@Rodney Pickering: some top drawer irony there. Medians as a statistical method are not averages!

So literally, the CEO is excluded in this method unless the company has like 2 male employees including the CEO. I mean… there’s nuances to this stuff, but let’s all accept that nothing is going to be solved in this comment section and all move on with our lives.

For those who care, if there’s 3 male staff, a CEO on 1million a year and a lad making 50k per annum and one on 40k. The Median is 50k. The average is 363k. In this study, they used the 50k.

@Ciaran Ó Fallúin: You think statements like that are going to get you a girlfriend Ciaran?

How about addressing the glaringly obvious point he made that pay rates should be compared for the SAME JOB??

And spare us the “Aeons of male management has prevented women achieving equal opportunity BS” and maybe give us some facts.

@Ooby Dooby: So there’s a wealth of research from NBER, Harvard Business review, Institute of Fiscal Studies… It’s endless. The data bears out the same characteristics, that women don’t receive anywhere near the same level of promotion opportunities which generates a pay gap. I don’t need my statements to get me a girlfriend, I just want to make sure that if I forget to pull out of your mom and she has a baby girl, I want that girl to grow up in an equal society.

@Ciaran Ó Fallúin: That wasn’t funny, I’m mildly embarrased for you.

What IS funny is your reference to “Aeons of male managment” in a company like Apple that has been established since 1976.

@Ciaran Ó Fallúin: Didn’t that study suggested women’s own choices meant they did apply for promotions and took part time work?

@Kal Ipers: it references it while stressing the importance of not confusing causation and correlation. Namely that the current structure affects decision making which reinforces the discrepancies.

@Ooby Dooby: I’m embarrassed for anyone who thinking Apple represents a starting point in the history of business management or structure. I’m embarrassed for anyone who thinks a guy acknowledging that a pay gap exists would do so for a romantic intent. I’m embarrassed for people who demand facts when they wholly intend to ignore them and haven’t the self awareness to reflect on the simplest of questions: if you can think of a single woman who was better than you at something, meaning they are at least your equal, why are less than a quarter of senior management teams female. There are a myriad of factors, no one says there aren’t, but only one group flat out deny that it’s in part because men hold women back from reaching the top. I personally disagree with that group.

@Ciaran Ó Fallúin: That is not the median. Median is the most common salary, so in your example there is no median. Stop talking about statistics if you did not know that.

@Andy K: I apologise, I was mistaken. I was thinking about the mean, not median at the time.

@Ciaran Ó Fallúin: That is actually your interpretation of the study. It is also a separate issue to this report. This is completely flawed way to calculate pay disparity and confusing it for many people. Calling it a gender pay gap is disingenuous at best and an outright lie in truth. You compare like with like to determine a real gender pay gap

@Andy K: Thanks for the apology. You’re still mistaken sadly. What you were describing is the “mode” which wouldn’t be appropriate here either. Median is a best effort, but still comes with caveats. Rodney’s just wrong, but that’s not what the masses care about.

@Kal Ipers: If you simplify the question to compare “like with like”, the outcome becomes very small as a defined pay gap (at similar grades). But that’s an oversimplification which if done knowingly could be called an outright lie. That’s why they use things like medians, where we can strip extremes. No one report can do justice to the source of earnings differences between men and women, but it’s super frustrating to read so many comments flat out denying the nose in front of their face. Nobody is saying sexism is the sole reason the current differences exist, but that level of nuance seems to skim right over a lot of heads down here.

@Ooby Dooby: when you have to pretend he said something he didn’t then you know you’re losing

@Ciaran Ó Fallúin: I reffered to Apple because they were one of the examples given in the article above?

Anyway I havent ignored any facts because you havent provided any and I’m still discussing the article above which compares hourly rates of pay without specifying the POSITIONS which are being compared!!

Also kudos for doing your best to sound intellectual after your “mom joke”

@Dave O Keeffe: You’re totally correcy there Dave – no idea why you replied to me though.

@Ciaran Ó Fallúin: The median would be a better measure of central tendency for data that are skewed because the mean skewed data will be affected by outliers. So the high level of CEO pay will have little effect on the median pay in a population but a big effect on the mean pay. You are correct here. But using the median pay for a comparison between two populations is basically nonsense in the cases above. I’ll give an example.

