I agree, but I know of an awful lot of people in the political arena who are willing to give the impression that this is so. Harriet Harman, the EHRC and various others like Katherine Rake and Polly Toynbee come to mind.

That whole nonsense about the “part time pay gap” being 37% for example, when in fact women working part time get paid slightly more than men working part time.

The whole nonsense over the TUC (in at least one report) using the mean pay gap when the ONS keeps pointing out that we should all be using the median….in fact, in one TUC report (actually, Scottish TUC I think) there was a footnote pointing this out, but still the wrong average was used.

1) I disagree with simply because in markets prices are set by supply and demand. If there are more women willing to work for less money well, so be it.

2) Sure, something I’ve been arguing a long time. Which leads of course to the point that extending maternity leave will lead to an increase in the gender pay gap….something seemingly that the TUC hasn’t quite grasped yet.

3) Sure…and perhaps this is just the division of labour within a household. Maybe this is even what people choose themselves.

4) See 1). The Women at Work Commission for example pointed out that it costs more to employ part timers and job sharers than it does full timers. Higher employment costs will necessarily lead to lower wages.

5) Certainly was true. Not so sure now. The majority of those entering university are now female, the majority of those graduating are, the majority of entrants into the traditional professions (military excepted) are female. It’s entirely consistent with the evidence available to us that this part of the problem has already been solved: we simply have to wait a generation.

It’s also true that 2) and 3) speak to the same human capital problem….

Some agreements and some disagreements.

I’m not sure that your gender analogy works very well. People don’t have the choice of being men or women, they do (to some extent) about whether to work in the public or private sector.

You seem to suggest that those of us concerned about the gender pay gap think it is all due to women doing the same job being paid less than a man doing the same job. I don’t know of anyone who thinks that it is as simple as that.

Here are some other factors:
1) jobs dominated by women (such as those involved in caring) are less valued.
2) women miss out on promotion and career development because they take career breaks.
3) women bear an unfair share of domestic labour and caring responsibilities and therefore can’t make the extra commitment required to get promotion
4) part time jobs (dominated by women) are not properly valued.
5) girls are not encouraged to have the same aspirations and career goals as boys.

But I agree that differences in human capital are important, and that those of us who want to see greater gender equality need to consider issues other than direct discrimination, just as those who try to explain discrimination away by human capital explanations need to accept that there is both direct and indirect discrimination in the labour market.

Read the Women and Work Commission report for a view endorsed by union and employer reps: http://www.equalities.gov.uk/pdf/Shaping%20a%20Fairer%20Future%20report.pdf

The gender pay gap is narrower in the public sector as Frank Eich’s paper shows, and I’m all for analysing why this is.

I accept that pay is not the only issue when comparing public and private sectors, but I did say that in my original post. My aim was not to draw any particular policy conclusions, but simply ask what lay behind the higher mean pay in the public sector.

As I’ve said before I prefer the narrower differentials in the public sector, recent outrage about those few public servants who earn very big salaries boil down to the public sector trying to ape the private sector.

As a member of that small state brigade might I point out the real point of interest here.

When people look at the gender pay gap (you, Fawcett, EHRC etc, etc) we are told that the simple existence of a pay gap proves that there is discrimination we must do something about. When people like me point out that the male and female worforces are quite different, with different levels of human capital etc, we’re told this isn’t relevant.

When we look at public v. private sector workers and note that there is a pay gap which is obviously an example of preferential treatment (or discrimination for the hard core) we’re told that this is irrelevant because the human capital attributes of the public and private sector workforces are quite different and this must be taken into account.

Which is of course what enrages: the cake and eat it syndrome.

Either differences in human capital are important when we compare differences in wages or they are not. As it happens I tend to think that they are, thus that your analysis above is to some extent reasonable (although there’s a lot more than just pay rates to consider, like pensions, hours of work, workload, job security, holiday pay etc) but we do have to then apply exactly the same analytical methods to hte gender pay gap.

Which, in politics (despite what academics have been able to show about the contribution of human capital differences to it) we don’t.