Gender equality means tackling real issues such as childcare, not knee-jerk reactions to nonsense

When the pay debate first reared its head at dinner parties, on Newsnight and the night tube, people were conflating equal pay with the gender pay gap. The debate has moved on, and people are now discussing why we don’t have enough women in senior positions.

A lot has to change if we want to see results. As Alex said to Megan on Love Island last week, “you can’t expect different results if you repeat the same actions.”

So what can we change? Making childcare affordable is the big one. It’s something all sides on the pay gap debate agree on.

The Left advocates universal free childcare at the cost of the taxpayer. The Right – liberalising childcare regulations. No, this doesn’t mean putting your child in a petting zoo; this means scrapping the strict staff-child ratios we have in UK nurseries.

French, Swedish and Norwegian – countries that I think we’d all agree are pretty kid friendly – staff-child ratios are significantly lower than ours (yes, that’s right, the French have less regulation than us in the childcare sector). As a result, the UK has the second highest childcare costs of all the OECD countries.

Full-time childcare costs can range from £16,000 – £25,000 a year. Considering the national average salary is around £27,000 per annum, childcare costs are clearly in the region of a kid’s year 6 physics homework – astronomical. Going back to work after having kids is a luxury that only the richer-than-average can afford.

Another policy recommendation that would help the pay gap would be to bring statutory paternity leave in line with statutory maternity leave. Currently, a woman is entitled to 90per cent of her salary for the first six weeks, whereas her partner would get a maximum of £845 regardless of his salary.

This means a woman on the national average salary earns about 3 times the amount from statutory pay than her partner. If these two were equalised, parents would be given a choice over who takes the parental leave for the first six weeks. Due to the simple fact that women are still the sex that pushes out the baby, I suspect take up would be low, but choice must be given. And at the moment, there is no choice.

Better data needs to be collected, too.

People on all sides of the pay gap debate accept the data are weak, although some argue that bad data at least gets the policy ball rolling. You cannot form good policy from bad data though.

The reporting was showing a correlation between gender and pay – not a causation. This year we were comparing apples with oranges. Data showing like-for-like comparisons would make a more compelling argument for pay discrimination.

There would always be discrepancies, but it would at least give us a more accurate picture.

Data should also be collected on women’s salaries to see if they are being unfairly penalised for taking time off to have kids. I strongly suspect that women’s pay trajectory is unfairly stunted for taking a year off, even if they come back working the same hours and producing the same output.

This should be compared to a man who takes two years off. 

So what’s the impact of arguing with bad data and over-egging the severity of the gender pay gap? Men don’t listen.

Other worthwhile causes such as the right to an abortion and the #MeToo campaign are devalued by bad data and inaccurate reporting.

Women’s right activists must stop pursuing non-issues if they want the important issues to be heard. For example, a recent BBC article stated that companies should not use words like “manage” and “lead” in job specs because this puts women off. Sadiq Khan added oil to the fire by moaning about the “Wikipedia page gap”.

Crying wolf deters men (although not Sadiq Khan) from engaging in the debate, thereby turning the pay gap discussion into a gossipy echo chamber.

Knee-jerk reactions to non-issues also demean women. Great Feminists like Emmeline Pankhurst and Barbara Castle wouldn’t be focused on the “gender page gap”. As a society, we have to be careful that this well-intentioned victimisation of women doesn’t propel us into a world where you cannot criticise a woman in the workplace for fear you’ll be labelled sexist.

We don’t want a to return to a world where women are put on a pedestal because we’re so delicate. If we continue to portray women as wimps who can’t ask for a pay raise and get put off by job specs with the words “manage”, we risk shoving women back in the home because they’re too fragile to be in the big wide world.

This is the exact opposite of equality, and that’s precisely the opposite of what women fought for.

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