Neither party supports the traditional family

There's an election campaign on in Australia. It's difficult to get too excited about it as both parties have similar policies.

The leader of the more right-wing of the two parties, the Liberal Party, is Tony Abbott. His family policy is to tax 3000 large companies to raise $6.5 billion in order to fund an exceptionally generous paid maternity scheme. A woman on $150,000 per annum will get 6 months on full pay (i.e. $75,000) plus 2 per cent superannuation.

It's another step along the way to undermining the male provider role. Once upon a time the role of the husband was important in supporting his wife financially during her pregnancy and whilst she stayed at home to look after her children.

In the new system a woman will provide for herself through her career and then be supported by the state during the period of time she is allotted to stay with her infant child.

Abbott has given up on the model of the male provider family:

'It proves that the Coalition gets it when it comes to the reality of the contemporary woman and contemporary families.

'The fact is very few families these days can survive on a single income ... So if we are serious about allowing women to have kids and a career we've got to have a fair dinkum paid parental leave scheme.'

The political elite, whether of the left or right, have accepted the idea that what matters in life is a professional career. Therefore it is a matter of justice for them that a woman's life centre on her career and be structured around her career rather than on and around family. Similarly equality means for them the idea that women be as little obstructed in career and earnings as men. The desired outcome is that sex distinctions between men and women in these public roles be made not to matter.

For traditionalists there is a different logic at play. For us it is important that we be able to fulfil our distinct natures as men and women. For most men, career is not in itself the fulfilling thing in life - it is mundane work that often leaves you tired and stressed by the end of the week. If there is a higher meaning to it, it is that it opens up a protected space for our wives to raise our children and to create a home. It is this higher meaning to male work that current social trends, supported by both parties, are undermining.

I do understand that high property prices have made it difficult for many people to survive on a single wage. I understand too that there are women who have a strong wish to pursue a career. And I certainly understand that families are not going to turn down such a financial windfall as the one being offered by Tony Abbott.

But if we are aiming to establish a trad community in the future, we have to make an effort to defend the male provider role. That doesn't by any means exclude women from paid work. There are a lot of ways to be flexible when it comes to this. But the minimum standard ought to be that in the average home the husband is the main breadwinner over the course of the marriage and that his efforts are significant in allowing his wife to have the opportunity to have children and to create a home for her family.

By the way, I don't mean for posts like this to demoralise younger men from seeking work. My advice is to stay the course. Most women with kids only want to work part-time at most, so you are still likely to end up as the main breadwinner. And if the government ever attempts to equalise the part-time earnings of women with the full-time earnings of men then it's time for all hell to break loose.

What was that about equal pay?

There are some companies in Australia which are now paying female employees more than their male counterparts on the basis that it's necessary to give women bonuses to keep them at work after having children.

Here's one example:

Caltex has introduced a new ‘return to work’ 12% bonus to lure its female employees back to work after maternity leave.

The quarterly bonuses of 3% of salary will be paid up to the child’s second birthday.

For a worker on a $75,000 salary, the 12% annual bonus would amount to $9000 a year before tax.

Caltex already gives maternity leave of 12 weeks at full pay or 24 weeks at half-pay.

Of Caltex’s 3500 employees, 30% are women. The company is actively pushing to attract and retain a diverse group of employees, including more women, and is keen to reduce its staff turnover as a result of primary carers of children not returning to work.

Caltex chairman Elizabeth Bryan said the package was designed to retain skilled employees...
 

Here's another:

One of Australia's largest companies is set to unveil a new paid parental leave scheme that offers women a "welcome back to work" payment.

Insurance Australia Group already provides 14 weeks' paid leave, but will now double the salaries of women for their first six weeks back at work...

The payment comes on top of the Federal Government's parental leave payment of up to 18 weeks at minimum wage.

IAG chief executive Mike Wilkins says the offer is designed to help women overcome the challenges of returning to work.
 

There was once a time when men were paid more on the understanding that this would enable them to support a family and allow a mother to spend time at home with her children.

But this was shouted down on the basis that equal pay was a sacrosanct principle that could not be violated.

But the equal pay principle is not so sacrosanct when it comes to paying speical bonuses to women.

I wonder what would happen if a company paid its male workers an extra $9000 a year for a couple of years after having a child, on the basis that such men would be facing extra costs in supporting a family? If Caltex and IAG can run with this kind of logic for women, then why shouldn't a company do it for men?

Pay gap is now running the other way?

The latest news on the "pay gap" is this:

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, single women between 22 and 30 years old earn an average of $27,000 a year.

That's 8% more than comparable men.

What was the media response to the existence of this pay gap? Was it condemned? Was there a gnashing of the teeth at the inequity and social injustice of it all?

No, it was presented as being an inevitable result of young women's efforts and ambitions:

Genesis Hernandez is studying English and culinary arts at Miami-Dade College.

She isn't surprised to hear single women in their 20s are earning more than young men.

"A woman has more motivation to study, to get a degree, to be somebody," Hernandez said. "For me it's really important to get a degree."

Education is key. Both Time Magazine and USA Today say more women go to college than men. Once there, women are more likely to graduate or earn advanced degrees.

"I do believe that," 28-year-old Jorge Oquendo said. "I have two sisters. Both of them are going to college. A lot of girls actually go to college and stay in college."

Model Amber Lawson wasn't expecting to hear women are starting to make more.

"That's good to hear women are getting their head on their shoulders," Lawson said. "I would think it would be about the same, but I guess men kind of go with the flow."

But what happens when men don't just "go with the flow" but get more motivated? What happens when men start to take on family responsibilities and settle into a stronger work ethic? At that point in time, men start to earn more than women, many of whom are downscaling their work commitments.

But when men in their 30s and 40s start to earn more, do we get the media cheering them on for their strong work ethic? No, it gets presented as a great social injustice that has to be rectified by state intervention.

Once again, it's that problem that men are targeted as an oppressor group in liberal society and so their achievements are always pinned down to some kind of unfair advantage, to "sexism" or to "discrimination", whereas the achievements of women are always their own.

We shouldn't accept it or get defensive about it. If men end up working harder for longer, and therefore earning more money, we should present it as a positive aspect of what men do. If men end up earning a dollar for every 80 cents earned by women, then that should be thought of as a credit to the male work ethic.

Finally, it's a little sad that Genesis Hernandez believes that you have to get a degree "to be somebody". The human person is a lot more than a career.

The Julia attitude

Barack Obama ran a "Life of Julia" campaign recently which attracted a lot of criticism. Julia is a (fictional) white American woman who goes through life being supported by government welfare policies rather than through a family. She does have one child at age 31, but apart from that Julia lives her life as an individual supported by the state.

