Where do you work?! The council?

Rigid scales are fairly well correlated with mediocrity.

Why should I get paid the same as someone who is unable to articulate their value to their employer?

Merry Christmas,

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Merry Christmas, Roz

Yep Hilltop I'm a civil servant and at long last valued after years of fog and obfuscation in the City. Equality of opportunity and pay based on qualifications and experience rather than gender. No I don't work for the Council.

Can't believe this thread is still going. I normally put most to bed (ie I am so off the wall nobody else can be bothered to join in).

So where did I say I want a medal Baboonery? Just surprised after some general improvements in society we still have some throw backs! To put it in football terms, the only people I've seen wanting to fight outside grounds nowadays are pot bellied middle aged men. Are you one of these? Perhaps you need to be listed.

BD - Hitting the nail on the head

What on earth has that got to do with anything?

If I'm a 'throw back' to a time when people were treated equally by the government and not penalised by the tax system for the hideous crime of not having had children, then fine, I'm a throw back.

Perhaps if you weren't so self-centred and talked about yourself in the third person a little less then you might be a little less astonished that people had views other than yours?

Look, Baboonery, the tax system is there (so they say!) to ensure that the perceived needs of the community are met, insomuch as the government that you had the opportunity to elect decide what those priorities are.

I am taxed for the NHS, regardless of whether I am sick or not; I am taxed to pay for the army, regardless of whether I am a pacifist or not; I am taxed to pay dole cheques, even though I am employed. So I am also taxed to promote children's wellbeing and education.

I was taxed to pay for education for nearly 20 years, when I had no children and I still don't get a refund now that I have opted out of the state system.

One is not 'penalised' for not having children, just as one are not 'penalised' for being fit, healthy and employed, while others smoke, drink, overeat, take no exercise and are lazy, cyclists' taxes also go towards building motorways. It's not fair, but that's the way the welfare state works. Think about it - are there areas where you, in fact, benefit which makes up for the "childlessness tax"? Swings and roundabouts ....

Baggydave said:

This is not just hypothetical in Japan - it's a real crisis. They have the longest living senior citizens in the world and only something like 1.5 children born per couple. However, in the UK I suspect we could probably cut back on a few 'childlessness taxes' and the population would still grow. And young adult immigrants (whose upbringing has been paid for by another country) are a particularly good value way to supplement the labour pool.

So should everyone should pay for kids? Do people without kids really benefit from other people having them? How? (See bottom of post for more on this...)


Jane said:

I think there's an interesting irony in these statements. I think you'd be pretty hard pressed, Jane, to find someone who had kids in order to further existence of the human species. I reckon it's a pretty safe assumption that the motive for almost everyone (excluding unplanned pregnancies) has kids for the pleasure of having kids. This is a point that's often forgotten in all this talk of equal pay - that the person who takes time off to raise kids gains something non-financial that the childless person doesn't - the pleasure derived from the raising of kids. This is not an trifling benefit. You only have to look at the amount of money that people are willing to pay, and to forego in missed earnings - typically many tens of thousands of pounds - to realise how much people really value this. The US research quoted by Elizabeth25 ignores this aspect:

They ignore the fact that women working part time gain a benefit over their full-time working partners - they get to spend more time with their kids, and crucially that this is a pleasure worth paying (or sacrificing pay) for.

They repeat this point again:

You could equally well say that women (in general) get an inherent bonus just for being women - they tend to (on average) spend a lot more time with their kids.

I also wonder whether they are a little biased in their interpretation of some of the other stats:

I'm only speculating, but I'm a bit skeptical that the evidence really does show a causal link, not a correlation between earnings and number of children. The way it is written suggests that having children causes men to earn more and women to earn less. Might it not also be possible that the amount you earn influences the number of kids that you have? (Or indeed that both earnings and number of kids are effects of another cause, such as education, geographical origin or location, etc?)

Elizabeth25 also quoted the following result of some research:

Again this seems open to questioning. Is it necessarily the case that the average male graduate should earn the same as the average female graduate? As the links I pointed to in one of my second and third posts in this thread pointed out, women tend to study different subjects to men and these subjects tend to lead to lower paying careers. So have they factored this in? Maybe they have, but it's not clear from the quotes. Succintly put by Baboonery:

Getting back to the topic at the topic at the top of this post, in reply by shzl400's post just above this one, I think there's arguably a difference between paying for other peoples' kids' Child Trust Funds and paying for the NHS and the dole. When you pay National Insurance you get something back - a sort of heath and unemployment insurance. You might not be sick or unemployed right now, but you might be in future. In the case of paying for someone else's child's Trust Fund, do you really get anything back?

