Closing gender pay gap about privilege, not equality

‘The fraud sets in when the Workplace Gender Equality Act, and this agency, try to leverage the laudable, simple aim of equal pay to the much more complex issue of the gender pay gap.’

If misleading and deceptive conduct by a government agency were an Olympic sport, Australia’s Workplace Gender Equality Agency would lock in the gold medal. You have to admire its chutzpah for the shameless way it ignores critical facts. That has as much to do with the ideology underpinning its foundation as the ideology and aspirations of the activists in charge.

Is the Morrison government brave enough to use its announced review of the Workplace Gender Equality Act to abolish this derailed agency, or at minimum fundamentally rein in its powers and purpose? It’s a big ask from a government that runs shy of reforming government-funded social engineers.

How about getting rid of this bureaucracy because it adds no value; indeed, is a hurdle to increasing productivity when the country desperately needs a boost on that front?

The agency’s submission to the review into the Workplace Gender Equality Act, released last week, lists 31 demands for sweeping new jurisdictions so it can interfere with the management of more companies and bury employers in a blizzard of even more paper. In line with its delusions of grandeur, the director of the agency wants the title of CEO.

This megalomaniac submission provides the Morrison government with all the ammunition it needs to curb or close down a bureaucracy that wants to further control our workplaces with its dishonest gender ideology. This agency should have copped a clip around the ear from government long ago. It has long played fast and loose with the truth about critical concepts in this area.

The agency’s prime concern is closing the “gender pay gap”. In August it claimed that the gender pay gap had risen from 13.4 per cent to 14.2 per cent. The agency defines the gender pay gap as the “difference between the average earnings of women and men in the workforce” based on the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ calculations of average weekly earnings for full-time employees.

The agency says the “gender pay gap is the result of social and economic factors that combine to reduce women’s earning capacity over their lifetime”. It lays the blame on factors such as discrimination and bias, men and women working in different industries, lack of workplace flexibility, high rates of part-time work for women, women’s time out of the workplace for caring responsibilities and women’s greater share of unpaid work.

However, even the agency agrees that the gender pay gap “is not the difference between two people being paid differently for work of the same or comparable value, which is unlawful. This is called ‘equal pay’.”

Paying a woman less than a man for the same job because of her sex has been outlawed by sex discrimination legislation for nearly 50 years and is prohibited by adverse action provisions of the Fair Work Act.

Equal pay is demonstrably an important political right. If the remit of the agency were limited to defending equal pay, I, for one, would heartily support whatever reasonable resources the agency needs to that end. So long as it does so fairly. As Lisa Wilkinson discovered, being a woman doesn’t entitle you to claim pay discrimination where there are excellent commercial reasons for differential pay.

The fraud sets in when the Workplace Gender Equality Act, and this agency, try to leverage the laudable, simple aim of equal pay to the much more complex issue of the gender pay gap. Not only do they not tell you what social change is needed to close the gender gap, but they pretend it is essentially caused by men, oppression or discrimination.

Neither the act nor the agency mention the varied and complex factors that challenge their men-equal-oppression ideology.

A more honest analysis of the gender pay gap would point to the economic consequence of the aggregate of all the differences that exist between men and women – their physiology, different skills and interests, different choices made about education and jobs, how hard and how long they choose to work and under what conditions.

The truth is that eliminating the gender pay gap requires a magic wand to abolish all differences between the sexes – whether stemming from physiology, culture, or preferences – that contribute to the gender pay gap. If you think socialism sucks, what this agency has in store, in its submission, is far worse. Tough luck if you believe in “vive la difference” when it comes to the sexes.

Here is the other dishonest part. Without a magic equalising wand – and if you accept that women have different physical and emotional attributes to men, may want to do different courses to men at university or TAFE, may prefer different jobs and industries, and may want a different work-life balance – you can close the gender pay gap only by paying women more than men even though some women may have less experience, skills and commitment to the workplace.

In other words, when this agency demands that the gender pay gap be closed without eliminating differences in the choices women make, it is demanding privilege, not equality, in the wage setting.

For example, if a 40-year-old man has worked at a firm for 10 years as a middle manager, while his 40-year-old female peer has had only five years at the same management level because she decided to leave the workplace for five years to have and raise little children, should they be paid the same? Assuming both started with equal skills and education, and the employer gave annual pay rises, you would expect the man to accrue greater experience and skills, not to mention a higher wage after 10 pay increases, versus the woman’s five pay increases and five years away from work.

While activists might think that revenge is sweet, they should be honest about their plan. It is about privilege, not equality. And consequently, the fine political right to equal pay becomes a casualty of closing the gender pay gap.

Most of us didn’t sign up for radicalised, unelected bureaucrats to socially engineer a workplace to reflect their blinkered and dishonest ideology about gender equality. Given that the Morrison government said barely a week ago that governments should now get out of people’s lives, it’s time to abolish this runaway Workplace Gender Equality Agency.

After all, the only thing worse than a meddling government is an interfering, unelected activist bureaucracy trying to change the world by stealth.