Earlier today we published a piece on the ‘gender pay gap’, linking to an intelligent article on the matter by a male journalist in the Express. I made some predictions on how organizations will ‘solve’ the non-existent problem of the ‘gap’. A stalwart commentator on our blog pieces, Groan, has worked in the public sector for over 30 years, and he had some very interesting points to make in a comment we’ve published, they take up the remainder of this blog piece:
Your 3 things that result have been a feature of Public Services in England for a decade or more as the result of Union Pressure in a highly Unionised labour force. In fact recently there have been successful cases mounted by mainly male workers (Parks and Gardens, Hospital orderlies and maintenance, drivers) challenging the wholesale pay cuts they experienced as part of Equal Pay Reviews. Having worked in councils and the NHS for over 30 years I thought I’d list the “positive action” (direct discrimination is actually illegal) now embedded in HR practices in Public Services (the services that are “unrepresentative” of the population because their workforces are nearly 80% female!)
Promote women at the expense of more able men
This is done through offering women only coaching or confidence courses (“Women into Management” Etc.) and/or targeting paper qualifications (offering bursaries or day release to women). And putting both or either in the “Person Specification” as either desirable or essential.
Increase the remuneration of women solely, regardless of merit
One common way of doing this is by having job or Role “evaluations” for individual posts or creating new posts and giving higher weighting to office skills and/or exaggerating responsibility levels of administrative staff. Good examples of these are the ones that get into the papers where the Job has highly suspect titles. Usually these include words like “Culture”, “Interface” “Client relationships” and of course “Equality” or “Cohesion” . Frequently quite peripheral administrative or PR Jobs given exaggerated importance (and Salary) in a management structure.
Increase remuneration in disciplines largely staffed by women (including Human Remains), while reducing remuneration in disciplines largely staffed by men, over time (maybe giving men lower annual increases
The most common way of doing this is by having job or Role “evaluations” throughout the workforce and giving higher weighting to office skills and/or exaggerating responsibility levels of administrative staff. In effect demoting more “hands” on work (usually the male roles actually or figuratively “getting their hands dirty”) Hence in public services clerical and administrative jobs are very much better paid (at the moment) than the private sector equivalents.
We can expect to see all these as Companies try to “do something” . It will be interesting to see if those companies who have a reverse pay gap (which is quite likely in some law firms, publishing, fashion, health or care firms) feel compelled to do something.
As no one will tell them I do think organisations like yours could keep reminding men that direct discrimination is illegal and that some of the “positive action” can and has been challenged successfully. Frankly the best ally the feminists have is men’s ignorance of the rights they do have.
Justice for Men & Boys 
An further cause of any absolute difference in pay between men and women is the often overlooked concept of “survivor bias”.
Men take more risks. Sometimes, those risks pay off very well, and sometimes very badly. When risks pay off very well, the individual man can find himself very rich indeed. But if things go wrong, chances are he will end up getting the sack or sometimes even being killed at work.
Straightfoward averages of income will include the former but not the latter group of men, i.e. they will take into account the men who got rich, but not the men who got sacked or even killed. So the average will skew towards the rich men, and as usual the less fortunate men will be ignored.
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What a very good point…
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This sort of thing has long interested me and I have (trigger warning here) read a lot of Feminist Academic research on the “invention problem”. Put simply this is the problem that across history, anthropology and contemporary societies females are unbelievably rare as innovating, creating something new. This is put down to the much greater male capacity to take risks, repeatedly.
I’m interested in this as one of the most intractable problems in Social Work (confirmed in endless reports and reviews) is indecision and inaction due to deep reluctance to decide on a course of action and follow it through. At its core is a reluctance to be identified as the person who decided on a course of action. Now of course this is the reverse of male behaviour in which males generally are keen to be identified as the decision maker when they believe this shows their puissance. This of course is a big risk for it is clear who to blame if it goes wrong as it is to gain success if it goes right. They don’t have the “invention problem” but of course every invention or decision is a “risk”, of going wrong. By contrast my experience is that females work hard to avoid individual responsibility. Huge energy is devoted to meetings as a means of collective decision making and spreading the risk across “services”(other people in fact). The subtle working of this means that inertia is endemic and the small number of males do “rise” as they are managers and innovators rather than administrators of a system, which women are more comfortable with . Of course the result is that men achieve higher rank more readily but also are more exposed when something goes wrong, they are clearly responsible individually responsible and reap the rewards of “success” or gain support, events for potential “customers” outside the contrct.
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Excellent piece.
I too work in the public services and recognise a lot of what is said here.
Personally,I believe that the feminised trade union movement have a lot to answer for and as a result of such gave up my Unison membership due to total inaction on various issues……I wonder if more assistance would have been given if I was a female union member?
Since 1997 around 90% of newly created public sector jobs have been awarded to women but why aren’t the unions speaking out about this in relation to blatant male discrimination,after all,they always talk a good fight about fairness and equality for everyone?
It looks like the trade unions will never bite the feminised hand that feeds.
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I think it is that the remaining Unions with mass memberships are ones with female memberships. For all the current furore with rail and Transport Unions most of the mass membership Unions are in the public sector (Unison being an obvious giant) with others in retail and banking/finance also similarly “dominated” by women. Thus overall the Union “movement” is reflective of female workforces. And we know of course that females have a much stronger in group bias. So I think that really often the “feminist” actions of such unions are in reality less to do with any feminist theory so much as simply reflecting the interests, biases and concerns of women in general. With the theory in a way following the prejudice. Feminists can use this self interest to advance their general agenda, even though its often hypocritical . Most obviously in the widespread pressure from such unions to increase maternity leave, carers leave and flexible working to accommodate women’s preferences for time at home. A band wagon hopped onto by feminists who actually espouse the view that women should be work focussed and take as little time away from the career as possible!
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Good points.
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