It's not surprising that left-liberals would feel comfortable promoting such a life, given that their ideal is an autonomous individual whose life conditions are to be made equal by a state bureaucracy. But there was less support for such a vision of life on the right. Andrew Bolt wrote:

Beyond parody. Barack Obama’s latest ad boasts how a single woman can be married to the government for life.

And from James Taranto:

The most shocking bit of the Obama story is that Julia apparently never marries. She simply “decides” to have a baby, and Obama uses other people’s money to help her take care of it.

...In 1999 Lionel Tiger coined the word “bureaugamy" to refer to the relationship between officially impoverished mothers of illegitimate children and the government. “The Life of Julia” is an insidious attack on the institution of the family, an endorsement of bureaugamy even for middle-class women.

It's interesting that the American left should be ramping up the idea of replacing family support with state welfare at exactly the moment such a model is failing in Europe. There are European countries now facing a serious debt crisis because of excessive government spending (even in Australia the average worker is now paying $5000 a year in taxes to support welfare spending).

It's interesting too that left-liberalism has continued moving left to the point that Barack Obama's advert is now more radical than the views expressed by feminist Germaine Greer back in 1991. Greer wrote back then that "Most societies have arranged matters so that a family surrounds and protects mother and child" and she complained of "our families having withered away" with relationships becoming "less durable every year".

There is no such sense of lament about a woman being supported by the state rather than by a family in the Obama adverts.

I should point out that you can find the "Julia" attitude in various places. For instance, yesterday I was reading an article in the Melbourne Herald Sun about superannuation. The gist of the article was that women are facing a bleak financial future because when they opt out of the workforce to have children they lose a few years of superannuation contributions.

The assumption is that women are not part of a family and have to support themselves. The thought never even occurs to the writer of the article that the husband's super fund will help support the family - instead, the assumption is that men's super is used for men and women's for women, therefore if women have less they are missing out:

"Countless Australian mothers are paying the ultimate sacrifice for their commitment to family, with many neglecting their financial futures in favour of other responsibilities around the home," Suncorp Life head of superannuation Vicki Doyle says...."

What do those with the Julia attitude then propose? They believe that women should get free superannuation payments:

We have argued for some time that paid parental leave should include a superannuation component and that a super 'baby bonus' or a return to work super bonus after a career break could go some way to addressing the issue.

And here we come to a serious flaw in this whole attitudinal shift. On the one hand, a society needs to keep its men motivated to work. But the Julia approach undermines this motivation, by seeking to make women financially independent of their husbands.

Let me put this another way to try to clarify it. A society needs its men to believe firmly that they are necessary to a family as providers. If that belief breaks down then that society will inevitably decline. But Western society is taking the attitude that women should be autonomous of men and rely instead on government welfare for support.

So the West is relying on individuals to hold two contradictory beliefs or values. We are supposed to believe of women that they exist as individuals without family support, but of men that they should continue to work to support women.

There are already some in the men's movement who believe that the situation should be equalised by no longer expecting men to be providers, i.e. by matching a "Julia" attitude with a corresponding "Julian" attitude.

Traditionalists would remove the contradiction the other way - by not thinking of women as autonomous Julias reliant on state welfare, but rather as wives and mothers supported within a family.

So much for equal pay - Australian company to pay women double

An Australian insurance company has decided to pay women double the money paid to its male employees in the first six weeks after they return from paid maternity leave.

That is a flagrant breach of the equal pay principles that have been pushed in the media for several decades:

NEW mums will be paid double for their first six weeks back at work under a major insurer's 20-week maternity leave scheme.

Insurance Australia Group, which owns CGU and NRMA Insurance, is offering the generous scheme to its 10,000 employees from today.

IAG is offering mothers 14 weeks' standard paid leave, plus six weeks at double pay when they return to work.

Combined with the Federal Government's 18 weeks' paid parental leave, women working at the insurance companies will get almost a year's wages while off work caring for children.

Could that be any clearer? If a woman has two children over a four year period she will end up being paid nearly four years' wages for two years' work; her male peers will work almost twice as many hours for the same income.

Will the unions stand up to protect equal pay for men? Not on your life:

The ACTU has welcomed the announcement, saying it should put pressure on other big banks and insurers to review their paid parental schemes.

"I think companies are not going to have any choice,'' ACTU president Ged Kearney told ABC Radio on Monday.

"We really need women to participate in our work place. It is important for the economy."

What about the media? Will it protest on behalf of male workers? Not likely. The Herald Sun ran this editorial:

The Insurance Australia Group workers will be paid double their wages in the first six weeks of their return to work...The move should be roundly applauded by the community...IAG has now thrown down the gauntlet to Australia's leading corporations to follow it down the path of progressive and sensible workplace relations.

The Herald Sun editor wants the double pay to become standard practice as a "progressive and sensible" measure.

Why? It's likely that several things are at play here. First, liberals don't think much of the motherhood role. They believe that power and autonomy come through careers and that it's therefore better for women to get back quickly into the workforce after having children. As part of this, equality is measured in terms of female workforce participation rates and lifetime earnings. And this tendency to look upon women in economic terms suits the interests of business just fine - it opens up a labour resource.

Traditionalists don't measure the good in terms of individual power and autonomy. We therefore place a higher value on the non-economic role of women as mothers within a family and we are more protective of the masculine provider/protector role that is exercised by fathers.

Paying women extra money is another step in undermining a masculine provider role. And whatever makes the male role within the family less necessary is likely to increase the instability of family life.

We ought to oppose what the IAG is doing; as a starting point, if I had a policy with either CGU or NRMA I would not be renewing it.

The unhappiest award goes to...

Who is unhappiest at work? According to one survey, the unhappiest workers are female, unmarried, age 42 and a doctor or lawyer.

That's an interesting result. According to liberal theory, such women should be the happiest. Such women are "unimpeded" in their autonomy by any commitment to family and they have successfully pursued a glamorous, high status career outcome.

But they are unhappier than anyone else.

Mightn't this suggest that an unimpeded, maximised autonomy is not the sole, overriding good in life? And that marriage is more significant to women than the liberal theory allows for?

And who are the happiest workers? They are married men with children, a good income and a managerial position.

That fits perfectly with what traditionalists would expect. Such men are fulfilling their masculine natures to be fathers and husbands and good providers. They are the happiest despite the fact that they have sacrificed a considerable measure of their autonomy to make a strong commitment to family and career.

Some more interesting data comes from a recent Herald Sun article about longer working hours. Which sex starts paid work earlier and finishes later? Not difficult to guess:

The report quoted Australian Bureau of Statistics figures showing about 30 per cent of men and 11 per cent of women are at work at 7am, and one in six men and one in seven women at 7pm.

