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Tosspottery, tosspottery

Men are still paid vastly more than women across many jobs and regions despite firms “tinkering around the edges” to try to close the gap, according to a report.

Where men and women are doing the same job, they are usually paid almost the same – although men still have a slight advantage, earning an average of 1.6% more. However, the real gap is caused by the scarcity of women at the highest and best-paid levels of industries such as oil and gas, technology and life sciences.

So men and women choose to do different things with their lives and this is a scandal, right?

48 thoughts on “Tosspottery, tosspottery”

  1. Of course. Your choices should be delegated to right-thinking people like Maev, so she can make sure you make them correctly.

    For an interpretation of “correctly” that is all to do with policy driven statistics creation, not anything to do with what you want or need.

    We are striving for equality of outcomes, folks, not equality of opportunity. How many times do you have to be told?

  2. Hence the love of Cuba’s $20 per month maximum salary and ration card.

    Despite the fact that this puts the inmates of that benighted island within the realms of the *absolutely* poor… $0.67 per day + a ration card, ffs….

    And the same people whinge over a benefits cap well over £20k per year…

  3. The gender gap can arise even within companies, in the same (or broadly similar) jobs. Case in point: A large company recently needed to recruit three middle-managers. They were able to fill two posts by promoting two women from the level below; these women were delighted to be able to stay in the same company, same duration of commute, same proximity to their kids’ schools; and they didn’t expect a huge salary increase. For the third post they couldn’t find a suitable internal candidate so they had to look outside. The only suitable candidate was a man, one whose salary expectations were £10k higher than what the women were now on. By hiring him, they’d have immediately faced a discrimination charge. What is the company to do?

  4. “found that firms were offering incentives such as flexible working instead of tackling the problem head on.”

    Can they even brain? The report and article *explicitly* state that the difference is due to the range of jobs women take, not the pay once they have them. If this is a problem, not just preference or aptitude, flexible working is exactly the sort of solution to explore.

    “We are focusing on the fundamental question of who and what we value and asking why it is that we don’t value women and the work they do – paid or unpaid.”

    Wut? The production of vast majority of Stuff we consume is abstracted away behind sales teams, logistics and call centres. We dont know who made it, so ‘we’ can’t discriminate if we wanted to.

  5. However, the real gap is caused by the scarcity of women at the highest and best-paid levels of industries such as oil and gas, technology and life sciences.

    Oh, don’t worry: oil and gas companies are busy filling their middle-management ranks with women of questionable competence in order to address this issue. With oil unlikely to go much above $60 per barrel in the foreseeable future I am curious to know how this will pan out in an industry which, before a decade of record prices, was best suited to single men living in portacabins in absolute shitholes.

  6. Of course it’s illegal to pay women less than men for doing exactly the same job and there’s not a lot of that happening.

    The ‘women get paid less for the same job’ industry really took off when they started categorising different jobs as the same, so that ( I exaggerate only slightly) painting the Severn Bridge – mostly done by men – was considered the same as being a school canteen assistant – mostly done by women – and it was an ‘outrage’ that an indoor job serving mash potato wasn’t paid the same as an outdoor job hanging from a rope in a gale painting a bridge.

  7. People in different jobs are paid different amounts of money?

    GASP!!

    How dare they pay a female HR manager less than a man who runs an oil rig in the middle of the North Sea. THESE ARE EQUIVALENT!! She has a professional qualification, for fucks sake!!

  8. Or, put another way, the oil and gas industry has traditionally been one best avoided by normal people. Then the oil boom happened and companies decided they would be all flash and modern and start appealing to those who want a nice middle-manager’s job in an air conditioned office and raise a family at the same time, the types who would have previously gone into banking, insurance, law, manufacturing, etc. And now there is no more money to pay for legions of middle-managers in air conditioned offices. Whoops.

  9. And now there is no more money to pay for legions of middle-managers in air conditioned offices. Whoops.

    OK, get rid of them. Or post them to distant rigs.

  10. There is value in this tosspoetry. Even the Guardian is admitting the gender pay gap many people think exists (wildly different pay for the same job), doesn’t really exist.

    Next time someone wibbles on about women getting only 71% or whatever the figure is they can be referred to a source they are probably going to believe.

    And as with many recent wins against SJWs I think we can pin this one on Trump. Not just to wind them up but because during the election Hillary Clinton tried to make an issue out of Trump saying men and women who do the same job should get the same pay.

