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Equality minister Harriet Harman has set out plans to allow firms to discriminate in favour of female and ethnic minority job candidates.

BBC News, Harman pushes discrimination plan

Harriet Harman - the Deputy Leader and Chair of the UK’s Labour Party, the Minister for Women, the Leader of the House of Commons, the Lord Privy Seal, and the Head of the Government Equalities Office - has proposed plans to introduce legislation that will make it possible for employers to discriminate on grounds of sex. Not simply possible, in fact; Harman expects that this legislative change will alter significantly the pattern of employment and pay in the UK, which it can do only if employers are encouraged to use the new law to discriminate on grounds of sex in order to combat … er … sex discrimination.

In stating her case Harman has repeatedly made the following claim:

Part-time women receive 40% less pay than full-time men. Do you think that that’s because they are 40% less intelligent, less committed, less hard-working, less qualified? It’s not the case.

The Guardian, Harman vows to tackle ‘entrenched discrimination’ in the workplace

The BBC repeats these figures without remark or comment on its website and the claim was also made on the BBC’s politics talk-show, ‘Question Time’ on the 26th June by Yvette Cooper, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury.

Cheerleading Harman on, Johann Hari of The Independent makes just the mistake Harman is inviting people to make with her misuse of data:

The facts are plain: women in full-time work earn 17 per cent less than men. Women in part-time work earn 40 per cent less.

Johann Hari, The Independent, Harman could yet give Labour its legacy

The Fawcett Society, which calls itself ‘the UK’s leading campaign for equality between women and men‘ deliberately reproduces the confusion in its false statement that:

Women working full-time are paid on average 17% less an hour than men (or 36% less if they work part-time)

The Fawcett Society

Let’s take a look at the data. The figures of interest - the real figures - are these:

Source: Office of National Statistics, 2006 Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE)
Analysis by All Employees via Tim Worstall, Why is Jo Revill Lying? and EQSQ.com, Vivre La Différence, The Gender Pay Gap in the UK

So there are pay gaps. There is a part-time pay gap and a gender pay gap. Part-time workers as a whole earn less per hour than full-time workers; part-time male workers earn less, on average, than both full-time female workers and full-time male workers. The biggest pay gap is that between male full-time and male part-time workers.

The gap between men and women is much less than the 40% claimed by Harman. Although she is reported as saying, Female part-time workers still earned 40% less per hour than their full-time male counterparts, her figure of 40% is not comparing counterparts at all - it’s not comparing like with like. She compares part-time female workers with full-time male workers with the intention of persuading voters of her case by exaggerating the pay gap. The inflated figure of 40% is produced by combining the two pay gaps - sex and part-item/full-time - and rounding up. Harman’s exaggeration and misuse of the data is demagogic .

It’s worth bearing in mind that the figures presented here don’t compare the same or similar jobs - they are mean gross pay across all jobs. There are numerous reasons why part-time work is paid less than full-time, one being that part-time workers are more expensive to an employer.

There are many reasons why women are paid less than men and one contributing factor will indeed be plain, old-fashioned, direct discrimination; which is illegal  - at least until Harman’s new legislation is approved.

Some of the pay gap will be attributable to factors other than direct discrimination; factors like individual choice and different attitudes to careers. Women still tend to take lower-paid jobs than men. Women, not men, take maternity leave. Woman take more time off work sick. Women have children and take more time off work to look after them. Women make career choices that fit better with their family needs.

As Thomas Sowell observes:

Men and women do not work the same number of hours. They do not work in the same occupations. They do not work continuously the same, and so on…I found that young male doctors make considerably more than young female doctors. But, when I dug into it a little deeper, I discovered that young male doctors work an average of 500 hours a year more than young female doctors. Obviously, a doctor that works 500 extra hours is going to make more money than the other doctor.

And finally it’s worth reflecting that any particular pattern of wealth distribution isn’t in itself an indication of some injustice done that demands redress.