Maybe that should be considered when feminists complain about the pay gap. The working day is longer for men which must account for some of the gap.

EU proposal could see women being paid double for the same work

Feminists have often raised the slogan of "equal pay for equal work". That is not a principle they truly believe in. What they want is equal or more pay for women regardless of the hours of work put in.

The latest evidence comes from the European Union. The EU is proposing not only that new mothers get 20 weeks leave on full pay after the birth of a baby but that they also get 2 hours a day to breastfeed the child when they return to work.

So let's say that there are two workers in a firm. Tony is a hardworking dad supporting a family. He gets paid $70,000 for putting in 8 hours a day for 48 weeks in the year. So he is working 1920 hours to get his $70,000. His female counterpart Julia had a baby at the start of the year. So she ends up only working for 30 weeks. Then she breastfeeds for at least one hour a day on her return. So she earns $70,000 for working 1050 hours. She gets the same wage for working 55% as much as Tony. If she takes the full 2 hours breastfeeding time then she will end up being paid the same as Tony for less than half the hours.

Is that equal pay for equal work? Surely not.

Now it might be argued that there are reasons for paying the woman so much more than the man - that it has to do with her family responsibilities. But the same could also have been said for the older system that the feminists complained about so much. Men used to be paid more because it was assumed that men had to support not only themselves but also a wife and children.

So if the older principle was so terribly unjust in feminist eyes, then how can they justify the new system?

Profound intellectual discomfort

Deborah Orr has done a rare thing. She's written a column for a left-liberal newspaper, the Guardian, in which she discusses why so many women don't identify with feminism. She writes that many women like herself feel a "profound intellectual discomfort" when it comes to feminism.

Why would a left-liberal woman feel doubt and uncertainty about feminism? I'll quote the relevant passages in a moment. But her argument seems to be this. Women feel vulnerable in life. The feminist response is to empower women by making them autonomous careerists. But this autonomy is, first of all, illusory as it has to be propped up by the state on which women then become dependent. Second, women were ushered en masse into the workforce just as much to supply cheap labour as to make women economically independent. Third, when women have children their priorities often change and they can become less ambitious at work and more committed to caring for their children.

Here's the first relevant passage:

The archetypal feminist of the 80s and 90s had a fulfilling and dynamic career, wonderful children, a lovely home and fabulous grooming. Consensus on the impossibility of such a lifestyle for any but the wealthiest has been long-since reached. But the recession and its subsequent deficit have shown all too starkly that even the seeming achievement of more modest autonomy for women is heavily subsidised by the state.

The stock response is that the state has, and should have, a duty to support parents and their children, and that's true up to a point. But it is hard to foster dependence without fostering vulnerability as well. Feminism, in truth, is entirely concerned with limiting female vulnerability, real as well as perceived. But its rhetoric can seem instead to be all about asserting and celebrating female strength.

In the next passage she correctly notes that women were fast-tracked into the workforce for economic reasons:

The mass entry of women into the workplace in the latter half of the last century was claimed too unequivocally as a purely feminist achievement. Yet the door opened so easily when pushed because the needs of capitalism had undone the bolt. Everyone knows the Empire Windrush didn't dock at Tilbury in 1948 to promote multiculturalism. It arrived to provide cheap labour in the employment marketplace, as women did too. Likewise, the fast-burgeoning demand for professionals did as much to usher women into flashy jobs as female liberation did.

Deborah Orr then admits that the wage gap as it exists today is due more to women's preferences than to discrimination:

But equal opportunity in the workplace has not resulted in equal achievement, and not all of this is the fault of continuing chauvinism. Women bear the children and, far more often than not, they wish to be the primary carer for those children. At its most strident, feminism can be mistaken for an ideology designed to make women feel they are wrong to want that.

Worse, feminism has accidentally promoted the idea that it's pretty easy to work and have children, with the right support in place. On even an average income, it's never easy, even once children are at secondary school (though it's certainly easier then). Your priorities change. Work is no longer the most important thing, for a while anyway. Ambition can dissipate.

Finally, she criticises feminism for being unwilling to openly discuss these issues:

For many women, that's a self-evident truth. But feminism forbids women from admitting too many self-evident truths, for fear that the utterance of them will encourage discrimination.

I'll finish with a thought of my own. Deborah Orr writes about women feeling vulnerable and seeking economic and material security by being autonomous career girls. She is aware, though, that this kind of independence has to be propped up precariously by the state.

Why not seek security through marriage to a man who is committed to supporting his family? Feminism tells women that men, far from being protectors, are a threat. Men are portrayed as exploiting women and as being the perpetrators of domestic violence and rape. Feminists suggest that it is average men who are committing such acts to a threatening degree.

That's why it's important for traditionalists to continue to scrutinise the statistics that feminists throw around when it comes to family life. When feminists come up with the "1 in 3" statistics, they do so knowing the effect that it will have - that it will make women feel as if they cannot rely on a man and that being a mother at home will be too great a risk to endure.

What was that about a pay gap?

In the UK women in their 20s are now earning on average 2.1% more than young men. The small gap swings the other way for women in their 30s: they earn on average just 2.9% less than men.

So will the authorities now give up pushing the issue of the pay gap? It seems not:

A spokesman for the Government Equalities Office said: ‘The narrowing of the gender pay gap is very welcome but it still remains too large, which is why the Government is committed to promoting equal pay and taking measures to end discrimination in the workplace.’

So despite the fact that young women are earning more than their male counterparts, the state is still going to intervene on the assumption that women are the victims of discrimination. But not everyone agrees:

The insistence that the Government must act to close a pay gap that, for many women, no longer exists brought a scathing response from some critics.

Economist Ruth Lea, of the Arbuthnot Banking Group, said: ‘There is no pay gap for women who do not have children, and for women under the age of 40 the gap is now trivial.

‘We always knew that single women were paid just as well as men. The idea that women are discriminated against was always a fantasy. I think the equality lobby will be running out of things to say.’

Given that women are increasingly dominating the higher education system, the young female pay advantage is likely to grow. And this has some potentially negative consequences. Women are generally hypergamous: they prefer to form families with men they consider as high up, or higher up, in the social scale as they are. But if women in their 20s do increasingly better than men, then where is the supply of male partners for women going to come from?

Perhaps what will happen is that numbers of highly educated, professional women will date "non-seriously" in their 20s, before having to settle for a non-professional man in their 30s.

In any event, family formation is likely to be disrupted.

