Closing gender pay gap about privilege, not equality. By Janet Albrechtsen.
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. …
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 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.
That’s one part of the bureaucracy we can get rid of completely.
Even more privileges for white middle and upper class women? Oh the fraud.
The agency’s prime concern is closing the “gender pay gap”. …
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. …
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. …
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. …
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. …
Remember how feminists used to complain that is was unfair when there were fewer women at university than men? And now that 60% of university students are women, they say nothing about the inequity? Same for wages:
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.
Same work, but more pay for women. It’s only fair, say the feminists.
Btw, I’ve noticed that 90% of the prison population is male. Why haven’t the feminists been demanding equity in jails? How are they going to remedy it — let men go, or put more women in jail?
