Why gender pay-gap truthers are on the rise The evidence that men earn more than women is clear -

Why gender pay-gap truthers are on the rise

The evidence that men earn more than women is clear – yet the alt-right insists this is a myth. Why has this argument become so pervasive?
Zoe Williams


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Pay divisions … women still earn less than men. Why? Illustration: Guardian Design

‘The gender pay-gap truther”. It is such a distinctive phrase: that neologism of “truther” sitting peculiarly against the throwback of “pay gap”. Something about it tells you immediately that these truthers, like anti-vaxxers, like Russian trollbots, have been around longer than you realise. And you would be right: in polemical YouTube comment sections and Reddit threads, the gender pay gap is already a myth. End of. Simples. Mike Wendling, the author of Alt-Right: From 4Chan to the White House, says: “You see this from the alt-right brigade: Milo Yiannopoulos, Ben Shapiro. I’ve rarely seen them bother explaining it to their audiences, who just take the pay-gap ‘myth’ as read.” And that’s despite evidence such as the latest British figures, which show that every industry in the country pays men almost 10% more than women.


There is a purity in this position: from an alt-right perspective, if women “can’t do maths” and “liberals are retarded”, to explain your theory in detail would be beneath your dignity. Megha Mohan, the BBC’s gender and identity correspondent, says the first time she heard the “myth” debunked in detail was in Stefan Molyneux’s 2015 podcast The Truth About the Gender Pay Gap. Molyneux (who also believes there is a hierarchy of racial intelligence) calls himself a philosopher; this is men’s-rights-speak for “YouTuber”. If you can make it through the saccharine language (“When you decide to have kids, your time vanishes in a giant airstrike of cuddly cuteness”; “Mother Nature has blessed women with giant feeding bags”), his point is straightforward: the gender pay gap is a myth because it only has one variable – are you a woman or a man and how much do you get paid?

This was echoed in the interview last year between the Canadian pop-psychologist Jordan Peterson and the Channel 4 News journalist, Cathy Newman. As Peterson put it: “Multivariate analysis of the pay gap indicates that it doesn’t exist”. You have to include other variables, Molyneux argued: 55-year-olds make more than 24-year-olds, but is this ageism, or simply a gap of experience and progression? Even taken in good faith, this would be the point of someone who doesn’t understand what you’re trying to measure with a gender pay gap – not any individual woman’s salary, but the structural factors that might be affecting women and their prosperity, and what workplaces and societies might do about them.


. . .

There is no ready answer to the pay-gap truther movement. Do you ignore it because you can see the cynicism of its skeleton and the frailty of its flesh? Or do you take it on because, like a White Walker, although it is a dead argument, it is on the move? I can’t decide, but I know what its game is.


https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/apr/23/gender-pay-gap-alt-right