For men, it's important not to be demoralised by what's happening. When the women around you are high flying careerists, it can be difficult to see the point of making the sacrifices needed to take on a traditional provider role. But a lot of these women will lose their gung ho commitment to careers either when they become mothers or after they've spent years in the work force. And those men who have stayed the course and moved ahead at work will then have put themselves in a strong position.

Is Virginia any better as a feminist mother?

Back in 2002, Australian journalist Virginia Haussegger wrote a newspaper column titled "The sins of our feminist mothers". It begins with the following description of her feminist upbringing:

As we worked our way through high school and university in the '70s and early '80s, girls like me listened to our mothers, our trailblazing feminist teachers, and the outspoken women who demanded a better deal for all women. They paved the way for us to have rich careers.

They anointed us and encouraged us to take it all. We had the right to be editors, paediatricians, engineers, premiers, executive producers, High Court judges, CEOs etc. We were brought up to believe that the world was ours. We could be and do whatever we pleased.

Feminism's hard-fought battles had borne fruit. And it was ours for the taking.

Or so we thought - until the lie of super "you-can-have-it-all" feminism hits home, in a very personal and emotional way.

The idea was to be autonomous, hence the slogan of "doing and being whatever we pleased". However, since it was careers which made women independent, women were to aim not at doing whatever they pleased but at a powerful professional career.

And Virginia Haussegger succeeded at this. She became a high profile news and current affairs journalist on Australian TV. But at a cost. She had a loving marriage but when she worked in a different city to her husband the relationship foundered. After her divorce she embarked on a series of casual encounters with men. By the time she met her second husband in her mid-30s, her fallopian tubes had been damaged beyond repair by chlamydia. She had lost the chance to have children of her own.

She wished that she had received a different message from her feminist role models:

The point is that while encouraging women in the '70s and '80s to reach for the sky, none of our purple-clad, feminist mothers thought to tell us the truth about the biological clock. Our biological clock. The one that would eventually reach exploding point inside us ...

And none of our mothers thought to warn us that we would need to stop, take time out and learn to nurture our partnerships and relationships. Or if they did, we were running too fast to hear it.

For those of us that did marry, marriage was perhaps akin to an accessory. And in our high-disposable-income lives, accessories pass their use-by date, and are thoughtlessly tossed aside.

Frankly, the dominant message was to not let our man, or any man for that matter, get in the way of career and our own personal progress.

Autonomy and careers were what mattered. Men were "accessories" to be tossed aside if they got in the way of a woman's "personal progress".

But, in the long run, it didn't seem worth it. A career and a single girl lifestyle made for a comfortable but alienating existence:

The end result: here we are, supposedly "having it all" as we edge 40; excellent education; good qualifications; great jobs; fast-moving careers; good incomes; and many of us own the trendy little inner-city pad we live in. It's a nice caffe-latte kind of life, really.

But the truth is - for me at least - the career is no longer a challenge, the lifestyle trappings are joyless (the latest Collette Dinnigan frock looks pretty silly on a near-40-year-old), and the point of it all seems, well, pointless.

I am childless and I am angry. Angry that I was so foolish to take the word of my feminist mothers as gospel. Angry that I was daft enough to believe female fulfilment came with a leather briefcase.

It was wrong. It was crap.

And now Virginia Haussegger herself is playing the role of a feminist mother, being the guest speaker and "chief feminist flag waver" at an event at the Australian National University. And what advice did she give the young women?

The same advice that she called "crap" back in 2002. She thought it great that the young women had a strong sense of entitlement; she highlighted professional success as what mattered; and she spoke at length of women being held back from achieving career success and pay parity.

Think about this. In 2010 she is telling young women that they will be oppressed by their lack of career and pay opportunities. In 2002, it was a very different story. She admitted then that she and her friends had not been held back at all in their careers and income. They had great jobs, high incomes and a glamorous, comfortable lifestyle. But she had learned that career and money weren't enough for fulfilment. She should not have treated men and relationships as secondary, as mere "accessories".

So why not tell the next generation of women this? Why not spare them from making the same mistake? Why not let them know that they can be oppressed not so much by discrimination but by failing to take the time to nurture relationships? That career and money alone can seem pointless?

Worst of all, why discuss motherhood in such negative terms, as a "breeding creed" that might upset a woman's "career and income ambitions"?

Virginia, aren't you repeating the sins of your own feminist mothers?

French right: "We must impose parity"

The governing party of France is the UMP (Union for a Popular Movement). It's a coalition of forces on the right of French politics.

But just because it is on the right of French politics doesn't mean that it's genuinely conservative. The party is sponsoring legislation that will make it compulsory for French companies to have women as 50% of their board members by 2015.

Why make it compulsory for board directors to be 50% female? Why not just allow companies to select whoever they think is best to fill these positions?

The answer is that under the logic of liberalism gender must be made not to matter.

Liberals take autonomy to be the highest good in society. Therefore, they favour what is self-determined, rather than predetermined. Our sex is not something we get to choose for ourselves - it is predetermined. Therefore, liberals take the fact of sex distinctions to be a negative impediment to individual freedom that must be made not to matter.

Liberals once thought that equal opportunity would do the trick. They assumed that men and women were by nature the same, so that if there were equal opportunities women would end up doing what men did in equal numbers.

But it hasn't turned out that way. Even though women are favoured in getting onto company boards, there aren't as many women who compete to do so. So even with equal opportunity and affirmative action gender still matters. Therefore liberals are increasingly turning to the blunt instrument of the law to get what they really want - equal outcomes, regardless of merit or fairness.

The president of the UMP, Jean-François Copé, made this perfectly clear when he said,

We must do to companies what we did in the public domain a few years ago and impose parity.

Equality of outcome is to be imposed by a party of the right. So much for the idea that liberalism is a neutral philosophy that leaves people alone to run their own affairs. We have well and truly reached the phase of liberalism in which the state intrusively engineers social outcomes.

As for liberals recognising that equal opportunity wasn't working as they'd hoped, listen to the views of this French woman:

Véronique Préaux-Cobti, a leading businesswoman, said the discussions were a sign that times had changed.

"In 2002, a huge majority would have been against," she told Le Figaro earlier this year. "Now, after years of good will with no change, there is a real realisation that things are not going to change on their own."

What a quote. She recognises that businesswomen have faced "good will" rather than hostility and opposition, but that things haven't changed (i.e. gender still matters). She then says that there has been a change in view as people have realised that "things are not going to change on their own" - which is a nice way of saying that people (liberals) now want things changed forcibly by state coercion.

