5 Apr 2017

The Wonders Of #EqualPayDay

Yeah I know, I’m late to the party, #EqualPayDay was *ahem* celebrated yesterday and I figured, what a bloody good idea! Not that I agree with its existence, I just want to roll with this and see where it goes.
By Jordan Holbrook: I am also gonna give a bit of a refutation but, I also wish to look at the implications of why this *ahem* PAY GAP exists and discuss what it really is. Nothing quite like re-inventing the wheel, eh!?
According to the National Committee on Pay Equity, “The next Equal Pay Day is Tuesday, April 4, 2017. This date symbolizes how far into the year women must work to earn what men earned in the previous year. Sounds horrendous doesn’t it!? How do these poor women cope!?
But, before I get into this, I would first like to give an honourable mention to Mark Perry’s “EQUAL OCCUPATIONAL FATALITY DAY” – the next one will be held on January 21, 2029. He defines “EQUAL OCCUPATIONAL FATALITY DAY” as “how many years into the future women will be able to continue working before they will experience the same number of occupational fatalities that occurred for men during the previous year. As a side note, saying “previous year” is a bit of a misnomer because we have to wait 12 fucking years before women suffer the same number of occupational fatalities that men suffered in 2017 alone.
I daresay no-one is going to celebrate or even remember this day, male disposability and all that. [I should probably note, I am not asking for more women to die on the job, instead, I want fewer men to die on the job. Figured I should clarify, else I get misquoted.]

I recently discussed Equal Pay and what-not in an article for The Conservative Woman. In the article, titled “Men pay £75 billion more tax than women every year”, I pointed out, as the title suggests, that men paid £75 billion more tax than women did. I know, shock and horror!

This I argued, was caused by the same thing that causes the pay gap. Now, in the article I gave a fairly simplistic explanation for why the pay gap exists, stating that those who work more … earn more! (I know, this does not fully explain the gap, men also inhabit the higher tax brackets, travel further for work, etc. I was keeping it simple so as to spend more time discussing the main event.) Thus, it is better to see it as an EARNINGS GAP rather than as a PAY GAP. To quote myself, because I’m a narcissist like that, “Those who work more, earn more! Don’t tell the feminists, I fear the shock of the epiphany might just kill them!” I’m not wrong, y’know.

For the sake of argument let’s analyse some data:

Hours Worked and Workers Working Them

Data ran for ages 16+. Data ran for period of Jan – Dec 2016.

                               Hours                    Workers               Hours a week (H/W)

Men                      617.1 million       17.8 million         34.6 Hours

Women               400.9 million       15.6 million         25.7 Hours

The source for hours worked came from here (ONS Dataset HOUR01 SA) and the source for number of workers is here (ONS Dataset A02 NSA). I arrived at these numbers for the year by taking the data from the 2016 quarters of Jan-Mar, Apr-Jun, Jul-Sep and Oct-Dec then finding the mean average, as shown here:



Men worked 1.34 times the number of hours per week than women did. Ergo, to match the average man, the average woman would have to work up to Saturday May 6th 2017 at her current rate to have worked the same number of hours as the average man. I shall dub this “Equal Hours Day”.

I would like to point out that Equal Pay Day (April 4th) is 32 days before Equal Hours Day, thus showing that, for 2016, the average woman would earn the same amount of money as the average man nearly five weeks before working the same amount of hours, if she continued working at the same rate. In short, she attains equal pay five weeks before working equal hours. And yet, you’re still gonna whinge about a pay gap!? Disgraceful!

Let’s go back to the tax gap, the statistic that started this video. The data can be found here.

We see that men paid £121billion in tax in 2014-15 whereas women paid £45.5 billion. For sake of simplicity and because I cannot be bothered re-running the data again for that year, I am going to assume there were roughly the same number of workers in 2014-15 as there were in 2016-17. I know, that’s quite the serious liberty I’m taking but, if we’re debating the pay gap, I honestly cannot find the motivation to expend the effort. They don’t bother with proper methodology, why should we? Actually, that’s a bad stance to take. Irrespective, we find:

Tax Paid and Workers Paying it

                                Tax                         Workers               Tax per Worker (T/W)

Men                      £121 billion          17.8 million         £6,798

Women                £45.5 billion        15.6 million          £2,885

We find that the average man paid 2.35x the amount of tax that the average woman did. Which means the Equal Tax Day for 2014 was Monday, May 9 2016. This day represents how much longer women would have to work so as to match the amount of tax paid by men in 2014. Assuming the tax gap does not increase (which it will, just as it has been year on year but, assuming it does not, for some inexplicable reason, then at this current rate), the Equal Tax Day for 2016 would be Thursday, May 10 2018. Absolutely delightful.

So, to re-evaluate, for the year of 2016, we have the following days:

#EqualPayDay                                                    –             April 4 2017

#EqualHoursDay                                               –             May 6 2017

#EqualTaxDay                                                    –             May 10 2017

#EqualOccupationalFatalityDay                  –             January 21 2029

Whilst I am glad to see the #EqualTaxDay and #EqualHoursDay are so close, I am not too happy that the #EqualPayDay is much sooner and I am very displeased to see how far in the future #EqualOccupationalFatalityDay is. Chances are, the #EqualTaxDay will end up being a little later into the year. But, don’t worry! At least we’ll have our #HashTag campaign out smashing Gynocentrism! Right!? RIGHT!?



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