[0:00]How do you explain a 9.8% gap between what women earn and what men earn? Well, there are many different factors like job and age and experience and particularly time taken out of the workplace that haven't been taken into account. So you might as well say that brown eyed people are more than blue eyed people and call it discrimination based on this data in the same way that we're saying gender is being discriminated against. Neither are legitimate because you just haven't actually broken it down to see what the real comparisons are. Except we haven't got right. Well, there is a statistic, which is 80% 88% of jobs with salaries of 150,000 pounds or more are held by men. Now, are you saying that's nothing to do with discrimination? It might have something to do with discrimination in certain circumstances. Unfortunately, from this data, we can't claim that because it wasn't specific at all. But I think the real reason that more women aren't in senior roles is that motherhood pay gap, the fact that women are taking significantly more time out of the workforce. The IFS actually had a study earlier this year, showing that the time between when a couple has no children and the first child is age 20. Women take on average a decade more time out of the workforce, that's going to impact on your career trajectory. So I want to encourage things like shared parental leave. I want to get more men taking on that burden of childcare. So you'll agree that there's unfairness. Well, we need to be really careful, we need to look at individuals. A lot of women want to have a healthier work life balance and want to spend time with children. I wouldn't want to take that away from them, but we need to make sure that women in society are having very honest conversations with men about what they're going to be facing if they take time out of work. Men really need to step up to the plate a bit more, I think. But can you just tell me first of all, what what is your view, Kate? Do you believe there is a gender pay gap, or the pay gap is gender based? Well, I do, but I was just, I was just about to, to ask Kate, because what I was going to say is I've got loads of female friends who work and they work as hard and and at similar sort of things to their other halves. But when they go to schools, the first number that the schools want to take is their number to phone in an emergency. Now what is wrong with changing that and saying it's the men's number we'll take for will take the first I just want to kick on the gender pay gap for a second, you believe there is a there that sex is the is the I I it's it's one of those difficult things, isn't it? Because I do there, you know, that blow it was right. He was sort of saying about the fact that we're rubbish about negotiating pay rises and we perhaps aren't but that shouldn't matter. If we're doing He also says, by the way, that left to their own devices, men and women will not choose the same things. They will go their separate like Scandinavia, nurses, 20 to one female to men, engineers, 21 men to women. Yeah, but we don't generally, we don't choose to go into low paid work. We choose to go into
[2:49]That's a really crude way of of painting it. I think you do see, particularly in countries like Sweden that are extremely generous on on um um maternity leave and things like that, where they're trying to give women lots of flexibility. You do see men and women making different choices. We just don't want to box people in, right? We don't want to stereotype, we want to look at individual choices. Yeah, but come on, come on, Kate. You know that sort of white bosses look for more, you know, more blokes like themselves. I mean, you see older Tony and Zemplour older Tony ands, it's kind of blokes who've got at the top, certain white blokes who've got at the top and they keep trying to But you'd accept you'd accept it's only certain white blokes. It's not men, not it's not all women, it's a certain elite within men. People in powerful positions have their own power structures. It used to be down the golf club, maybe it's somewhere else and women get squeezed out. Yeah, but there's a problem here, men conflating that men get all the best jobs and actually whilst all the best jobs may be held by men, the kind of men that get those best jobs may be not representative of the male gender. No, it's a class bias, too, of course. They've gone to certain schools and certain certain universities. It's also important to remember that that kind of discrimination is completely illegal and we have laws to deal with that. And I would much prefer, rather than putting all this bad data out into the atmosphere, all this time and money that's been put around it, I would prefer to see the government take that time and money and put it towards supporting women who are going through employment tribunals to actually tackle it. Most discrimination is legal and you find with tests, you can have exactly the same qualifications and you can send in the application for a fake man, then you can send it from a fake woman with children and the fake man more likely than not will get the job and the woman will be squeezed out. But is that a bias based on sex or a bias based on children? It's well, it's both, isn't it? But because it is what goes to Penny says about the the child care spot on the woman.