So equal opportunity isn't enough for liberals. Even when businesswomen were treated favourably the result was not boardroom parity. The fair treatment of women in business is made clear in a large-scale study of executive pay tracking the earnings of 16,000 executives over 14 years. The research showed that,

At any given level of the career hierarchy, women are paid slightly more than men with the same background, have slightly less income uncertainty and are promoted as quickly.

In other words, women in business were treated better in general than similarly qualified men.

There's evidence too that some less qualified women are already being appointed to company boards in order to change gender ratios. Chris Thomas, a partner with an executive head hunting firm, has stated that,

if some of the women on boards today were men, they would not be directors. If the sorts of discussions that go on around the choices made were taped, they would be embarrassing. (Herald Sun, "Time to get on board," 5/12/09)

According to an insider like Chris Thomas, women are cynically being appointed to directorships over better qualified men, in order to bolster the number of female board members.

A lot of men may shrug their shoulders at this. Most of us won't be competing for these directorships anyway. But we have to realise that once the principle is accepted it will work its way through society as a whole.

If the state can act coercively to force a parity in outcomes between men and women, then get ready for some radical social engineering. Expect, for instance, for it to be made compulsory for men and women to have an equal number of months of paid parental care. Expect the level of superannuation paid to women and men to be made the same, regardless of contributions. Expect the level of lifetime earnings to be made the same, regardless of hours worked or the nature of the work undertaken. Expect a mandatory 50% of non-combatant officer positions in the armed services to be reserved for women. And so on.

All of this will present opportunities for traditionalists. There will certainly be men who will understand that less qualified women are being promoted ahead of them. This can only weaken the allegiance of men to a liberal order.

The problem we have is that the men who finally do break faith with liberalism are often so demoralised that they simply opt out and give up on their own civilisation rather than turning to an active and principled opposition. But some men will be spirited enough to consider a traditionalist alternative.

We need to present to these men a very different understanding of gender and freedom. Freedom for traditionalists is a freedom to act as we are really constituted, i.e. as men and women, as members of distinct communities, as moral beings and so on. So it is a more important good to be allowed to fulfil our distinct natures as men and women than to force a parity of outcomes through state coercion.

Would you accept this offer?

Here's an amazing story from England. The issue of equal pay has moved to another phase. It's no longer enough to have equal pay for the same work. The demand now is for an overall equal outcome: the system is to be rejigged so that women end up earning as much as men.

This has led to an extraordinary situation in Leeds. Refuse collectors there have been paid a salary of 18,000 pounds - about $32,000 Australian dollars or $29,000 US dollars - a low wage by Australian standards.

The Leeds Council has been required by equal pay legislation to reclassify work so that women end up earning the same as men. The result? The mostly male refuse workers were asked to take a massive pay cut of 25%. They would end up earning only 13,500 pounds - less than $25,000 Australian dollars.

In return, dinner ladies would be paid slightly more than they are now - but in general the demand for equal pay is to be achieved by cutting the male wage rather than by raising the wages of women.

Not surprisingly, the binmen have refused to accept the large pay cut and have been on strike for a month.

This is another example of how conditions for many men are eroding in modern society. Andrew Beveridge has provided data showing that between 1970 and 2005, real female wages in America increased from 67% to 89% of real male wages. This might sound like a gain for women workers - but it's not. The increase was not due to real female wages rising - they didn't - but to a fall in the male wage. This doesn't help women at all as it makes it more difficult for men to earn a living wage to support their families.

So this justifies feminism?

Jill Singer, a columnist for the Melbourne Herald Sun, has written a fighting article. She believes that women are being treated as second-class citizens and should fight back and not take it lying down.

It's another one of those "we still need feminism" pieces. But why does she think women are hard done by? She gives four reasons, the last being the most original.

1) The bedroom

Jill Singer is outraged at the idea that a woman might have sex with her husband when she doesn't really feel like it:

We might as well start with the bedroom. You'd like to think that women these days wouldn't have sex unless they wanted to. Yet nothing could be further from the case.

Evidence is a book by Australian writer Bettina Arndt which encourages women to say yes at times to give their marriages a chance. An offended Jill Singer is not amused:

... the likes of Bettina Arndt, author of The Sex Diaries - an odious little tome that advises women it is their wifely duty to sexually serve their husbands.

The dutiful Bettina would be a hit in Afghanistan today, considering her views dovetail nicely with the likes of the grunting primitives running that women-hating joint.

So Jill Singer wants us to treat Bettina Arndt's views as repugnant, backward and beyond the pale. Which is a pity as Bettina Arndt is doing nothing more than encouraging wives to be generous towards their husbands as an expression of marital love:

it seems extraordinary that sex is treated so differently from all the other ways in which a loving couple cater to each other's needs and desires. We are willing to go out of our way to do other things to please each other - cooking his favourite meal, sitting through repeats of her beloved television show. Why, then, are we so ungenerous when it comes to "making love", the ultimate expression of that mutual caring?

What does Jill Singer really expect? That you can have a system of marriage based on sacred female choice alone? That there is to be no giving or caring from the female side? Arndt wrote her book because she actually listened to some anguished husbands who loved their wives and who wanted their marriages to last but who felt unable, as one of them put it, to "live like a monk".

Jill Singer wants women to fight for a principle which puts the utmost strain on fidelity in marriage. It does not reasonably justify a commitment to feminism.

2) Violence

Jill Singer believes that violence against women justifies feminist outrage:

... while not as severe as the problem in Afghanistan, an unholy number of men here are bashing, raping and killing women.

According to Rob Hulls, Victoria's Attorney-General, violence against women is the leading cause of death, disease and disability in women aged from 15 to 44. It's a disgrace.

Ironically, the only time Jill Singer has gone on record as being the victim of violence the perpetrators were a group of self-entitled young women:

While [the tram] stops in Middle Park, a loud and boisterous cluster of teenage girls shove me aside as they make to leap aboard.

"Get out of our way, you effing slut," says one of these charmers ...

The aggression of the girls did not seem fuelled by alcohol or drugs - but by an apparent sense of absolute entitlement.

... It was the "Out of our way!" that inflamed, and the sheer arrogance ... to my shame, I fired back a barb ... "Well, I might be an effing slut but at least I'm not fat".

With this I jump off the tram. The five screaming banshees leap off after me, screaming: "You effing slut" - and worse.

... one girl throws a drink in my face, while another whacks me over the head.

As for the claim that violence against women is the leading cause of death, disease and disability in women aged from 15 to 44, this is a preposterous lie. That Jill Singer is willing to believe this statistic undermines her credibility.

I've dealt with this rogue statistic many times before. It has also been taken apart by Tim Harford, who presents a statistics show for BBC radio. For the record, the main causes of death for young Australian women are, by a long way, cancer, suicide and car accidents.

