The Mirage of the Gender Pay Gap

Misleading statistics are stopping us from obtaining true equlity

Alarmist headlines about the gender pay gap are flooding mainstream and social media, designed to spark outrage and elicit engagement with claims like “women earn seventy-nine cents for every dollar a man earns” or “this company pays men more than women.” Phrased like that, most people would be shocked. But beneath the surface, these headlines are more a statistical misrepresentation than an honest reflection of reality.

Let’s address the core, rather technical, heart of the problem with these headlines: they refer to aggregate figures yet conveniently fail to mention that fact half of the time. An aggregate figure, in this case, combines all individual salaries for each gender into an overall average for men and women. It helps simplify things by giving you one key, flashy figure to focus on, but it hides the factors which go into it. As the saying goes, correlation does not imply causation: we cannot assume that gender alone causes the wage gap. When we hear that women earn, on average, less than men, this is not a comparison of wages for the same job or position. In the UK, it has been illegal to pay women less than men for the same work since the Equal Pay Act of 1970. Think about it for a second: if it were true that companies could pay women less than men for the same job, any profit-driven employer would exclusively hire women to cut costs. The fact is that such discrimination is illegal in most developed nations, as it should be, and is therefore uncommon.

What these statistics truly represent are the overall earnings of men compared to women in all sectors, across all jobs, and in all positions, throughout a whole economy. This gap does exist, but its cause is far more nuanced than the simple narrative of “women are paid less than men.” It reflects historical patterns more than present-day discrimination. The top earners — CEOs and executives — are overwhelmingly male, and their exorbitant salaries skew the average. These men are not in their twenties or thirties, they are often older: the average age of CEOs is fifty-eight, and this generation of men entered the workforce when societal pressure on women to prioritise family and caregiving over career advancement was much stronger than it is today. Decades ago, women faced significant barriers, such as limited access to maternity leave and expectations to take on the bulk of household duties; these pressures in turn often pushed women out of high-earning career paths, leading to lower lifetime earnings for many of them.

Today, however, the landscape is dramatically different. Young women in their twenties are outperforming men from elementary school to university, and entering the workforce with more opportunities and fewer societal constraints than previous generations. If we look at data from the Office for National Statistics, the gender pay gap has been small or negative for employees under forty for more than a decade but widens considerably within older age groups. In fact, between 2010 and 2015, women in their twenties consistently earned more than their male counterparts, with the gender pay gap falling all the way to negative three per cent (meaning women earned three per cent more on average). What these numbers tell us is that the pay gap is not a reflection of society’s perception of the inherent worth or capacities of women, but a historical artefact from a time when the societal roles of men and women were more rigidly defined. This is good news for us!

So, while lower average earnings for women still exist when looking at the entire workforce, it's critical to understand that this gap is largely driven by the choices and opportunities available to past generations, now occupying the highest-earning leadership positions. As the current generation of women moves up in their careers, the gender pay gap should naturally tighten, if not close.

However, the question still lingers: is the pay gap present in older generations entirely separate from the fact that many women do take breaks in their careers to raise their children, with employers in turn discriminating against them because of this? This cannot be discounted, but it leads us to the heart of this issue. The conversation surrounding pay equality, instead of focusing on snazzy Instagram graphics that frame women as helpless victims of discrimination, should be centred upon creating a system in which women are able to juggle careers and family without suffering professionally for it.

Progress is continuously being made in this area, and improves women’s standing in the workplace: better childcare options, equitable parental leave, and non-discriminatory hiring practices are all critical to ensuring that women have the same opportunities for advancement as men. More than this, ending discrimination towards women in the workplace also means giving men the same right to parental leave as women which remains an issue most countries have not addressed, especially when it comes to policies that encourage fathers to actually utilise the existing leave. If an employer knows that a male employee is just as likely as a woman to request parental leave, because he has the legal right to do so, then that knowledge alone would advance equality in the workplace in a meaningful way, by serving as a deterrent from discriminatory hiring practices, and easing a professional burden which is too often borne by the woman alone.

All this is not to say that even after we ensure that women have equal opportunity in terms of career advancement, there won’t be a number of women who choose to prioritise raising children and taking care of a household over climbing the socio-economic ladder. But I will never tire of emphasising this: feminism should not aim for identical outcomes or flipping the trends; it should strive to secure equal opportunity for everyone, regardless of gender. While being a stay-at-home parent may not be counted as “work” in the aggregate figures used to gauge gender equality, it is undoubtedly a full-time job in every meaningful sense, one that many find deeply fulfilling. Feminism should not be about berating women for choosing motherhood over a full-time career; rather, it should be about ensuring that choice was made freely, without legal and societal pressures or constraints. As long as that is the case, I am not concerned with what the aggregate figures say — not every woman needs to conform to the glamourised capitalist ideal of a “girlboss”.

The key takeaway from this is that the gender pay gap, as presented by the media, is a misleadingly oversimplified statistic, and — more importantly — a reflection of the past rather than the present. As feminists, we need to shift our focus away from sensationalised figures to promoting systemic changes, such as access to childcare and parental leave, that actually support true equality. Feminism should be about empowering women to succeed on their own terms, not perpetuating a narrative of victimhood for the sake of internet outrage.

Illustration by Sandra Palazuelos Garcia