From Kay S. Hymowitz writing in City Journal
It probably doesn’t come as news that airline companies pay pilots more than cabin crew—but according to the dogma of the gender wage gap, we’re supposed to find this fact troubling. The British government now requires companies to report their raw gender gap—that is, the difference in the median hourly wages earned by their male and female employees. Ignoring occupational differences, seniority, employment history, hours worked, or any of the countless other factors affecting salaries, these data are misleading at best. Nevertheless, when budget airline EasyJet reported a 51 percent pay gap between its male and female employees, the company knew that its reputation perched on the edge of a PR abyss.
And that’s the whole point of the exercise: simplify statistics to shock people at the seeming injustice done to women and shame companies into action; refuse to compare similar job functions; ignore the fact that, like every other airline, EasyJet’s pilots are disproportionately male, while their cabin crews skew female; forget that almost all carriers compete for the same 4 percent of the world’s female pilots; and whatever you do, don’t mention that the EasyJet CEO, who was in charge of this bigoted organization and also its highest-paid employee until retiring earlier this year, was a woman. The company should be branded with a scarlet “51 percent” until it . . . does what? Cuts pilots’ pay? Hikes the salaries of female cabin crew? Hires male attendants instead of female? Goes bankrupt?
The United States does not—yet—use such a travesty of a reporting system, but it does maintain the same illusion that a gender wage gap is, by definition, proof of injustice. Activists have declared April 10 Equal Pay Day, to protest the approximately 20 percent pay gap between men and women, which, as in the EasyJet example, tells us more about the activists’ false ideology of gender equivalence than about whether women are being treated fairly in the labor market.