An Argument Against State Action to Close Wage Gap - Building Gender Balanced Business

As the Labour Government readies legislation aimed at helping companies redress the wage gap in Britain, Professor Shackleton, author of “Should We Mind the Gap? Gender Pay Differentials and Public Policy”, presents his case that discrimination is not the cause of the 17 per cent more per hour that men earn vs. women in the UK.

• Men are more likely to be made redundant, or laid off, than women, Shackleton argues, and suffer more accidents, and thus higher pay compensates for those risks.

• Women sentence themselves to lower pay through their choices of professions — if more were engineers, he argues, rather than interested in public or voluntary lines of work, their pay would be higher.

• Women also fail to demand (what men deem to be) appropriate salaries when taking jobs, a difference Shackleton does not consider to be the responsibility of the employer or state.

• Any comparison of the wage gap against other countries, he argues, is flawed because other countries have different labor restrictions that limit or otherwise affect women’s participation in the labor force, and thus can magnify or reduce their wage gaps relative to the UK.

• Finally, or actually firstly, Shackleton notes that ethnicity and sexual orientation can result in sharply different, even reversed, subcategories of wage gap. And he argues that with women’s education and lifestyle choices changing, the wage gap will not only fix itself, but eventually be to the disfavor of men.

Thus, he argues in The Times that no change is necessary, and he decries the proposed state remedy, which comes with the support of 8 in 11 Britons, as “legislative flimflam”.

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