    Hillary Clinton: Donald Trump’s equal pay plan for women: “You’re gonna make the same if you do as good a job.”

  11. ” And now there is no more money to pay for legions of middle-managers in air conditioned offices.”

    Evidently time to go for the “Sir Humphrey” solution and close down those jolly expensive oil rigs with their discriminatory “danger” money.

  12. If you attend university graduation ceremonies, it is evident that men and women tend to choose different careers. Men are over represented in engineering, women in social work and speech therapy (or pathology as it is now termed. There tends to be a fairly even split in fields such as geology and environmental science.

  13. Evidently time to go for the “Sir Humphrey” solution and close down those jolly expensive oil rigs with their discriminatory “danger” money.

    That’s what they’ve done: cut back on blue-collar workers like material inspectors and kept the hordes of diversity coordinators. This won’t end well.

  14. Men are over represented in engineering

    Except for chemical engineering, women love that hence have the process engineers you meet in the oil industry are women. Presumably the patriarchy keeps them from studying mechanical engineering.

  15. Tim N,

    > chemical engineering, women love that

    Would it be terribly sexist of me to point out the similarities between chemical engineering and cooking?

    Joking aside, women simply aren’t as keen on mathematical jobs as men are. We’ve known this for donkey’s years.

    More worryingly for you:

    > oil and gas companies are busy filling their middle-management ranks with women

    NY Times: As Women Take Over a Male-Dominated Field, the Pay Drops

  16. “earning an average of 1.6% more”

    If they’re ***EARNING*** it, they’re ***EARNING*** it, what’s the problem?

    What these people actually want is for people to be ****PAID*** the same regardless of whether they earn it.

  17. Saying about people doing the same job for the same pay – wife is temping at the moment and in her light industrial job there’s a lot of heavy lifting.
    She was assigned to a particular section within the building and shocked all the males on the section – they don’t get women assigned to them as its the heaviest stuff and most awkward to move by hand. She’s just getting on with the job.

  18. My wife, who is an accredited mental health social worker, insists that we engineers are on the spectrum to some lesser or greater degree.

    Geotechnical engineers are only just on, I’d imagine, given that it is more a dark art than a science, but what type of engineering would be more on the other end?

  19. Geotechnical engineers are only just on, I’d imagine, given that it is more a dark art than a science, but what type of engineering would be more on the other end?

    Mechanical is definitely the nerdiest, followed by electrical, then perhaps aeronautical. Civil engineers tend to be a bit more normal. Chemical engineers more normal again. As the nerdiness decreases, the number of women increase.

    I’m mechanical but a very poor one, possibly because I have the ability to socialise.

  20. @ DocBud
    Tell her that is not true – it is possible for a neurotypical to be an engineer, it is just that certain autistic traits are beneficial in engineering, such as making sure that things don’t fall to pieces because a vital screw/connecting bar is missing.

  21. @ Andrew M
    My late father, a chemical engineer, was an extremely good cook: he described cooking as an elementary organic chemistry preparation – but it is the chemistry, not the engineering, to which cooking is similar.

  22. Bloke in North Dorset

    “My late father, a chemical engineer, was an extremely good cook: he described cooking as an elementary organic chemistry preparation – but it is the chemistry, not the engineering, to which cooking is similar.”

    Cooking also has a lot to do with process and project management, especially baking, so perhaps closer to chemical engineering than you imply?

  23. @ BiND
    Well, perhaps – probably closer than you infer from my comment. Project management: yes (albeit I only notice that on Christmas Puddings and Beef Wellington).
    Process management in cooking is at least as much to do with chemistry as engineering – yesterday’s lunch was, albeit edible, less successful than it should have been because the pack of frozen shellfish from which I was trying to make an interesting pie was seriously over-salted: for a chemistry experiment one ensures ingredients are 99.9% pure

  24. @ Tim Newman
    Fluid Mechanics is Applied Mathematics and can be used for unimportant chemical engineering tasks but anything that *just* requires fluid mechanics isn’t chemical engineering.
    I’m speaking as an ex-mathematician.