A useful counter-statistic, one listed in the Australian Bureau of Statistics Women's Safety Survey (1996) is that women are much less likely to suffer violence when in a married or de facto relationship than when single. Single women are more than twice as likely to suffer violence from any source, four times as likely to suffer violence from strangers and eleven times as likely to suffer violence from a previous partner. Being in a stable relationship with a man does make a woman, on average, more physically secure.

3) Pay gap

Jill Singer is shocked that there is a pay gap of 17% between men and women:

According to a concerned Tanya Plibersek, Minister for Women's Affairs, the pay gap between male and female earnings in Australia is a shocking 17.2 per cent.

A recently announced review will attempt to find ways of reducing this gulf, but we shouldn't hold our breath waiting.

Again, I've dealt with this issue many times before (you can click on the "feminism and equal pay tag" below if you're interested). I'll limit myself here to two points. First, I managed to get into an argument with a feminist on this issue just recently. I did finally get her to admit that women in most jobs are paid the same rate as men. Her fall back position was that amongst executives in private industry a woman with equivalent experience and qualifications would be paid less than a man.

It turns out that even this isn't true. Last year a Carnegie Mellon University study was released that looked at the earnings of 16,000 executives over 14 years. It found that women were promoted as quickly as men of the same age, educational background and experience and earned on average a higher salary. (hat tip: Feckblog)

Despite these advantages, the female executives ended up earning less - but only because they were more likely to quit their jobs:

At any given level of the career hierarchy, women are paid slightly more than men with the same background, have slightly less income uncertainty and are promoted as quickly ... We concluded that the gender pay gap and differences in job rank in this most lucrative occupation is explained by females leaving the market at higher rates than males.

My second point is this: it wouldn't help relationships much if men weren't so committed to holding down their jobs and earning a steady income. Married women generally expect their husbands to be good providers. If you don't believe me, you only have to listen to Jill Singer herself in a column from 2006:

While there's a growing number of women fortunate to have supportive stay-at-home husbands, the majority probably still prefer their man to be a traditional bread-winner.

Just as men hanker for women who are more gorgeous but less clever than themselves, women will generally keep seeking men who can provide for their family in material terms ...

Women might melt at the sight of men who are good with children and doggies, but what really brings us undone is an old-style bloke who knows one end of a spanner from the other and black from red in a balance sheet.

... Snags are for nagging, not shagging.

It seems that Jill Singer is underwhelmed by men who can't take care of the family finances. She recognises that the majority of women feel this way. And yet she somehow thinks that you can have a sexual dynamic in which men are expected to be providers and still end up with equal lifetime earnings for men and women.

4) Public role

Jill Singer does make one telling point at the end:

I was recently invited, for example, to be interviewed on 3AW about single sex clubs.

The male interviewer wrongly assumed I'd be irate about "men only" clubs - but I couldn't care less about them and pointed out I personally favour "women only" gyms.

As he blathered on about how outrageous he thought men's clubs are, it didn't occur to him that 3AW is one of the most exclusive men's clubs in town.

She's caught a radio host following the "liberalism for thee but not for me" syndrome. He deserves to have this pointed out to him.

But Jill Singer follows up with her own feminist syndrome. She says she wants more women in public life, but it turns out that only a certain type of woman, acceptable to her, will do. It's similar to the response of feminist women in America to the idea of Sarah Palin becoming Vice-President. The American feminists unleashed a most bitter and hostile attack on Sarah Palin, much more intense than anything they subjected a male politician to. What feminists seem to want is not more women in public life but more women of a certain kind, made in their own likeness.

What grounds do most women have, therefore, to support feminism? The rate of violence against women who are married to men without mental health, drug or employment issues is not high. The wage gap for Generation X women is small and is not due to discrimination. And the idea of becoming a feminist to deny a husband sex is, hopefully, not going to inspire most women to a lifelong political commitment.

The minister for making things up

Why would a young woman become a feminist? For Anna Corbett it was one issue which jump-started her conversion:

My name is Anna, I’m 22 and I’m a feminist. Six months ago, if someone told me that I would write these words, and mean them, I would have laughed out loud. I believed that feminism was outdated; that it created more problems than it solved ...

All of this changed because of a chance event ... I was sat in one of the computer rooms of my university trying to find the motivation to start an essay. Next to the computers as usual were leaflets advertising various events, sports clubs and rooms for rent.

Procrastinating, I started to read through them and came across a small slip of paper from the woman’s committee. I wish I’d kept it. It was only a few short sentences on how careers traditionally considered men’s preserve, such as the police, were better paid than those traditionally followed by women, such as nursing. This, among numerous other issues, contributed to the pay gap between men and women. An idea swam through my mind that would characterise my next few months: I’d never thought about it like that before.

The message of that leaflet stayed in my head for far longer than the essay which I was writing. It began to nag at me ...

So it was the pay gap which brought Anna into the arms of feminism. This is a bit strange as the pay gap hardly exists for women of Anna's generation. This is from a report in the Melbourne Age:

According to research from the University of Canberra's National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling, true pay parity is but a fraction of 1 per cent away for this current crop of twenty somethings.

A report to be released today shows that the pay gap that has persisted between men and women is now 0.6 per cent for gen Y women, compared with 3.5 per cent for gen X and 13 per cent for baby boomers.

The pay gap for young women in now 0.6 per cent. And notice the general trend. Before long it will clearly be men who will be paid less. Will Anna then switch to a support for men's rights?

So why would Anna think the issue sufficient to justify a commitment to feminism? Partly because older feminists greatly exaggerate the existing pay gap. For instance, in Britain the Labour Party deputy leader and Minister for Women and Equality, Harriet Harman, claimed that women were paid 23% less than men. She received an official warning from the UK Statistics Authority for doing so.

The stated aim of the authority is "Building Trust in Statistics". Sir Michael Scholar wrote on behalf of the authority to Harriet Harman querying why a figure of 23% was used when the original research claimed half of this amount (12.8%). It seems that instead of comparing male full-time workers to female full-time workers, the earnings of all workers were compared. That is how the much higher pay gap figure was generated.

Nor did Harriet Harman take account of the fact that the original research did not compare like occupations nor length of service. It only measured in coarse terms the overall outcome. In other words, it's possible that men earnt 12.8% more because they had longer service, had applied for promotions and worked in more difficult or dangerous occupations.