Let’s take Boux Avenue, the lingerie company. Let’s assume that the majority of workers in retail in this company are women. This will have the effect of bringing the median down in the woman population in this company. It is possible that Boux Avenue could have 25 senior women and 25 senior men getting the exact same pay, but both populations will have different medians due to the fact the woman population has more retail staff. So using median for comparison purposes where populations are different can be misleading.

The only way Boux Avenue could fix this is to fire half the female retail staff and hire men for these positions. Does that make sense? Would a woman prefer to buy lingerie from a man or woman? Would a man work in this position?

I was disappointed by this survey. I was expecting an rigorous analysis of the data. We just got the same nonsense really.

@Ciaran Ó Fallúin: You know why the it is small as a defined gap? Because there isn’t one. What you and this report are trying to do is say people are paid less because of their gender. The reality is women work less senior jobs and more part time hours. They don’t get paid the same which is correct.7

@Jimmy Ryan:

The analysis on median for Ryanair misinforms along similar lines. Ryanair’s management in situated in Ireland. So the median analysis for UK workers will basically come down to an analysis of workers that are pilots and cabin crew. The majority of the male population will be pilots. The majority of the female population will be cabin crew.

Let’s assume all pilots get paid the same and all cabin crew get paid the same. A median comparison analysis of income across the male and female population basically becomes an analysis of the median pay between pilots and cabin crew. What do the results highlight? Pilots get paid more than cabin crew.

Again, the analysis is nonsense.

@Jimmy Ryan: We got limited analysis to a limited question. On a broad comparison of all companies, we got what we expected to see. What will be interesting from now, is with a baseline we can see changed over future years. There are companies, like what you described above which will never offer meaningful insight, but personally I found the big 4s assessments to be very interesting since there wouldn’t be a logical reason for a big discrepancy, but the margin was pretty huge (40%) before accounting for title. That’s enormous, we know why (gender distribution at the top), but not why, why.

@Ciaran Ó Fallúin:

I was looking forward to this analysis. As it was government mandated, I expected it to be rigorous. This analysis highlights and adds absolutely nothing in relation to possible gender discrimination. It cannot act as a base for anything in this regard. It just highlights again that there is a macro level pay gap which everyone accepts already. Theresa May’s comment that it is a justice issue is also just virtue signalling nonsense.

I would love a rigorous analysis of pay across bases including gender, race, sexual orientation, etc. I believe any discrimination along these lines should be publicly highlighted and tackled. However, we are simply not getting that from this analysis. I’d be really pissed if I was a shareholder in a company like Ryanair now. Can you imagine the negative press that this provides? I’m sure Ryanair, with their pilot issues, would willingly accept 1000 female pilots in the morning.

These figures misinform and Theresa May is bordering on propagating Fake News with her comment based on these figures. Along with the MSM also.

@Jimmy Ryan:

Actually, I think Theresa May should be dragged in front of the Fake News committee in UK parliament.

@Ciaran Ó Fallúin: we do know why, you just don’t like it.

@Ciaran Ó Fallúin: Gender Pay Gaps is nonsense really .. Why is it only commented on in certain types of High Salary Industries like Finance and IT for example and not in Health/Nursing and Construction ..
In 18 years of working in an IT role i have only come across 2 women actually working in the role … but when it comes to the management roles, there is more women who never even came from this background or even had real experiences in the roles due to Quotas..
When I was in College there was only 9 women in the first year and 82 men.
This trend is still there today, more men do IT / Physics / Maths type courses, while indeed more women as doing these courses today then numbers are still very little.
Also then the gender pay gap preachers use the mantra “Equal Pay for equal Work” which is also nonsense .. a person working in a job fro 10 years should be on more money that a person doing the job for 2 years, with salary increases, bonuses etc .. When one applies for a new job, the years of experience come in to equation when negotiating etc ..
Also in my world if I take a year or 2 off work for whatever reasons, i don’t expect to get the same job back as Technology changes and I am then behind and can only expected to to the same job once I have learned the new ways and got up to speed

@Irish Bob: I had a similar experience in university where I studied Finance and Economics. For this course, we often had certain elective modules in areas of Human Resource Management, Accounting, etc. The Finance and Economics modules were invariably 90% men. Accounting was more evenly split and HRM was invariably 90% women.

