Kathy Lette, Author (Australia)
I agree – because in a country as wealthy, well educated and liberal as Britain sexism should be unacceptable. More than 100 years since Emily Pankhurst tied herself to the railings, British women still don’t have equal pay (we’re getting 75 pence in the pound compared to men).
Jeebus. Even Polly has been forced to realise that the gender pay gap isn’t 25%.
This is quite without the point that we don’t really have a gender pay gap, we’ve a motherhood one. But even if you’re going to deliberately try to misread the statistics you cannot get to a 25% gap.
Also, getting Emmeline Pankhurst’s name wrong doesn’t indicate a particularly deep knowledge of the subject.
Mrs Pankhurst did n’t tie (in fact, chain) herself to the railings .One of her supporters did..
As an aside; some pensioner residents of one of my wife’s housing association schemes once came around to her office to protest against the ‘Victorian’ conditions she was imposing on them. They invited a local newspaper photographer along to capture them chaining themselves. To the railings. The problem was she had removed the railings and the gates about 12 months before. She joimed in the conversation on what might stand in for railings.
In the end they went down the local park for the photo.
Thomas Sowell repeats himself: http://m.townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2014/04/15/statistical-frauds-n1824357/page/full
Also, I know a chap who writes books who makes about 3k a year out if it (and has to get by on what he makes in his proper job).
Kathy Lette makes £100k a year in royalties – I smell endemic sexism!
She doesn’t care about facts
Is it true that women are particularly bad with numbers?
John77
I wonder if she gets her 25% by describing a full 10% of results as an “outlier” to be ignored, as did a certain charlatan you took apart yesterday.
DBC
‘Mrs Pankhurst did n’t tie (in fact, chain) herself to the railings .One of her supporters did..’
I hope that was consensual, otherwise it puts an entirely different light on the matter.
I take it you’ve not read much of her oeuvre, then, Mr Worstall..? 😉
Ironman
Loved this comment today:
“I am intrigued by reaction amongst the tax profession to what I wrote about Starbucks yesterday. You won’t be surprised to know that those who have commented have said what I wrote was wrong. That always seems to be the case, so there was nothing new there. ”
Perhaps if everyone is always pointing out you are wrong then you should reassess your work?
Call me a reactionary, but 100-odd years on from allowing women and the working classes to vote, isn’t it time we reviewed the results of this experiment in mass democracy?
Back in the bad old days, before any drooling simpleton was awarded the franchise merely for surviving to his 18th birthday, we had the greatest empire the world had ever seen. Britain was the global undisputed master in science, engineering, and military power.
We ruled a quarter of the planet with only a tenth of the mostly useless civil servants we employ now to mostly implement EU directives.
Instead of being lazy layabouts with no respect for their elders, children used to have productive jobs in factories, mines, and the navy.
There was no income tax, no VAT, no welfare state, no carbon taxes, no legion of elfin safety, planning, and environmental bureaucrats to stop you from starting a new enterprise.
The national debt was tiny, and most people could navigate daily life without having to come into contact with the state. Unless they committed a crime, in which case they were dealt with swiftly and harshly.
Now that we allow any Heat Magazine reading slackjaw or slackjawella to cast a vote, what are the results?
The state and its tentacles are everywhere, like a monster from Japanese porn.
We’re taxed up to our eyeballs, and yet the government is essentially bankrupt, having merrily run up the national debt into the trillions of pounds with no end in sight.
Despite all this crazy spending, our armed forces are a weak imitation of the army and navy that once dominated the world. It’s unlikely we could even retake the Falkland Islands if a hostile force invaded. We’d probably lose a war against Andorra, if they were up for it.
Half the population lives off the other half that actually works. We pay useless people to do antiproductive public sector jobs – jobs that actually make us all poorer by stifling innovation and enterprise – that is, when they’re not browsing Comment Is Free during office hours and complaining that they aren’t paid enough.