But it gets much worse. Harriet Harman took little notice of Sir Michael Scholar's rebuke. Her office produced an official document, Shaping a Fairer Future, which did anything but promote trust in statistics. In the foreword to this document the following claim is made:

pay gaps are even greater for part-time workers (39.9 per cent)

This is more than an exaggeration, it's an outright fabrication. Sir Michael Scholar felt obliged to pick up his pen again and chide the Minister for, well, making things up. He made the following correction to the false statistic:

The casual reader would be surprised to learn then that median hourly earnings of women and of men (excluding overtime) are very close, with women’s median pay actually being slightly higher than men’s (by 3.4 per cent).

While the Foreword to Shaping the Future refers to 39.9 per cent as an estimate of the pay gap for part-time workers, it does not explain what this is a measure of. Looking at the numbers presented in the Authority M&A; note, 39.9 per cent appears to be a measure of the difference between the median hourly earnings of part-time women compared with full-time men.

Let me put this plainly. Women who work part-time earn on average 3.4% more than men who work part-time (£7.52 compared to £7.26 per hour). So the pay gap actually favours female part-time workers. What Harriet Harman's office did was to compare female part-time workers with male full-time workers. Not surprisingly, male full-time earnings were considerably greater that female part-time earnings.

So young women like Anna Corbett are being misled into thinking that there is a large pay gap reflecting sexist discrimination. But the pay gap that does exist is small, is narrowing and reflects differences in work patterns between men and women.

Nor is a pay gap necessarily a bad thing for women. Many women want a male partner who earns either more or a similar amount to them. If men were to stop being ambitious and no longer chose well-paid rather than inherently satisfying careers, then women would find it much more difficult to partner.

It's also the case that it's often married women who encourage their husbands to work overtime or take promotions. That's because married women no longer see their husband's earnings as "male pay" that oppresses them, but as family income which supports them.

If men are motivated to be providers for their families, then there is likely to be some kind of a pay gap (at least in overall earnings). If such a pay gap disappeared entirely, it would reflect a loss of such a commitment by men. Would this really be in the long-term interests of women?

Ending the gap debate?

From the Mail Online:

Men in their 20s no longer earn more than women, an official analysis of the 'pay gap' declared.

It found that the difference between the earnings of men and women twenty-somethings is 'non-existent'.

Women who choose to stay single are likely to earn more than single men throughout their lives, it said.

This has been known for some time. Women are not paid less than men until they have children and decide to scale back their work commitments. I've seen this many times at work myself: women with strong feminist beliefs who are very ambitious at work until a few years after the birth of their first child, at which point they change their life priorities.

The research findings prompted this comment:

Ruth Lea, adviser to the Arbuthnot Banking Group, said: 'It is a matter of choice. People earn the same until they get together, and then they make choices about work, family and lifestyle. That is what adults are expected to do - make decisions.

'I suspect that in reality the pay advantage lies with women and I think the whole pay gap debate should stop now.'

I doubt, though, that the debate will stop. In part, this is because there are many in the political class who believe that women are less autonomous than men, and are therefore unequal, and that careers are the way for women to get the same autonomy as men. People with this idea won't easily accept an arrangement in which men redouble their efforts at work to support their families, whilst women scale back to care for their young children.

This approach to equality is wrong on a number of grounds. First, it doesn't make much sense to think of the money earned by a husband as a "male" wage existing in competition with a "female" wage. Most of what the husband earns will go straight into family expenses - with much of it being spent by the wife. In reality, what husbands earn is a family wage, spent for the benefit of the family.

Second, it's debatable that careers provide a greater level of autonomy than spending time with family. The men in their 40s who finally do earn more on average than women have a great part of their time and energies committed to work duties. They don't get to choose to do whatever they want whenever they want; on the contrary, their lives are closely regulated by their work. Women too at this time of life are likely to be busy, but they do have a little more flexibility in choosing how to arrange their lives.

Even more importantly, why should autonomy be chosen as the overriding good? Why shouldn't people think it important to do what's best for their children and for their family?

There's one other possible objection to women choosing to scale back their work commitments: it means that the family is playing a significant role in how people organise their lives.

We can't assume that everyone in the political class approves of this. If your aim is to establish a system in which everyone is treated the same along universal, centralised, rational lines, then the continuing relevance of the family in providing support for women to care for their children won't be so easily accepted.

In other words, there is a conflict between those who envisage social organisation in terms of the client individual and the state, and those who accept the family as a natural, non-bureaucratic unit of society.

Obama and the living wage

In a recent speech, Barack Obama had this to say about the decline of the black family:

A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one's family, contributed to the erosion of black families - a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened.

Obama's comment is striking because we're not supposed to think such things anymore. In our feminist age, we're meant to focus on the opposite: on how to achieve the economic independence of women, rather than on paying men a living wage to support their families.

That's one reason why the decline in the male wage has received so little attention. Last year, Andrew Beveridge released a report on real wage levels in the US since the 1970s. It showed that the average real wage for American men in their 20s fell from $39,641 in 1970 to $30,560 in 2005 - a tremendous decline over just a few decades. The average female wage rose very slightly over the same period.

This change in wage levels is presented to us as a progressive outcome we are supposed to celebrate - as it means that the female wage as a percentage of the male wage rose from 67% to 89% during this period.

But this is one of those big deceptions. The real level of female earnings only rose from $25,275 to $25,467. If there is greater equality, it's not because women are any better off than they were in 1970. It's because male wage rates have been dragged down.

There's another interesting fact revealed by Andrew Beveridge's report. Young women living in large cities in America are earning far more than their male counterparts. In New York they are earning 17% more than men ($35,653 compared to $30,560); in Dallas the disparity rises to 20%.

None of this is good news for family formation, as the decline in the male wage makes it increasingly difficult for men to offer a provider role to women. Barack Obama is aware of what this has meant in practice for the stability of the black family; there are already signs that family formation in the wider society is being similarly disrupted.

A woman of the pay gap

Why is there a pay gap between men and women? Julia Gillard believes it's because women still lack economic rights. Carrie Lukas, in a column last year for The Washington Post, begs to differ. It's not that a group of privileged male insiders are holding back oppressed female outsiders, but that women like herself aren't motivated primarily to select jobs with the highest pay:

In truth, I'm the cause of the wage gap -- I and hundreds of thousands of women like me. I have a good education and have worked full time for 10 years. Yet throughout my career, I've made things other than money a priority. I chose to work in the nonprofit world because I find it fulfilling. I sought out a specialty and employer that seemed best suited to balancing my work and family life. When I had my daughter, I took time off and then opted to stay home full time and telecommute. I'm not making as much money as I could, but I'm compensated by having the best working arrangement I could hope for.

Women make similar trade-offs all the time. Surveys have shown for years that women tend to place a higher priority on flexibility and personal fulfillment than do men, who focus more on pay. Women tend to avoid jobs that require travel or relocation, and they take more time off and spend fewer hours in the office than men do. Men disproportionately take on the dirtiest, most dangerous and depressing jobs.

