counterblast

WOMEN are paid 20% less than their male rivals. The Equal Opportunities Commission is irate and perplexed. It is not only unlawful to pay less it is stupid. If these disparities are true why do they persist?

Business is as rational a procedure as you can find. Markets are blind to various prejudices because they are seeking out profits. True a proprietor may have a mass of silly views in his noddle but he is at a competitive disadvantage if he deploys his atavistic ideas in the market place. There is profound wisdom in Nelson Mandela's insight that "Markets are colour blind".

So why are women paid one fifth less than men performing identical tasks? Something must be going on that is unexplained. It may be they are indeed worth less. I doubt any personnel officer could try to argue a woman's dexterity or brains are of less use to the employer in any one day or week. Yet, over years and across the country, the EOC reports uniform findings. It is too easy to say this is mysogny or foolishness. I suspect women are found to be worth less for reasons that are substantive if difficult to detect.

The mix or risk and reward that is a contract or offer of employment may carry cultural baggage but markets are clearing mechanisms. If women, in general, were worth as much as men they would be paid the same. There are roles which are purely commission related. Advertising sales persons, insurance and pensions advisers, telemarketing teams are all paid identical rates based purely on sales performance. They too report women earn less.

Of course there are exceptions. Some women have the mix of flair or other mysterious qualities that mark them out as worth more than their male colleagues at the next desk. But that 20% average gap seems remarkably consistent.

The crashingly obvious element is women drop out of the job market to have their children and do not return until infancy is passed. Yet statisticians can deduct the maternity element from the figures. The 20% lag is still there. It is a curiosity not explained by raging at the cupidity or sexism of employers.

THE mirage, the statistically average woman, does seem to be truly worth less. Actuaries in their cold and calculating manner point out that as women live longer they are tending to work the same number of years but the definition of work includes the mix of roles of domesticity and motherhood. If markets are rational perhaps something is going on undetected by the brittle rationalism of the EOC.

I asked two personnel folk I know why they persist in paying less and they answered 'it is perfectly simple'. Women were more amenable and biddable. Can it really be then women are more timid and more grateful for a job however underpaid? My hunch is experts are usually wrong. Women are paid less because they deserve less.

I am not arguing this in a curmudgeonly "a woman's place is in the home" daftness. Something more elusive is at work. My intuition is women have more capacious souls and concern themselves with more than employment. In this sense their 20% shortfall is a trade off for the greater, if intangible, rewards of womanhood.

If you take an employer as enlightened and as committed to equal opportunities as Glasgow University, women are found at the lower end of all the scales and the proportion holding professorial chairs is 8%. So, even when an employer tries to be open, progressive and fair they still exhibit the filtering processes that brain-dead manufacturers do.

It is easy to point out men have more testosterone and it is their body chemistry as much as their bank managers that insist on higher pay packets. It is too easy to argue families represent a spontaneous division of labour that is a continuum from the woman tending the fire in the cave while the men hunted, through to the women spinning while the men ploughed.

Each enterprise in Scotland is in daily combat with its rivals. If women were worth the same as men they would be paid the same. Markets cannot afford prejudices.

Perhaps time will change the texture of expectations. The EOC has a provocative advert exhorting parents to pay less pocket money to their daughters. The next generation may close the gap but my hunch remains women have better things to do than work. That is why they remain worth less.

Peter Clarke is a former pupil of St Columba's School for Girls, Kilmalcolm (true)

Copyright 1999
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.