Things which everybody already knew but are presented as news.

From the BBC:

Mothers in part-time jobs are being hit by a "pay penalty" and are often not given pay rises linked to experience, a new study has suggested.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies report found by the time a couple's first child is aged 20, many mothers earn nearly a third less than the fathers. A key factor was women working part-time in motherhood, the report said.

A gender pay gap between graduates has not improved since 1993, despite gaps narrowing for non-graduates, it added.

The original headline and article was much less nuanced and just wailed on about the 'gender pay gap' and highlighted that the 'gender pay gap' was larger for graduates than non-graduates.

Happily enough, somebody then sat down and actually read the report and did a more accurate write up to explain it's a 'mothers pay gap' and how it arises. The point about graduates is that their salaries tend to increase with seniority much more steeply than for non-graduate jobs, so hitting the pause button on pay rises by going part-time will lead to a bigger gap between mothers and everybody else.

Conversely, seeing as so few jobs require much physical strength*, any natural advantage that men used to have is being eroded. (*Call me a chauvinist, but how many female rubbish collectors do you see?) So we'd expect the 'gender pay gap' at the lower end to flatten of its own accord.

On the subject of graduates, also from the BBC:

Many graduates receive "paltry returns" for their degrees despite racking up £50,000 in debt, says the chairman of the Education Select Committee.

Robert Halfon will say in a speech on Monday, that between a fifth and a third of graduates take non-graduate jobs, and that any extra returns for having a degree "vary wildly". He will also suggest that too many people are studying academic degrees.

University leaders maintain that a degree remains an excellent investment.

Well duh. There are only so many jobs that really need graduates (precious few, if you ask me). If more people are doing degrees than there are graduate jobs, clearly, for the excess, the whole exercise is pointless, purely in career terms (good fun though). People were saying this twenty years ago when Tony Blair went mad and decided half of school leavers 'should' go to university.

And university leaders would say that, wouldn't they?

The Mothers' Pay Gap

At last!

From the BBC:

Women in the UK returning to work after having a baby fall even further behind men in earning power, a report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies has said. The gap between hourly earnings of the two sexes becomes steadily wider after women become mothers, the IFS says. Over the subsequent 12 years, women's hourly pay rate falls 33% behind men's.

The IFS says this is partly because women who return to work often do so in a part-time capacity and miss out on opportunities for promotion.

Robert Joyce, one of the IFS report's authors, said women who chose to cut their hours on returning to work were not penalised with an immediate cut in their hourly wages. However, he said: "Rather, women who work half-time lose out on subsequent wage progression, meaning that the hourly wages of men (and of women in full-time work) pull further and further ahead."

Which is what I have been saying for years - there is no real gender pay gap, it is a mothers vs everybody else pay gap. You do not need to be an economist, social scientist or statistician to suss this out, most people will have noticed this themselves first hand (my wife and I certainly have).

Ben Southwood of the ASI takes the more cheerfully libertarian view in City AM explaining why this is no biggie and the real reasons for the apparent residual ten per cent pay gap which cannot be explained by motherhood alone, worth a read in full.

Nonetheless, to the extent that we "should" do something about the gender pay gap*, this is the place to start. IMHO, a Citizen's Income and more generous Child Benefit** instead of the Child Tax Credit crap would more or less eliminate the pay gap in net terms.

* My view is 'big deal'; the total wage pot is what it is, if mothers were paid more, then everybody else would be paid less, so for most couples it evens out. Her Indoors earns barely a third as much as I do (she is underpaid and I am overpaid, by definition) but - like most women - she somehow gets to spend considerably more of our total net/discretionary income than I do.

** The IFS say that the pay gap increases steadily after a woman has had her first child. Other sources correlate this with the number of children - the more children, the bigger the gap (probably a bit of both). So a more generous Child Benefit per child, paid to the mother would fix this nicely, and scrapping means-tested Child Tax Credits increases the incentive to work, so that looks like a win-win to me.

Gender pay gap: problem has sorted itself out.

It is well know that there is no real gender pay gap (except at the very top).

It is - indisputably - a "mothers vs everyone else" pay gap, women take an average pay cut of about 10% for each child/year missed to maternity leave for each of the first three children (it flattens off after that). I mentioned some research a few years ago that said that fathers tended to earn more than childless men, so as long as couples with children pool income and expenses, it all comes out in the wash.

More evidence of this from the BBC today:

Full-time working fathers out-earn their childless counterparts by more than a fifth, research suggests.

On average, fathers working full time get a 21% "wage bonus", the study based on 17,000 workers aged 42, concluded. Fathers living in Britain with two children earned 9% more than those with just one, says the research by centre-left think tank IPPR for the TUC. Full-time working mothers of the same age saw a "wage penalty", earning 11% less than their childless colleagues.

The report said the reasons for the "fatherhood bonus" were not clear, though they were likely to relate to hours worked, increased effort and positive discrimination.

The last bit is the interesting bit:
- Do men pull their socks up when they have kids and try to earn a bit more,
- Are the qualities which make men likely to get married and have kids the same sort of qualities which employers look for (boring, reliable etc), or
- Do women simply prefer getting married to and having children with men who earn more (self-selection)?

We don't know, but facts is facts, and the fact is that overall, working couples with children probably earn the same as couples without children or single/childless people.

I once tried explaining all this to a feminist (in a couple and expecting their first baby) and she went mental and refused to accept the logic or even the principle.

The "gender pay gap": Excellent list.

By Graeme Leach in City AM:

Ten reasons why gender pay differences don’t prove discrimination by employers

One step forward, one step back ...

As I have been saying for ages, there isn't a 'gender pay gap' as such, it's a 'mothers-versus-everybody-else pay gap', which is of course based on official statistics, as well as personal and anecdotal evidence.

I thought we'd made a bit of a breakthrough recently when The Farrah Fawcett Society finally acknowledged this simple fact (possibly inspired by Tim W's article at Comment Is Free?) but now 'they' have reverted to type and are insisting that it's a 'gender pay gap' again.

Ah well.

Bring out your prejudices!

Tim W has a nice article up at Comment Is Free today, highlighting a few facts'n'figures on the "gender pay gap", aka "the mothers' pay gap", and how the welfare system largely compensates for this.

Most of the comments are the usual drivel, of course.

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.

"MPs urge action on gender pay gap"

*Yawn*

I fixed that months ago.

Next.

Gender pay gap and child benefit

Tim W has ripped into another article on the gender pay gap and reminds us that the real gap is between working mothers (tend to work shorter hours and miss a few years etc) and everybody else.

This is easily fixed. Take all Child Benefit, Child Trust Fund and Child Tax Credits and roll it into an flat-rate, non-means tested, non-taxable Child Benefit of £35-ish per week (or whatever is roughly fiscally neutral), payable directly to the mother (unless she's not looking after them, of course). As a further tweak, we could limit this to (say) the first three children in each family.

An average working Mum with two kids would thus get an extra £3,500 tax-free per year, which is equivalent to an extra gross salary of £5,000, which in turn would make her net income much the same as everybody else's.

As things stand, the savagely means-tested Child Tax Credits system discourages mothers from working and/or cohabiting, which is another reason for doing this.