Although the tax system is complex, it should still be fair (indeed it probably needs to be complex in order to be fair - although if course what exactly is 'fair' is up for debate).

Oh, and I've always found a good way to find our whether you're worth a raise or not (without the risks involved in the 'just ask' technique) is to get offered another job (one that you'd be willing to take - it has to be one that you'd actually be willing to take) at an equal or higher rate, then ask your current employer to match or better it. It'ss a win-win situation for you, but also not bad for your employer. You can't lose, as you either take the new job or get paid enough more in your current job that you don't want to move. Your employer also gets to find out what other people are willing to pay for you, so then can either happily raise your pay in order to keep you (within what you're worth to them) or let you go and replace you with someone cheaper.

And another point that has not yet been mentioned is that statutory maternity leave entitlement might be a source for discrimination against women. Obviously it would be illegal to hire a man rather than a woman on the basis that she might take paid maturnity leave and then return, but in the real world it would hardly be surprising if this did not go on. If you want to stop this kind of discrimination, it'd seem the only thing to do would be give men and women the same maturnity/paternity leave rights.

I'm not an economist, but I suspect in the question of Child Trust Funds, you will find some evidence that as per usual with this Government, some other aspect of the child and family budget has been raided to produce the ?250 cash benefit to each child, hence the net 'payment' by taxpayers remains the same. I also suspect that somehow even this small payment will have a positive effect in the future, when the money invested will enable the then adult to put a deposit down on a home, perhaps reducing a need for housing benefit or enabling them to stay off the Council's housing waiting list. If it even enables someone to pay for a training course in the future and boost their earnings ( and therefore taxable pay) it may be a beneficial thing. My own sceptical view is that at some time in the future, someone will decide that with so much money to look forward to at 18, other aspects of child maintenance can be 'safely' reduced, with the parents liable for instance for increased proportion of university fees. Overall, a potential saving for taxpayers. No doubt there is an economic argument and rationale for this somewhere- I suggest that anyone interested does some research on government or social science websites.

In respect of other points made, the whole point about Equal Pay legislation in the UK and in Europe is that women should not be disadvantaged financially in comparison with men by the mere fact that they are women and in the main responsible for bringing up children. The hard fact is that women continue to be so and despite OL's view that women have such a good time of it, most continue to do the treble shift of paid work, and the unpaid work of child care, and domestic responsibilities, and suffer detriment to both health and finances as a result. You will probably also find that most women with children who work may work part time in theory, but longer hours in practice, as they take work home with them and answer and make business calls on days off when they are unpaid. This is the reality for working women in the UK today, not the Nirvana portrayed by Ooperlooper. Just as well we are suited to multi tasking.

Have a look at the Equal Opportunities Commission website for further detailed information on policy and case studies and more sophisticated arguments and analyses than you will find on this thread. You will find that it is far from easy or straightforward to challenge inequality and win. From personal experience, having had fairly senior roles in the male dominated profession of construction, I have had to fight all the way to counter the commonly held view that not only do men deserve more money for equal or even poorer performance, they also need it to support their families. This archaic concept is still widespread as justification for paying men more. I have also had to fight for equal pay for doing the same job as a younger, less experienced and less effective male colleagues. Women are not valued as much as men, which probably permeates into their own behaviour which perpetuates the cycle. Their skill and success is taken for granted.

It is still clear to me that the root of this thread and motivation of many of the posters is plain old misogyny and dislike of children. The latter seems almost to be a national UK trait.

The UK has a long way to go in respect of adequate financial support for children and families, so worry not, you are still paying less for other peoples children than a lot of Europeans.

I'm not sure that ?250 quid is going to become a fortune in 18 years. If you invested in stocks and shares and got a tax free 10% return, and inflation stayed at an average of 3%, then after 18 years your ?250 would be worth, if my calculations are correct, ?845 in real terms.

Roz, you say that women tend to work, raise kids and do domestic chores. You seem to imply that women tend to contribute more to the family than men.

(NB. I realise that not all familys consist of one man and one women, but just for the sake of simplicity here...)

If so, then that's surely the solution is to more evenly share the child raising and domestic duties, not to artificially (and arguably unfairly) raise women's pay, isn't it?

I'm glad you've had some success overcoming discrimination in your career, by the way. The more pioneers like you fighting for fairness, the easier it will be for others in future. I've said it before, but I'll say it again; I fully support that you should get equal pay to male colleagues doing the same job, with the same skills and experience and the same level of performance.

The root of this thread has nothing to do with hatred of women. I do hate the abuse (whether intentional or through ignorance) of statistics to falsely claim support for a certain political agenda, and that was my gripe.