If you work for JP Morgan, finance and economics skills are viewed as more important. You get paid more for positions such as investment management and portfolio construction than you would for even many of the management positions whether HR or otherwise. You’ll also work many more hours. That’s just the nature of the business. Best of luck to any man or woman who thinks that they can get equal pay for HR vs Portfolio Construction.

@Irish Bob: On mobile and get 800 characters so I’ll be brief, looking at the ratio of men/women in nursing would not indicate or point to gendered pay as an issue… I mean, duh. Finance and service industries are prevalent because they have equalish gendered representation, but offer stark contrasts in salaries. Yes there are less women applying for IT or Engineering college courses (I’d argue having studied Maths our course was 60/40 m/f). That’s not relevant to the salary gaps being highlighted, but is relevant to a broader case of misincentivisation. If you’re engineering faculty is 100% male for example, what are the chances you’ll be able to entice female applicants (a major issue highlighted within engineering itself). A female VP looking at an all male board would feel the same.

I wish for nothing but daughters for the lot of you. Good luck

@Ooby Dooby: then perhaps you shouldn’t have implied that he said apple had aeons of male management. You brought up apple, he didn’t mention any specific company as it was a general point but then again, you knew that.

@Ciaran Ó Fallúin: I hope you get none with your twisted mind, what kind of person says something so disgusting about someone’s ‘mom’, are you even Irish?
You have successfully killed support for any gender equality discussion I would say, being female I don’t find you remotely credible, quite the opposite.

@Brendan O’Brien: And this 2.9% was between men and women, with exact same education and experience? Was that basic salary or including overtime and bonuses?

@Ciaran Ó Fallúin: Any study to contradict my initial comment? Please send it my way if so

@Pat Bateman: Google PWC and pay gap or EY pay gap. To your 2.9% query to Brendan, the gap before any adjustment for education, across equal level and before stripping bonus (the big 4 don’t pay overtime…), The difference was 43.8%. This is all publicly reported and hard to miss, unless you choose to ignore it.

@Ciaran Ó Fallúin: I see their report now, nice quote from it here ‘When looking at our bonus gap it is predominantly driven by two key factors, the first being that there are more men in senior roles and secondly the number of part time opportunities across our business, which are mainly filled by women. At PwC we are confident that men and women are paid equally for doing equivalent jobs across our business.’ Did you chose to ignore the last sentence of the report?

@Pat Bateman: The article that I was quoting from gave only “Our analysis of our gender pay gap shows that it is largely driven by the fact that there are more men in senior higher-paid roles within the business. When we adjust for this factor our pay gap drops to 2.9%.” I see now that they claim that ‘men and women are paid equally for doing equivalent jobs across our business’: if this is the case, good for them, but the question remains as to *why* ‘there are more men in senior higher-paid roles within the business’.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/ng-interactive/2018/mar/07/gender-pay-gap-what-we-learned-in-week-two

@Pat Bateman: sure, let’s pick and choose quotes… “there are no quick fixes to pay gaps, but as a firm, we have a clear strategy and action plan to deliver our targets for gender and ethnicity” and “The increase in our gender and BAME pay gaps when partners are included highlights our need for more women and ethnic minorities in senior positions”…

You should let them know there’s no issue, it’s sounds like they’re spending a small fortune trying to fix it.

@Ciaran Ó Fallúin: But is the reason that women aren’t in these senior positions solely down to gender discrimination? More than likely not. We have enough problems in the world without making up more

@Pat Bateman: You agree that if the reason is not *solely* down to gender discrimination, the gender discrimination element is still a bad thing and ought to be ended?

The fact that you don’t experience a problem doesn’t mean that the problem doesn’t exist or isn’t important.

@Brendan O’Brien: Gender Discrimination should be eliminated. There are going to be cultural, social and psychological differences between women and men that may have an impact on position and salary. This means gender could be the reason for the difference but not in a discriminatory way. I agree with your last sentence, but not experiencing a problem may also be because it doesn’t exist.