Gillard wrong on pay gap

It's International Women's Day. Our Deputy Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, is claiming that "more still needs to be done" to achieve gender equality. She believes that women lack "economic rights" because they earn 85% of the male wage.

I feel destined to have to go through the faults of this argument about the pay gap for many years to come. To keep it as short as I can, there are three problems with using a pay gap to justify further feminist struggle.

First, there is no pay gap in the sense of women being paid less for equivalent work. Men earn slightly more on average than women because they work longer full-time hours than women working full-time; because they are more likely to accept dangerous work or work in remote locations; and because they are more likely to choose better paying occupations.

There are two good brief articles I can recommend for those wanting more information on these matters: one by John Leo and another by Bettina Arndt.

John Leo points out that women are 15 times more likely than men to become executives at top corporations before the age of 40. In other words, those women available for these jobs are fast-tracked into them at a much younger age than their male counterparts. Leo, summarising some of the findings of a book on the subject by Warren Farrell, notes that:

Never-married, college-educated males who work full time make only 85 percent of what comparable women earn. Female pay exceeds male pay in more than 80 different fields, 39 of them large fields that offer good jobs, like financial analyst, engineering manager, sales engineer, statistician, surveying and mapping technicians, agricultural and food scientists, and aerospace engineers. A female investment banker's starting salary is 116 percent of a male's. Part-time female workers make $1.10 for every $1 earned by part-time males.

There is a worse problem with Gillard's argument about the pay gap. It is senseless to talk about a "male wage". The large majority of men work to provide for their families. The money they earn is effectively a family wage. Gillard falsely imposes a modernist assumption on men: that men are making money in competition with women for the autonomy and power that money brings. It is a vision of society in which men and women are naturally set apart in a hostile, competitive relationship, rather than working to raise a family together.

Finally, it may not be wise for women to wish for the abolition of the pay gap. Women are inclined to feel romantically attracted to men who earn more than they do. The less the pay gap, the less likely it is that a woman will find a husband. Also, for the pay gap to disappear, men will have to be less oriented to earning a good income to support their families (in terms of accepting longer full-time hours, or selecting well paid, rather than glamorous and rewarding occupations). Is this really in the interests of the average wife?

Arndt on the wage gap

Bettina Arndt has a terrific piece in this morning's Herald Sun, in which she explains the reasons men tend to earn more than women. Given that Herald Sun articles are only availabe online for a short time, I've reproduced the article below.


Why men are paid more

October 16, 2006

EVERY few years the Australian Bureau of Statistics releases data about the gender wage gap. And every time the Labor Party announces the sky is falling in.

The fact that men earn more than women is presented as proof that the country is going backward under Howard. The white picket fence is rising up to capture us all.

Everyone who participates in this farce knows full well that these wage-gap statistics are meaningless.

So, what if the average woman in Australia earns $300 less per week than the average man.

That statistic fails to take in account the hours worked. In fact, the average Australian Joe Blow works almost twice as many hours as the average Jenny Blow, according to data HILDA, the Household Income and Labor Dynamics in Australia survey.

Since he's putting in twice as many hours, I hope Joe Blow would earn far more. Not only does he work far longer hours, he's also far more likely to take on hazardous jobs such as mining, construction, trucking, he's more likely to be willing to move overseas, or to an undesirable location on demand and has trained for more technical jobs with less people contact.

In fact, the wage gap hasn't much to do with discrimination, or conservative governments trying to keep women in their place. Differences in the way men and women behave in the workplace largely determine how much they earn.

Women are more likely to balance income with a desire for safety, fulfilment, flexibility and proximity to home. These lifestyle advantages lead to more people competing for jobs and thus lower pay.

Wage gaps tend to disappear when women put in the same hours and have the same experience, training and work history as men. In Australia, similarly trained men and women under 30 show similar earnings. It is only in the older age groups that wage gaps start to widen, according to Mark Woden at the Melbourne Institute.

Yet men and women still tend not to have the same training. A London School of Economics study of more than 10,000 British graduates found the men started off earning 12 per cent more than the women.

The reason? Most of the women had majored in the social sciences, while many men chose engineering, maths and computing.

While more than half the women said their primary interest was a socially useful job, men were twice as likely to mention salary.

SIMILAR patterns emerge here. Graduate women in Australia, who move into traditional male professions, often start off earning more than men. For instance, the average starting salary for female geologists in Australia is $60,000 compared to $52,000 for men.

When women go into potentially high-earning careers, many end up earning far less than their male colleagues because of the way they structure their working lives. Look at female doctors. To get into medicine, these women were as ambitious and hard-working as any of their male colleagues.

But a few years down the track it's a different story. Current figures show a female GP works in her paid job only 63 per cent of the hours put in by a male, although clearly many face a second shift at home.

Women are making choices. Yes, these choices are constrained by their family responsibilities. That's the reason they work those shorter hours and seek the lower paid, but more flexible work closer to home.

Australian women still choose to take time out when their children are young, then return to part-time work. They miss out on financial rewards but are more content. The latest HILDA survey clearly shows women working part-time are more satisfied than full-time working women.

The part-timers are far happier with their work-life balance and just as satisfied with their jobs as the full-timers. In fact, more than half the women working full-time want to work fewer hours while just over a third of the part-timers want to work more.

Yes, there are still glass ceilings, pockets of discrimination, but the major reason men earn more than women is the trade-offs women choose to make. So, the next time Anne Summers bleats about wage gaps, you'll know she's trying to pull the wool over your eyes. Wage gap talk is a con job.



I'll add just one brief point to Bettina Arndt's efforts. It makes little sense to oppose male earnings and female earnings. It's not as if the male wage stays with men, to be used for the purposes of men. What men earn is mostly spent on the upkeep of a family; a lot of it, in fact, will ultimately be spent by women.

So even the framework of the "male wage" debate is misconceived. The money earned by men is not really "male" income, but family income which women directly share. Women have an interest in encouraging their husbands to earn a good income, and this too helps to explain why the gender gap in wages still persists.

Poor rich women?

In the papers today is the news that female millionaires will outnumber male ones in Britain within 15 years.

Keep this in mind the next time you hear complaints about men earning more than women. As I've often argued, the feminists who make these complaints seem to assume that the money men earn is for themselves: that it is somehow "male" money which men pocket for their own use.

In reality, much of the money men earn goes to their wives. So the more men earn, the wealthier women are likely to become. That's what's happening in Britain, where the fact of higher "male" earnings is soon going to co-exist with a higher number of female millionaires.