  25. Bloke in Costa Rica

    Can we please stop with the “autistic spectrum” nonsense? You simply can’t function as an engineer in a modern discipline (especially software engineering) without a highly refined set of social skills. Engineers don’t tinker alone in their sheds and have grease under their fingernails. They interact with other people, a large number of whom are not engineers. The “autistic” bit seems to be code for “detail-oriented” and “focussed”. These are good things, and presumably also desirable in a of other areas. I would imagine an auditor who wasn’t detail-oriented would not last long. And pedantry when you’re reading a requirements specification (or writing one) is a virtue, not a vice.

  26. Can we please stop with the “autistic spectrum” nonsense? You simply can’t function as an engineer in a modern discipline (especially software engineering) without a highly refined set of social skills.

    Yes. Just because someone has an analytic mind and great attention to detail doesn’t make them some sort of weirdo.

  27. @john77,

    Quite, I was simplifying. And in my industry, at least the bit I’m in, we don’t do so much regarding reactions, it’s all about vessel and line sizing.

  28. “We are striving for equality of outcomes, folks, not equality of opportunity. How many times do you have to be told?”

    Who wants true equality of opportunity either? Most people want to unduly favour their own children and pass as much to them as possible, rather than have them engaged in a fair fight with no endowed advantages every single generation. The whole of life is about accumulating and passing on, isn’t it?

  29. @ BiCR and Rob
    Professor Simon Baron-Cohen regards autism as the extreme end of the masculine spectrum.
    Rob, feminists *do* regard *anyone* who expects them to beanalytical or pay attention to detail as “agreesive patriarchalist” *as well as some sort of weirdo”
    BiCR No! If you are a brilliant software engineer you can survive without highly refined social skills unless you are a really unpleasant person who offends your colleagues so much that they actually respond to it. It’s 40+ years since I was a programmer but big sister was until she retired and wife’s best friend and her partner still are and #1 son is and I have worked with lots of them. Most of them are aware of their lack of social skills *and cope with it*, as I do. I can remember a few who made their lack of social sklls into a jokey part of their image. I have survived for over 40 years in an environment with far fewer people on the spectrum than in computing (or even among Actuaries) by avoiding, as far as possible, marketing.

    I think you are too sanguine about auditors. I have lost count of the numberbof errors I have found in audited accounts and a couple of clients of my main client used to send me draft versions of their audited accounts for me to spot errors that the auditor had missed (or created).

  30. @ Tim Newman
    Understood when you explain. As you know, I am a pendant and somewhere (undiagnosed) on the spectrum.

  31. jgh,

    Spectrum does not mean that it has to be inclusive of everything of a particular type. If there was a human being spectrum, then, yes, everyone would be on it, though progressives would argue that those who voted for Trump and Brexit probably shouldn’t be. The autism spectrum recognises that there are degrees of autism, from those with traits that are often not recognisable to those who struggle to function in society.

    My wife was only being semi-serious in her statement (in the same way that I am when I refer to bloody social workers). If engineers are on the spectrum, it is at the end close to the normal spectrum.

  32. When I was growing up, if someone was said to be “On The Spectum”, all it meant was that they couldn’t afford a Commodore 64.

  33. john77

    “@ Tim Newman
    Fluid Mechanics is Applied Mathematics and can be used for unimportant chemical engineering tasks but anything that *just* requires fluid mechanics isn’t chemical engineering.
    I’m speaking as an ex-mathematician.”

    From an industry perspective, chemical engineers really do spend the vast majority of their time just in fluid mechanics. The amount of time on actual reactions is very small indeed, unless they are in R&D roles or such-like.

    Agree with Tim that the only places I generally encounter females in either oil and gas, or any other process type work, is as either process engineers, or HR.

    With very rare exception, you never, ever, get them onsite. I’m on a 300 strong construction site currently and we have exactly two females, a dizzy and a QS.

  34. Finding kernels more interesting than Kardashians doesn’t make you autistic or “poorly socialised”.

  35. I’m speaking as an ex-mathematician.

    Sounds like you’re in denial, john77. You should contact your local branch of Mathematicians Anonymous.

  36. If there was a human being spectrum, then, yes, everyone would be on it, though progressives would argue that those who voted for Trump and Brexit probably shouldn’t be.

    Agreed, if you call it the “living human” spectrum: mass murder being the typical recourse of the socialist dictatorship.

    You simply can’t function as an engineer in a modern discipline (especially software engineering) without a highly refined set of social skills.

    And, loathe though I am to argue with BiCR here, I would agree that software engineers (and presumably others, but my field is software) can lack social skills and still do a damn good job. I’ve worked with plenty, and would happily work with any of them again.

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