@Pat Bateman: “but not experiencing a problem may also be because it doesn’t exist”. I’VE GOT IT! It’s unreasonable for Brendan and I to expect you, Pat, to experience this problem. Have you considered dressing as a Patricia for a few years and we’ll see if you get that promotion? Or maybe have a chat with a woman about whether she feels her chances of career success are hampered solely because of her gender. I think you’ll find on average, you hear a yes and that on average they make a lot of career decisions based on an expectation/ reality of sexism organisations. But hey, one way to know for sure, right?

@Ciaran Ó Fallúin: You’ve made the assumption that Pat isn’t short for Patricia. I havn’t said a woman’s gender won’t hamper their career. Many women will go on maternity leave during the career, that will be a setback. They may then decide to stay at home with the children, and allow the man of the house to be the breadwinner, which was traditionally the case. Does this mean their gender affected their career – yes. Is it gender discrimination – no. Let’s solve some real problems first, then we can move onto the fake ones after

Dearest Patricia, my apologies. Nuanced studies which adjust for women who take maternity leave still find a significant gap (see studies from the EIGE and again, the Institute of Fiscal Studies). Women who return to work are massively disadvantaged from a future careers standpoint. But as you say, given what’s “traditionally” been the case, we expect that… Erm, it’s a tradition if we think it should stay that way. Why can’t I be the one to spend more time at home raising my kids? People arguing that a career gap exists aren’t saying that there aren’t factors at play, but one of those is the blokes club at the top of the house (on average).

@Ciaran Ó Fallúin: It’s traditional, the women have the choice though. I think women should weigh up the pros and cons and make up their own mind. If you want to stay at home and mind the kids, by all means do that, but most men don’t and as a result, they have a greater chance of reaching top positions. This isn’t due to discrimination, this is due to the choices both genders make.

@Ciaran Ó Fallúin: Men get to senior positions and get promotions more often than Women on merit. No boss is consciously thinking “Ok shes a women so I’m obviously not giving her the promotion”? A huge factor is because the workplace is an extremely competitive environment and guess what? Men are on average more competitive and females are more co-operative on average. The workplace is a hierarchy where you have to compete to get to the top. Its unfortunate that it is that way but unless you can think of a better more fair way than competition in deciding who gets promotions, it’s all we got and women will lose in that front unfortunately. There are very competitive women and very co-operative men but on average it is the way it is and statistics will show this with most males at the top of workplaces.

@will: I believe that senior positions have historically had a preference for men in senior roles, that’s my opinion, like how you share the opposite. As for competitive men and co-operative women, here’s an interesting one… In Trading (FX, Derivatives etc) the argument for male dominated environments, was that they’re super competitive and need macho blokes. So they studied the assertion and found male results outstripped female results in bull markets, but their losses far exceeded female losses in bear markets and recession. And so the argument goes, that trading floors are now trying to diversify as Boards seek greater stability in results and less risk taking. That’s one example, but one which I feel can be extrapolated across a variety of sectors.

@Ciaran Ó Fallúin: I agree that senior positions have historically favored men up until the start of the 90′s. Culture and society has changed. Women are expected to go to university and get a job. Women are now a huge part of the workforce and completely outperforming men in the universities. I still think though that in the actual workplace under the fairest conditions with 0 preference towards men or women, on average more men will get the promotions than women due the males innate competitive drive. That’s an interesting study do you have a source for that? I’m sure there are scenarios in business and other sectors where a person with female dominated personality traits in management or position would have been more effective in dealing with such scenario than male dominated personality traits. Structuring a company based on that model of female traits are good for some situations, male traits are good for other situations is an interesting concept although maybe impossible to implement.

@will: Sadly it’s a non published study (t’was an internal doc) but I know there was a good study on Finnish female traders which showed much more time spent reviewing stocks for purchase etc and unless I’m mistaken, better returns over longer time lines (but I may be consolidating memories). The argument I’ve heard recently and find myself agreeing with is this, the mantra that makes perform better in competitive environments because they are more competitive misses the point – that we can redesign the environment. E.g. let’s push for better returns over longer time periods on Portfolios. A guy will walk in pitching his 20% return when the market did 10%, ignoring the 25% loss during a 10% dip. The female doing 3 or 4 percent over the market is ignored in the current environment.

@Rodney Pickering: yeah but they’d keep the place spotless you know.