We pay the workshy Morlocks in our society to squeeze out hordes of genetically impoverished offspring and parade them on Jeremy Kyle’s Cirque Du Freak while people who work for a living worry about being able to afford a house and kids.
Criminals have more rights than their victims, the police pussyfoot around rioters, and one of the big issues of recent times has been about whether or not incarcerated murderers and kiddy fiddlers should have the vote. Not the rope, mind you, but the bloody vote.
So forgive me if I’m not impressed with references to the supposedly heroic attention-seeking dramas of the suffragists.
Had the statesmen of the time known what a monster mass democracy would unleash, how it would lead to a degenerate society where a gentleman can’t even light up a cheroot on a train or administer his cane to a street urchin without some teary-eyed imbecile crying to the authorities, they’d have had a quiet word with Mr Pankhurst and reminded him of his husbandly duty to keep his household under control.
My modest proposal is that voting should be restricted to property owning males. Everyone else can stick to voting for things they actually understand, like the X Factor or the latest poll in Heat Magazine.
Tim: Not only ill-informed, but generally stupid. Her “oeuvres’ are pathetically juvenile and what passes for humour is telegraphed from meters away. (Ad hominem alert). Above all, she is married to probably the world’s most pompous and self-regarding snob that Australia has ever exported. However, that such an airhead is asked to comment on such an equally air-headed bit of patently media-focused sewage is somehow most appropriate
@ Ironman
I suspect that she gets it by dividing total earned income of working women by total number of women and comparing it with the average income of working men. She states that 50% of the workforce are women and that they do 99% of housework which implies that less than zero housework is done in the more than 1% of dwellings that are occupied solely by men.
Also, getting Emmeline Pankhurst’s name wrong doesn’t indicate a particularly deep knowledge of the subject.,
She’s from Australia. What did you expect, knowledge or spelling ability?
Right, so if women really were paid 75p in the pound compared with men and were just as productive, we could expect to see massive male unemployment as employers scrambled to hire women instead of men.
Shedding 25% of your labour costs would be an irresistable offer to any business.
Is that happening?
Steve
No, because although the eeeeevil businesses are overcharging customers, avoiding tax, offshoring, offering BOGOFS, using child labour on zero hours contracts and generally destroying the world as we know it, their number one priority is always (and always will be) ensuring that women are put in their place. Money doesn’t come into it.
Didn’t you get the memo?
Right, so if women really were paid 75p in the pound compared with men and were just as productive, we could expect to see massive male unemployment as employers scrambled to hire women instead of men.M
There you go, using logic, just to prove a point. Typical man.
*folds arms in huffy way, sniffs as if trying not to cry*
GlenDorran – nobody tells me nuthin. I didn’t even get the memo about how cupcakes are fascist till the other day. Come to think of it, that bastard Mosley was always cramming cupcakes down his piehole and demanding that inferior cakes and pastries be rounded up.
Sam – Crikey. You have a point there.
Logic was invented by a hairy Greek misogynist called Aristotle.
According to extensive research I just did on Wikipedia, Aristotle was a hatey hateful hater and probably a rapist. Here’s what he said about women:
“more mischievous, less simple, more impulsive … more compassionate[,] … more easily moved to tears[,] … more jealous, more querulous, more apt to scold and to strike[,] … more prone to despondency and less hopeful[,] … more void of shame or self-respect, more false of speech, more deceptive, of more retentive memory [and] … also more wakeful; more shrinking [and] more difficult to rouse to action”
Therefore, logic is sexist.
Saw a very useful video by an American woman (forgotten where) on this very subject after Obongo declared the same difference in male/female wages.
It’s not just the time out for motherhood gap. It starts when women choose which occupations to go into. E.g. a female veterinarian will get less pay than a male aero-engineer.
Women tend to choose the softer, caring professions, but sadly they pay less.
@Eddy
Ouch! I couldn’t be arsed to write out “One of her supporters chained herself to the railings” You win.
However, if you can find a photo on the Net of the lady concerned, ( a Miss Nell !!), you will soon realise that nothing inappropriate was on offer.