Fun Online Poll - Pornography in the workplace: update

Hmmm.

In last week's poll, I asked "Is pornography displayed at your workplace?", with responses as follows: No - 87%; Yes - 8%; I work in a shop that sells "lads' mag's" - 6%, i.e. even taking The Farrah Fawcett Society's wider definition, only 14% said that there was some pornography in their workplace.

In this week's poll, I asked "How much 'degrading imagery of women' is there at your workplace [compared to when you first started working]?". The results so far are "Less - 40%; About the same - 43%; More - 17%".

While this confirms my suspicion that there is no "endemic" of pornography in the workplace (if anything there is noticeably less than in days of yore), there's a bit of a mismatch here, because even if we interpret "About the same" to mean "None then and none now", if only 14% of workplaces have some (from the first poll) but 17% say there is more, then at least 3% of people aren't being consistent (but it's still within a reasonable margin of error).

Pornography 'in the workplace' - Fun Online Poll Part Two...

Thanks to the 104 people who took the time to vote in last week's poll, the results were as follows:

Is pornography displayed at your workplace?

No - 87%
Yes - 8%
I work in a shop that sells "lads' mag's" - 6%
-----------------------------------
The taxpayer-funded Farrah Fawcett Society boldly claimed that "the presence of degrading imagery of women in UK workplaces has never been more endemic." The above figures hardly suggest "an endemic" to me, but to try and sort this all out, this week's Fun Online Poll asks: "How much 'degrading imagery of women' is there at your workplace [compared to when you first started working]?"*

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

* Let's ignore the fact that some people like having girlie posters (or indeed posters of buff young men) at work, others presumably don't.

[Case study] The corrosive effects of pornography in the workplace

From The Metro:

A postal worker who spent 10 years hoarding packages of pornographic DVDs and female lingerie in his attic is facing jail...

Y'see? That proves it! If only The Farrah Fawcett Society had had their way, then this poor chap would never have been led into temptation.

Fun Online Poll: Pornography in the workplace

That Fawcett Society "report" claims that “While the days when it was deemed acceptable to hang ‘girly calendars’ on office walls may be long gone, the presence of degrading imagery of women in UK workplaces has never been more endemic. Pornographic lads’ mags are openly displayed in over 50,000 retail shops – each one of them somebody’s workplace. But displaying these magazines in this way is in violation of the Sex Discrimination Act, so it is crucial that retail employers cover up pornographic newspapers and lads’ mags and place them on the top shelf."

Being a boring sort of chap, I have spent most of my working life as an accountant and have never seen 'girly calendars' (which they seem to consider to be pornography) on display in the office or at clients' premises, but that's probably not a representative sample.

So that's the topic of this week's Fun Online Poll. I've added "I work in a shop that sells "lads' mag's" as a middle option between "Yes" and "No" as this seems to be the only tangible evidence they have that "the presence of degrading imagery of women in UK workplaces has never been more endemic". And don't ask me to define 'pornography', if you think it is, then it is, and if you think it isn't, then it isn't, I suppose.

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Some articles are so perfect it would be a shame to fisk them ...

From The Metro:

Lap-dance clubs 'threaten equality'

Women's equality at work is being threatened by displays of pornography and the use of lap-dancing clubs to entertain clients, a new report has warned.

The Fawcett Society said the sex industry had "infiltrated" the workplace after an "unprecedented" expansion over the past decade. The campaign group said exposure of employees to pornography at work was "rife", ranging from the display of pornography and a trend of entertaining clients and staff in lap-dancing clubs.

Research for the Fawcett Society found that 41% of UK lap-dancing clubs directly targeted employers through marketing on their websites. Most lap-dancing clubs in London provided "discrete receipts" which enabled employees to claim back expenses from their employer, while lads' mags were displayed for sale in more than 50,000 workplaces, said the report. There were no independent, compulsory guidelines about the display and sale of pornography, and no major retailer had a policy of covering up lads' mags or putting them on the top shelf, said the Fawcett Society. A fifth of men admitted accessing pornography at work.

