Our thanks to James for this.

We’re very fortunate in the quality of commentators on this website, and it’s always worth checking them out. Yesterday we posted comments by Groan on the ‘gender pay gap’, PutinCooksSocks left comments, and Groan responsed. We start with PutinCooksSocks:

A 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.

Straightforward 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.

Groan responded:

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”.

I’ve been told of an interesting manifestation of this phenomenon in the state education sector. Women are less inclined than men to apply to be head teachers, but more inclined than men to be deputy head teachers. You will not be surprised to learn that deputy head teachers are paid almost as much as head teachers.

An excellent piece on TCW by David Kurten. His brief bio on the site:

David is a UKIP London Assembly Member and UKIP’s Education and Apprenticeships Spokesman.

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.

A tip of the hat to Melissa Kite, a journalist, for her honest account of interactions between politicians and female journalists when she worked in Westminster. An extract:

Look, it was a long time ago and I’m practically an old lady now, in media years. I’ve no need to keep up the pretence that I was a blameless naïf in my 20s and 30s when I was an ambitious young lobby hack. I want to make my confession. I want to explain why I did it.

I took advantage of men to get ahead, and because I enjoyed it. And yes, Michael Fallon was one of them.

He and I used to book our party conference dinners months in advance. I looked forward to them as a highlight because I knew the gossip would be flowing as freely as the wine. I would book the best place in town, turn up in a smart outfit and grab hold of Mr Fallon on arrival, covering him in mwah mwahs…

Look, what I’m saying is, women are not always passive victims. I certainly wasn’t. I enjoyed the charged atmosphere of politics. I thrived on it as well as the men did; more than some of them maybe.

Our thanks to Mike P for this, and several tips of the hat to Sir Roger Gale.

Outrageous. Yet utterly predictable. The CPS will do everything it can to avoid bringing a prosecution for MGM, and had the mother approved of the procedure, it would still have been illegal under the Offences Against the Person Act 1861. No exemptions to the law are allowed for legal or cultural considerations. The arrest of Dr Balvinder Mehat and the boy’s father and paternal grandmother on suspicion of committing (and conspiring to commit) Grievous Bodily Harm with Intent (maximum sentence – life imprisonment) was nothing more than a publicity stunt, following embarrassment at the CPS and Nottingham Police over their utter incompetence in the case. From the article:

According to the British Medical Association, male circumcision in the UK is generally assumed to be lawful provided there is valid consent.

It is WRONGLY ‘generally assumed to be lawful’.

The light at the end of the tunnel in this case is the outstanding lawyer seeking to bring a prosecution, Saimo Chahal QC. From the article:

Saimo Chahal QC (Hon) is appealing the Crown Prosecution Service’s decision and has written a 24-page letter, “outlining numerous defects in their decision-making process and evaluation of this case”.

She told the BBC: “The decision lacks any semblance of a considered and reasoned decision and is flawed and irrational.”

If prosecutors do not review their decision within 14 days, she said, the mother will “be obliged to take the matter before the administrative court for a determination of these very important issues, which need to be resolved not only for her personal case but also for the wider public interest issues that the case raises”.

Our thanks to Michael for this piece in the Express. For once, a piece on the ‘gender pay gap’ written by a male journalist. Extracts:

The Institute of Economic Affairs has shown that the so called pay gap between between men and women aged 22 to 39 is “negligible”…

The study, which involved data from the Office for National Statistics, appears to blow apart the claims made by the feminist Fawcett Society which says the pay gap is 14.1 per cent in favour of men…

The IEA report focussed on the Equal Pay Day campaign aimed at closing the alleged gap in wages and argued it was based on a “myth”.

Large companies are being required by law to publish their ‘gender pay gap’. We predict companies and public sector organizations will do the following to reduce it:

Promote women at the expense of more able men

Increase the remuneration of women solely, regardless of merit

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)

 

Well, I don’t know how this didn’t come to our attention before now.

In April 2014 we challenged Polly Neate, then Chief Executive of Women’s Aid, to retract seven lies and misleading statements made in an online discussion by Franki Hackett, a Women’s Aid spokeswoman who later won a Lying Feminist of the Month award for those lies and statements. Our blog piece on the matter is here. Predictably, Neate refused to retract them, or apologise. Regular followers of this blog will be only too aware of the duplicity of Polly Neate and Women’s Aid in downplaying the issue of male victims of domestic violence.

I was vaguely aware that the odious Ms Neate had left Women’s Aid in February, but had heard nothing of her since. It was by chance that today I discovered through a tiny piece in the Times that she’s been Chief Executive of Shelter, a charity campaigning for the homeless, for the past nine months. 90% of the street homeless in the UK are men. You will not be surprised by this page and others on the Shelter website, that the homeless are invariably described as ‘people’, not ‘overwhelmingly men’. What a disgusting thing to do, to appoint a woman who hates men as much as Polly Neate, to lead a charity for the homeless.

Just announced. Heaven forbid a disgraced female minister might be replaced by a male MP, though about 80% of Conservative MPs are men. Also from Guido:

Sarah Newton is made Minister of State at DWP and hotly tipped 2015 intaker Victoria Atkins becomes Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Home Office.

Hmm, does anyone notice any commonalities between these appointments by Theresa ‘this is what a feminist looks like’ May? No? Nor me.