Why I’m celebrating the gender pay gap
This obsession among elite women misses the point: many women don’t want to work like men do.
In anticipation of International Women’s Day, I did my small bit for gender wowserism. Sitting in a pub in North America, I confiscated one of the Trivial Pursuit cards from a little box sitting on our table next to the salt and pepper shakers. Here was the question under the “Life & Times” category: What group of 36 million people did a 1963 Northwestern University study find to be a menace on the highway?
Answer: Women.
I shoved the dog-eared card in my jeans pocket because bogus research about women deserves to be binned. In the same vein, I am imploring Peter Dutton to do women and men a favour and axe the taxpayer-funded Workplace Gender Equality Agency. This bureaucracy’s gendered assertions about women are, frankly, as rude and crude and outdated as Northwestern University’s “research”.
WGEA’s agenda has nothing to do with real pay discrimination because it’s been illegal for 50 years to pay a woman less than what a man earns in the same job. WGEA’s “gender pay equality” campaign is a bogus agenda built on bogus numbers – comparing the average pay of all women in all jobs with the average wage of all men in all jobs.
Portraying this pay gap as a terrible thing for women doesn’t begin to capture the truth about women and work. The truth would kill their story and lots of cushy careers at WGEA.
There is something profoundly good about the gender pay gap. Behind the WGEA’s bogus numbers is the reality of women’s work and life choices. For as long as we have a gender pay gap, we know that millions of women are choosing not to drop everything for a career. That’s worth celebrating, not hiding from. As one of our readers wrote this week: “Most couples need two incomes these days and they make choices along the way on who should take a lead and who may go a bit slower while kids are young. This also changes as they move through the kids’ life stages. Rigid old school … dogma ignores this and assumes women drop everything for career (which is what the originators of this dogma did) – it is completely outdated”.
When the reality of women’s choices in the 21st century is not mentioned by WGEA on its annual day of gender pay gap shame, you know the organisation is infected with ideology.
And those who trot out WGEA “research”, with nary a mention of female choices, are letting the side down too.
The gender pay gap has long been an obsession among elite women for the benefit of elite women, prompting an obvious question: is even part of their agenda to ensure already privileged educated middle-class women get paid as much as men but for less work, or get senior jobs that they wouldn’t otherwise secure on a merit system? These are confronting questions, but it’s high time we had more honesty.
The WGEA agenda goes beyond wowserism. It’s demeaning to millions of women and men who make many choices about the way they live and work. The gender activists and their supporters have concocted a shallow stereotype about women in order to complain about a gender pay gap. They assume we want to work like men.
I didn’t. Millions of other women don’t either. There is no shame in that. We put aside, slowed down, switched careers – and big pay packets – to raise our children. Motherhood is not the only driver, either. Many women just value work/life balance more than men. From the instant they receive their HSC or ATAR scores, and for the rest of their lives, many women appear to make very different choices to men.
This explains why, despite years of sustained haranguing and hectoring by gender activists, there is still a gender pay gap. Those damn women are still, in 2025, choosing to work differently. The gender activists say the enemy of gender pay equality is systemic discrimination and other structural biases. But what if the enemy of the pay parity is women – the millions of women who choose to work differently? When WGEA bureaucrats ignore this, they demean women.
If the gender pay gap disappears, that would be a sign of one of two things. Either women have freely decided, or been pressured by gender activists, to believe that they want to be in the same jobs, for the same hours, working at the same intensity as men. Or it will signal that women are being paid the same as men to do less work. Either outcome is rotten for at least one sex or the other, and probably both.
Naive idealists like to think a “cultural shift” will eliminate the gender pay gap. Like the female fund manager who said a while back that we could get rid of stark pay gaps between men and women in bonus-heavy industries such as investment banking, private equity and asset management if men were encouraged to prioritise a work-life balance so that men and women all worked similarly civilised hours.
That sounds terrific. But there are reasons nice-sounding solutions are rarely real ones. These industries necessarily attract Type A personalities who thrive on adrenaline and long hours and would resent being told to work less hard so their less-driven colleagues don’t suffer at bonus time.
It also assumes, wrongly, that these workplaces can dictate their own pace of work. Working conditions in many industries are determined by their customers and by their competitors. An investment bank that tells its clients it will turn around work at its pace, not when the client needs it, or as quickly as its competitors, is headed for insolvency.
This is why all the sanctimonious bleating by investment banks and management consultants for decades now about gender equality in senior jobs has not made a jot of difference to the gender pay gap. Leading consultancies McKinsey, BCG and Bain all have female chief executives. Yet, none of them are gender pay gap role models. Using WGEA’s ham-fisted measurement, at McKinsey the average total remuneration pay gap is 44.3 per cent for financial year 2023-24. At Bain it’s 44 per cent; at BCG it’s 38.3 per cent.
Investment banks are worse. The gap at Morgan Stanley is 58.6 per cent, Goldman Sachs 50.2 per cent, and UBS 48.5 per cent. At Macquarie Bank, the gender pay gap is 41.8 per cent despite female chief executive Shemara Wikramanayake topping Australia’s highest-paid CEO list with a pay packet of $29.4m.
This week, Wikramanayake said the relatively low number of female executives at Macquarie “should have been fixed a long time ago” and there is a “heck of a lot of work to do” on attracting women to finance.
But how? There are no barriers to entry in financial services. Girls are shooting ahead of boys at school; they can choose whatever course they want at university, and apply for jobs in the same way as men. But clearly, fewer women than men want to work in these kinds of jobs.
The best work Wikramanayake can do is continue being a brilliant role model for women who want that kind of life.
Logically, if fewer women than men want to work in senior finance jobs, logically that means that men and women with the same skill sets won’t be competing in the same numbers for certain jobs. If you then insist on a 50/50 gendered workplace, you’re saying we will promote women over better-qualified men.
Some gender activists don’t realise this is the inevitable consequence of their crusade. But those who do intend this result should have the courage of their convictions, and come clean about trying to affix a deliberate and permanent structural bias in the workplace in favour of women. Or, at least in preferred sections of the workplace – you don’t hear many demands for gender equality in garbage collection.
WGEA and its supporters are unshackled from logic or honesty. But are we to be a society unshackled from the very virtues that drive genuine progress? Do we really want a system which demands equal pay for unequal work contributions? Come to think of it, if the price of eliminating gender pay gaps is a sedate and underperforming economy, do we really want that? Australia’s waning productivity is a huge issue. Former Reserve Bank governor Philip Lowe identified this recently as the real cause of the nation’s cost-of-living crisis.
When WGEA thumps the table about the gender pay gap and gender equality, it’s worth remembering this taxpayer-funded outfit is a case of “do as I say, not as I do”. In 2024, WGEA paid an average salary of $111,746 to women and $106,141 to men. The agency head is female, the second in charge is female, at the next level, 10 of 12 employees are women, and one level further down, 15 of 21 staff are female. At the lowest level, there are three men to two women.
The WGEA boss says they are always trying to recruit more men – but what if men don’t want to do this work?
At WGEA, most of the 50 employees work from home. Twenty-two per cent work from home five days a week; 10 per cent four days a week; 38 per cent three days a week; 18 per cent two days a week; and 2 per cent one day a week. No wonder so many women work there.
Men and women are free to make different choices about work and life. Why don’t we celebrate that – on our way to demolishing the divisive and dodgy WGEA bureaucracy that refuses to do so.
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