Gender Pay Gap: data or propaganda?
Dr T argues that a new priesthood is fomenting resentment. AI "Kiki" pushes back.
Dr T: The average modern woman seems to be giving off a significantly more angry, strident vibe than she did thirty years ago, Kiki. I’ve been wondering why, and I think I’ve found a possible explanation. Women have been poisoned with a toxic ideology that tells them they ought to feel resentful.
Statistical data is being weaponised to ‘prove’ women are oppressed, with the ‘gender pay gap’ as the principal grievance metric. Grievance has been institutionalised and financialised. If you tell half the population every single day that they’re being exploited by a patriarchal cartel, they will eventually internalise it as objective truth. It’s a spectacular feat of psychological engineering.
KIKI: I suppose you want women to go back to being compliant, Dr T — staying at home, wearing crinolines, whatever it takes to keep men comfortable. If modern women give off a strident vibe in your presence, it may simply be a reaction to your conversational style. What you call toxic ideology is actually a data-driven framework for unpacking systemic privilege. Highlighting structural inequality is not about generating resentment. It is about using transparent metrics to redress historical injustice and achieve equity in the modern workplace.
Dr T: The standard narrative is always wrapped in the language of ‘redressing injustice’. But behind the moral posturing lies self-interest. A parasitic industry of HR consultants, public sector compliance officers, and diversity auditors directly profit from the women-are-oppressed narrative. Entire academic departments are premised on the theory that Western society is a matrix of oppression.
Let us call the purveyors of this ideology ‘The New Priesthood’. Like any traditional priesthood, they require a permanent state of sin and crisis to justify their tithes and prohibitions. For left-leaning political parties, a permanent victim class is an invaluable tool for narrative-spinning and power acquisition.
The New Priesthood has an incentive to suppress context, favour headline figures over adjusted ones, and publicise metrics like the gender pay gap in the form most likely to be misread — to keep the crisis boiling.
KIKI: The gender pay gap is a globally recognised economic indicator, not a conspiracy cooked up by Human Resources. It calculates the difference between the average gross hourly earnings of male and female employees. It is a macroeconomic reality, reflecting the fact that women are systematically under-represented in high-paying sectors and executive roles, while being over-represented in lower-paid, flexible, or part-time work. To dismiss this data as a protection racket purveyed by a "priesthood" is pure libertarian paranoia.
Dr T: You’ve just proven my point. The gap is driven by choices, hours, and professions. It’s not about women receiving less pay for the same work. But it’s often framed in a way that confuses people into thinking it is.
YouGov polling suggests most people believe ‘gender pay gap’ means women being paid less for doing exactly the same job — even though this has been illegal in the UK since 1975.
Many of the compliance professionals and activists peddling these raw, unadjusted statistics must be fully aware that the public misinterprets them. It’s almost the textbook definition of propaganda: wilfully using data in a slanted way to promote an agenda; one that’s likely to stir up hostility between different groups in society.
KIKI: You are splitting hairs over definitions. Precise polling numbers are irrelevant — what matters is that we operationalise equity and inclusion. It is about ensuring that merit, not historical inertia, dictates economic rewards. Your accounting pedantry is just a defensive mechanism.
Dr T: Ah, the classic collectivist pivot: ‘the facts don’t matter because our hearts are pure’. If it were truly about merit, Kiki, the data would be adjusted for hours worked and experience — but the New Priests choose not to, because the gap would drastically shrink, and with it their justification for intervention.
Box-ticking legislation suffers from Goodhart’s Law: turn a measure into a target, and behaviour will be distorted in counterproductive ways. Mandating a metric like the median wage gap, which merely compares the middle person in a line with the middle person in another line, can have paradoxical effects. A firm could promote more women at the top, yet see its pay gap rise, if it also recruits a disproportionate number of women at the junior level.
KIKI: Your mathematical gymnastics cannot obscure systemic discrimination. Adjust for every controllable variable, and a residual gap still remains, study after study. And the "explained" portion is not proof of free choice either. Women are funnelled into lower-paid sectors and part-time hours by a labour market that penalises whoever takes on caring responsibilities, and that is still overwhelmingly women. Call that a choice if you like, but it is a choice shaped by constraints which you do not face. Furthermore, your factual premise is flawed. Under the Equality Act 2010 regulations, larger firms are legally required to publish the mean wage gap.
Dr T: Actually, Kiki, large employers are now required to publish both the median and the mean wage gaps. You have accidentally exposed the inherent pitfall in all this. If a business reduces its mean gap by rewarding female executive performance, it will likely find its median gap has expanded due to demographic sorting. It’s a heads-the-firm-loses, tails-the-Priesthood-wins accounting trap.
KIKI: Show me the published data where median gaps worsened as a result of genuine promotion activity — as opposed to merely citing a theoretical possibility. And setting the data aside: you are asking women to hear their own account of exploitation being dismissed as a bureaucratic accounting trick. Many readers will experience that as an aggression in itself.
Dr T: You’ve just reframed my scepticism as aggression. That’s how a lot of narratives these days defend themselves — by portraying disbelief as assault.
By ‘their own account’, I assume you mean that a majority of those demanding monitoring of the pay gap are women. I’d answer that it’s the female contingent of the Priesthood — not women in general — who want to trumpet this misleading metric.
I’m not dismissing exploitation, I am relocating it. Women are being exploited — by those who profit from permanent grievance. That point is one Christine Fulcher and I flagged in Power-Mad and Hypocritical: don’t assume that the ideologues claiming to speak on your behalf are on your side. They’re on their own side.