Gender pay gap zealots care nothing for facts or fairness

“WGEA’s chosen measurement for the gender pay gap is unadjusted for anything that happens in the real world to explain differences between women and men,” writes Janet Albrechtsen.

If we are in the business of publicly naming and shaming gender pay gap scoundrels, then the Workplace Gender Equality Agency ranks as the worst.

Each year, this agency tops the list as worst offender when it comes to analysing the so-called gender pay gap. Each year we taxpayers pay these bureaucrats to churn out work that consistently defies logic, fairness and choice.

WGEA’s latest report, released at midnight on Monday, has taken an underlying fraud to a higher level of wickedness. Why? Because if you are going to publicly humiliate companies, you had better have the right set of numbers to justify that exercise.

Instead, WGEA data is as hollow as a drum, but that doesn’t stop it beating said drum for ideological purposes.

One killer line brings down this house of cards: the data does not compare men and women doing the same job in a company.

Think about that glaring omission given WGEA has the temerity to shame companies such as Qantas, Virgin Australia, Telstra, Woodside and Santos for being the worst offenders when it comes to the gender pay gap.

Suffice it to say that not only would none of the companies on WGEA’s name and shame list not pay men and women differently for the same jobs even accidentally, most of them go to great lengths, through careful pay audits, to ensure men and women doing the same job are paid the same money. The gender pay gap actually has nothing to do with equity or fairness or any similar concept. It is simply a smokescreen to force social change.

I am not going to recount WGEA figures because if you start at the wrong place you end somewhere up the garden path. And those who are of a fair mind should not buy into this fraud.

To illustrate, WGEA’s chosen model doesn’t account for the fact more women than men prefer to work less hours, that women choose different jobs than men – in other words, that women make different choices to men.

In other words, WGEA’s chosen measurement for the gender pay gap is unadjusted for anything that happens in the real world to explain differences between women and men.

Indeed, you’d be hard-pressed to find any serious attempt by WGEA’s bureaucrats to mention, let alone thoughtfully analyse, the different choices men and women might make. WGEA is so obsessed with asserting there are iniquitous structural inequities in our society that it is happy to doctor the data by excluding the choices of women to get to its result. For WGEA a flawed means justifies the ideological end: screaming each year about the gender pay gap and ramping up those screams by producing a list of worst offenders.

One of the dumbest defences of its flawed model is the claim by WGEA boss Mary Wooldridge that their chosen measurement is replicated internationally. That apparently makes it just fine. “The gender pay gap is a widely used, internationally recognised measure for gender equality,” Wooldridge said.

Consider that logic carefully. Never mind that the data is hollow, inaccurate tosh; it becomes legitimate if the same hollow, inaccurate tosh is replicated on a global scale. What WGEA appears to be saying is that the bigger this flawed agenda gets, the more untouchable and incontestable it is. It’s just as well we don’t use the same reasoning to justify international drug cartels.

WGEA chief executive Mary Wooldridge (R) and Finance Minister Katy Gallagher (L). Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Let me put forward a different view: reproducing something rotten again and again, across countries, doesn’t make it acceptable. It makes it worse. It means there is a grand fraud afoot.

So why is there global reliance on fake data? That’s the easy part.If WGEA and other similar activist agencies used more accurate measurements that factored in the different choices millions of women make, their agenda, activism and relevance would be in ruins. By excluding choices as relevant factors, WGEA is left with a gender pay gap caused by structural inequality. It gets to stay in business by claiming each year that the system is stacked against women and fairness.

Given that it has been illegal for more than 50 years to pay men and women different amounts for the same work, WGEA is clearly not interested in genuine pay equality. Its aim is to confect and cement an emotive-sounding cause to justify massive social change that suits its vision of a modern society.

But its dodgy numbers mean all it has done is create a straw man.

Those who lap up the naming and shaming WGEA data would do well to consider the massive, centralised, disempowering social change required to eliminate WGEA’s confected gender pay gap. There are two routes. Either we insist that women work more hours, do the same kind of work as men, regardless of their choices, or we need to pay women more for less work. Which one of these social “reforms” is genuinely equitable, let alone attractive?

Eliminating differences between men and women that contribute to different pay outcomes means effectively mandating that men and women must be 50-50 in all jobs (not just cushy jobs but garbos and gravediggers too), that men and women must be 50-50 in all university or training courses, that men and women must split 50-50 all domestic and childminding work, and must share all holidays or absences from work 50-50. We would need to eliminate differences in choices and attitudes to life, work and family between men and women.

At the moment, the gender pay gap – as defined by WGEA – exists mainly because many women choose to work in lower-paid jobs. Therefore, to “fix” this gender pay gap, we need a societal change to reduce the number of women in lower-paid jobs. Does that mean cleaning out women from the ranks of clerical and admin roles and any other lower-paid work? Does it mean getting rid of many women in HR departments too because only that will lead to a 50-50 gender equal workplace? Only through social engineering on this colossal scale can we make men and women statistically the same in an aggregate sense to satisfy WGEA’s agenda.

How about WGEA, with 30 female employees out of a workforce of 32 as at June last year, clean up its in-house gender inequality first before pointing the finger at others. Or has WGEA inadvertently discovered that there are some jobs that more women than men prefer to do?

There is another way to gender pay parity that the boffins at WGEA probably prefer – simply pay women more even if they work less, and regardless of what kind of work they do. That might be social utopia for the gender equity ideologues. Revenge is a long time coming, some will say.

I’m willing to bet that in the real world, women want to continue making their own choices, thank you very much, to work less, to work in different fields and in different roles.

Equally, it’s not hard to guess that men might come to resent employers who paid women more money than men for working fewer hours than men.

Either way, the change WGEA has in store for us to reach its version of gender pay parity is ugly in a free society. WGEA, noisy local accomplices such as Chief Executive Women and sister organisations globally use “gender parity” to demand equality of outcome, not equality of opportunity. Their “data” is nothing more than politics, focusing on aggregate outcomes, not individual preferences.

It is, simultaneously, a laughable and depressing insight into the current state of the Western world that we countenance taxpayer-funded bureaucracies filled with a majority of senior female bureaucrats (so much for in-house gender equality) who behave like chorus girls on a global stage singing from the same song sheet of fraudulent numbers.

Like central planners from previous eras, the gender pay gap ideologues are the latest bunch of we-know-better-than-you emoters who sideline facts, fairness and individual choices.