing population means that Sweden is going to be paying 110% of its GDP on pensions and welfare very soon. This is impossible to maintain. Contraction on all fronts is inevitable. The prognosis for their economy is not good.

2/ Netherlands:- When Holland discovered its vast natural gas reserves, it spent a high proportion on very high unemployment benefits and lavish welfare payments. A Dutch man, living in Britain, was able to claim , in a British Benefits Agency office about four times the benefit paid to a British worker since EU rules state that any EU resident, unemployed in another land, can be paid the benefit rate applicable in their native land. Most of the gas is now used up and the Dutch economy will not be able to continue in the same vein.

It is the highest folly for Grimshaw & Rubery to point to these countries as models to follow.

What is value? :-

We can do no better than reiterate the comments made in our earlier analysis of the absurd ‘Equal Pay Task Force’ report (2001).

Anita Hattiangadi (1), an economist with the American-based Employment Policy Foundation, has studied the supposed gender pay gap extensively and has given evidence to the U.S. Senate on issues of gender and pay. Amongst the mass of evidence which she has gathered is the following. Steven Rhoads has done similar work (2)

1/ There is no pay gap among full-time workers aged 21- 35 who live alone.

2/ There is a pay gap of only 3% among full-time workers aged 21 -35 without children.

3/ The only discernible pay gap and this matches that discerned by Gilder (3) is between married men and married women ( see below).

Hattiangadi uses the 'diamond/water' paradox to illustrate how ridiculous the concept of 'equal value' is. To wit, water has 'value', indeed it is essential for life. No one can survive without regular quantities of water. Diamonds, while pretty, have no value of their own. No-one actually needs to have a diamond. However, diamonds are expensive, while water can in many places be obtained for free. Why is this so?

Well, and this applies to jobs just as much, the iron laws of supply and demand operate here.

Water is plentiful, in most situations, whereas diamonds are not. Thus, weight for weight, diamonds command a far higher price. One can imagine circumstances where one would trade a pile of diamonds for their weight in water, but it is likely to involve a scenario where one has be stranded , with a suitcase of diamonds, in the Sahara for 5 days with no liquid when a jeep with jerricans of water happens to come by.

Gender Pay Gap:- What does the document state?

There are quite a number of discordant statements in the document. A few are listed, with comments below, (document quotes in italics).

page 9 ‘women may have derived some benefit through the levelling down of men’s pay as a result of men’s increasing presence in a low paid occupation’:-

This statement is so palpably ridiculous that it brings into question the intellectual grasp of the authors. The idea that women can ‘benefit’ because men are facing lower pay is nonsense. Since millions of men, thrown out of the traditional industries, have seen their pay lowered, and have brought less money back home to their families, the reality is that a good deal of poverty and suffering has been caused by this. Only a blinkered, twisted view of economic reality could result in the above statement.

page 36 ‘The removal of layers of middle management also takes away the stepping stones to higher level jobs on which women have relied....’:-

What! Does this sexist drivel mean that men have not also relied on these steeping stones?

page 36 ‘Women are less comfortable in a competitive environment’:-

Actually, many men also feel this way. But, in a globalised economy which inevitably tends towards driving everyone closer to the pay norms of the Indian sub-continent, competition is of a ‘dog eat dog’ nature. Only the most competitive can survive. We are not happy with globalisation, but Tony Blair and ‘Dubya’ Bush appear to be.

page 39 ‘Equal pay should in principle involve an upgrading of women’s pay, not a downgrading of men’s pay’:-

Oh, who says so? Anyway, in the global village, most people can expect to be moving downward towards longer hours and less pay.

pages 41-43

This entire section is, frankly, complete codswallop!

page 45

(see Anita Hattiangadi for why this page is worthless)

page 49 ‘women who have decided..... to become.... participants in the labour market’:-

No! Government, especially New Labour, policy is to force virtually everyone into the labour market. Supply and demand effects means that this will actually reduce wage rates.

Most women have been forced to work through the pressure of competing with two earner couples in the housing market which itself has contributed massively to house price inflation for decades now.

page 51 ‘..the undervaluation of women’s work in the public sector should be addressed....A failure to tackle this may eventually result in the loss of an important means by which women can develop high paid and high skilled careers’:-

It could with far greater authority be said that the work of the men who work in dangerous, unpleasant and arduous jobs in both the public and private sector should have their "undervaluation.....addressed". It is clearly arguable that the men who dig up the roads , who repair our power lines our sewage systems and water supplies in all kinds of weather, are considerably undervalued. It is difficult to contend that lesbian outreach centres are more essential to human civilisation than these mainly low-paid men.

Never mind globalisation, then. Never mind market forces or the fact that people who wish high paid careers train for them. No, the government, like a good nanny, should organise the whole economy so that women can have high-paid careers. Do the authors have any grasp of economic reality at all? It looks unlikely.

page 52 ( top half):-