Belated Friday Funny: The Farrah Fawcett Society

As we know, the lefties, in particular Harriet Harman and The Fawcett Society, constantly whine on about "the gender pay gap", and even David Cameron jumped on board a couple of years ago (whether he has jumped off board again is unknown). They salivate at the prospect of having compulsory gender pay audits and the like, which will generate thousands more jobs for taxpayer-funded meddlers and burden businesses with yet more red tape.

Now, as anybody who knows anything about anything knows, it isn't a gender pay gap as such, it is a mother-versus-everybody else pay-gap. And if your own observations aren't enough evidence, the ONS published detailed tables that confirm this assumption, which Tim W picked up on and used in a recent article in The Guardian.

I therefore nearly fell off my seat when I read the following article in Friday's London Paper, of which an abbreviated version was published in The Metro:

Research (1) for campaign group (2) the Fawcett Society showed that childbirth marked the start of a "great divide" on earnings (3), which continued even after children left home. Before becoming parents, men and women were equally likely to be employed but, after having children, 57% of mothers of under fives were in paid work, compared with 90% of fathers (4)...

Dr Katherine Rake, director of the Fawcett Society, said: "The choice of whether and when to return to employment is, of course, a very personal one. However, it is critical that those mothers who choose or need to be in paid work should (5) be able to do so without suffering a pay penalty (6)."

(1) It's not 'research' as such, by their own admission, it "is a new survey of existing research, drawing together the most recent data from academic and government sources.", i.e. they used the same ONS figures as I did, which I will assume to be reliable.

(2) "Campaign group"? Nope, it's a prime example of a FakeCharity. The Society's entry at fakecharities.org woefully understates the extent to which it is government funded.

(3) So they've finally admitted that it's a mothers-pay-gap, not a gender pay gap, which is a bit of a breakthrough, really. Now all I have to do is explain why having additional rights for pregnant women makes it harder for young women to get jobs ...

(4) Which is another way of saying that 43% of mothers choose to take time off to stay at home with their young children, and that 90% of fathers are in work. What on earth is wrong with that?

(5) Ah ... the s-word ... which usually invalidates whatever it is that the person is trying to say.

(6) OK, this is the key to all this. As we know, couples tend to pool income and expenditure, so the gap between fathers' and mother's pay is not that important either. But as a moderate feminist, I do ask myself, is there perhaps a simple way of sorting all this out without all the bureaucracy and crap and in a way that is fiscally neutral for the taxpayer?*

Anyways, I do wonder why The Fawcett Society named themselves after Farrah Fawcett, who's hardly a leftie-feminist icon, which reminds me of a joke I heard on Friday:

Farrah Fawcett went to Heaven and St Peter told her that as she had led such a blameless life, she would be allowed one wish. After giving it some thought, she replied "I would like all children in the world to be safe". A few hours later Michael Jackson was dead.

* Ah yes ... there is. We scrap Child Tax Credits (which are primarily a straight bung of £42 per week per child for unemployed single mothers); we scrap the Child Trust Fund nonsense and increase Child Benefit (currently £20 per week for the first child and £13.20 for subsequent children) into an enhanced flat-rate, non-means tested, non-taxable Child Benefit of (about) £30 per week (or whatever is fiscally neutral).

In the longer version of the article, it was said that women earn 22% less than men (which is a red herring, of course - the proper comparison is between mothers and women who have never had children), but let's go with 22% for now...

If an average mother with two children would have been earning an average gross salary of £25,000 (£19,174 after tax), but now only has a gross salary of £19,500 (£15,379 after tax) she's out of pocket by £3,795. But she'd also get 2 x 52 x £30 a week Child Benefit = £3,120. So overall, her family unit would be £784 a year worse off, which is hardly worth worrying about, is it?

Or you could say, mothers do an average of twenty hours paid work per week, so that £3,120 equates to extra pay of £3.25 per hour, tax free.