Appalling. Excerpts from a government website, containing not one sentence with which Harriet Harman or Jess Phillips would disagree – and this from a Conservative government!
Thousands of employers will publish their gender pay gap figures for the first time from today, helping break the glass ceiling [my emphasis] and create a more modern workforce.
The UK is one of the first countries in the world to require gender pay gap reporting and follows the government’s commitment to introduce the requirements at the last election. This is a key part of the government’s work to eliminate the gender pay gap… [my emphasis]
The UK gender pay gap is already at a record low of 18.1 per cent. These requirements will help employers to identify the gaps in their organisations and take action to close their gender pay gap. [my emphasis]
Ensuring that women have the same opportunities as men to fulfil their potential in the workplace is a key part of building a country that works for everyone, as the Prime Minister made clear in her first speech outside Downing Street…
As part of the new regulations, employers will be required to:
Publish their median gender pay gap figures
By identifying the wage of the middle earner, the median is the best representation of the ‘typical’ gender difference. Employers will be asked to use data from a ‘snapshot’ period in April to calculate this average.Publish their mean gender pay gap figures
By taking into account the full earnings distribution, the mean takes into account the low and high earners in an organisation – this is particularly useful [for ideologically-driven campaigning purposes] as women are often over-represented at the low earning extreme and men are over-represented at the high earning extreme…The new gender pay gap mandatory reporting requirements are part of wider work the Government is doing to support women [my emphasis] in the workplace. This includes £5 million to increase returnships, offering 30 hours of free childcare, and introducing shared parental leave and new rights to request flexible working. There is also extensive cross-Government work to get more women into the top jobs at the UK’s biggest companies and to get more girls taking STEM subjects at school. [my emphasis]
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Justice for Men & Boys 
I’ve said it tons of times, the so-called gender pay gap is about female lifestyle choices, hours not worked and responsibilities not taken. It will take about ten years to show up, assuming the individual cases concerned are tracked, but I would fully expect the pay and prospects of men taking SPL to lag behind that of those who don’t.
If we take “work/life balance” as a continuum with those who prioritise work as 10s and those who are only there in body for the minimum possible time as 1s, then the higher you score on the continuum the higher your pay is going to be. Hardly rocket science.
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I was looking for the link where mothers who want to stay with their babies after 3months can be reported as working against “breaking the glass ceiling”. Obviously the goal is to completely eliminate motherhood or demand women work extra hard to both earn the same as men while raising their children. Also guess in the long term they want kids to be turned in as wards of the state – in the meantime the difficult task of rearing them is going to be outsourced to those who are not subject to these expectations – immigrants and unemployed.
Alternatively I would suggest adding a monetary value to raising a functional follow up generation and using this to balance the books, I bet the inequality might tilt into the other direction.
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I’m always a little chary of assuming that MPs are really fully aware of such things. Certainly in Local Gov. much of what Council’s actually do is in the hands of the “officers” (the local civil service) . Every bit of this sounds like its from Civil Servants. The minister may be pulling all the strings but I wonder sometimes. It is probably truer than we like to think that who ever we vote for we always get “the Government” . Hence the importance of those MPs that do actually read what is written and do prod. ministers. And indeed of J4MB to highlight such stuff. I’m willing to lay money that very few have read any of this. This has all the hallmarks of an administrative and expensive imposition on businesses grown out of “call me Dave’s” wish to be seen to “do something” without any thought at all to the practicalities..
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‘The minister may be pulling all the strings but I wonder sometimes.‘
I prefer to think of the average minister as a brainless puppet whose strings are broken and whose intellectual limbs therefore wave about wildly, while the brighter ones know that their strings are pulled in a way that gives the illusion that they are in charge. There aren’t many bright ones.
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‘ … offering 30 hours of free childcare … ‘
It isn’t free though, is it, and we know who is going to be made to pick up the bill. That’s right, the tax payer, 78% of whom, in money terms, are men (perhaps a higher percentage of nett tax payers).
Another ‘heads she wins tails he loses’ situation for women who want more for less and something for nothing.
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This is an impossible task. The majority of women do not want to work the long hours and abandon their kids care, and majority of men will never reduce their hours down the ones women work because they care too much about supporting their families and they have to make up for the short all in income from their partner’s less hours. If everyone is on flexible hours to suit their family who is going to work the unsociable hours? men of course, who then should get better pay. The feminists would probably want that stopped too sayings unsociable pay is unfair on women that don’t work it. So without gross unfairness (to men mainly) this is a pointless policy.
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Looked at from feminists’ perspectives, this is far from a ‘pointless policy’, hence why they’ve brought it about. Firms will have to report a gender pay gap of x% and £y,000 p.a., and will be shamed into providing ‘solutions’ to the non-existent ‘problem’. Obvious approaches from the female geniuses in HR will be to inflate (over time) the incomes of the jobs mainly done by women, such as undemanding admin in pleasant surroundings, and deflate (over time) the incomes of the more challenging jobs – often in unpleasant and/or dangerous conditions, or requiring unsocial hours, or lengthy periods spent away from home – mainly done by men. A win/win outcome for feminists, then.
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I remember a time when the offical median pay gap was around 13%. So how can it now be at an all time low of 18%? They changed the way it was calculated. It used to be the median difference between men and women who work full time, but now it is calculated as the median difference between all men and women in work. So at least 5% of the difference is because part-time work does not pay as well as full-time work.
Also if you look at the ONS report on the page gap, it says clearly that the official pay gap does not compare like with like, and that if you adjust for relevant factors like job role, experience and qualifications there is no male-female pay gap.
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