Kat Banyard, campaigns officer at the Fawcett Society, said: "Despite relative silence on the issue within employer circles, our research shows that the sex industry is a major threat to women's equality at work. For too long, employers have engaged with the sex industry without due regard for the impact on female employees, and have failed to prevent the illicit use of the sex industry by employees in a work context. But this is an issue that employers cannot afford to ignore."

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.

Ask a stupid question ...

Over at JuliaM, Staybryte asks:

What the hell is the Fawcett society? How does it get funded? How come these busybodies get to lobby the head of the BBC and push their self-serving agenda?

The middle bit's easy. Download their 2008 accounts from the Charities Commission website and check out their 'Income from charitable activities' (about 60% of their total income) on page 12:

The Indigo Trust £36,800
Lloyds TSB Foundation for England and Wales £20,000
Electoral Commission £10,866
Department of Communities and Local Government £20,000
Barrow Cadbury Trust £33,333
Esmée Fairbairn Foundation £22,289
LankellyChase Foundation £15,000
The Home Office £42,000
Nuffield Foundation £3,894 + £39,418*
Oxfam Poverty Programme £10,000
Equal Opportunities Commission £10,000
Amicus (Unite) £2,940
Unison £15,938
City Parochial Foundation £26,250

I've bolded the donors who are wholly or partly taxpayer-funded. The Indigo Trust is a Sainbury's trust, who appear overly keen on paying for all this nonsense, presumably they are trying to curry favour with the Labour government, so they're suspect as well. The City Parochial Foundation appears to be part of the Church of England, so make up your own mind whether they are part of 'The State'.

* UPDATE: as John B points out in the comments, The Nuffield Foundation is a private foundation set up by the chap who designed the Morris Minor. But ... its offshoot The Nuffield Council On Bioethics receives up to £400,000 from The Medical Research Council, which in turn is "a publicly funded body". So I've unbolded it but with misgivings.

But I'm not budging on the Lloyds TSB Foundation. It was set up on the whim of the government at the time the TSB was privatised with the mission "to support and work in partnership with recognised charitable organisations which help disadvantaged people to play a fuller role in communities throughout England and Wales.", which puts it squarely in fakecharity/quango territory.

Twats of the day (4)

From today's Metro (article not online):

Child poverty is linked to the gender pay gap and the lack of jobs for women ... Two out of five poor children are living with a single mother, while a third have a mother on little or no income, says the Fawcett Society... Lone mothers are at twice the risk of poverty as couples with children, says the society... The society wants ministers to ban the dismissal of pregnant workers, to raise maternity benefits and make gender pay audits compulsory.

I'm not sure I can even be bothered fisking that properly, but here goes:

1. Main cause of child poverty is poor people having children. People without jobs tend to be poor. No sane welfare system can possibly 'lift' such kids out of 'poverty'.

2. Excessive 'rights' for pregnant women makes it harder for other women to get well paying jobs (employers are over-cautious about taking them on).

3. Before my wife had kids, our salaries were roughly equal. Now we have two kids and Her Indoors has had a 'career break' and works slightly shorter hours, so my salary has continued to rise and hers is slightly lower than it was. Big deal. If she's underpaid, then by definition I must be overpaid; and as we pool all income and expenses, we end up roughly equal when it comes to spending power.

4. As to raising maternity benefits, I see no reason why all non-working mothers shouldn't get the same Citizen's Basic Income, regardless of household composition or household earnings. That gives you a 'safety net' without a 'poverty trap'. About £60 per week seems about right.

5. As to the 'mother's pay gap' (for that is what it is), to the extent that this is not alleviated by points 3. and 4. above, I am also in favour of scrapping means-tested Child & Working Tax Credits and rolling them into a higher flat-rate Child Benefit of £30+ per week for each of the first three children in each family.

6. And finally ... how about doubling the tax-free personal allowance, which will further reduce the %age gap in net pay between low- and average-paid workers?

That's that fixed. Next.