Magical Budget causes imaginary closure of wage gap – Wong

Written By: - Date published: 9:57 am, July 2nd, 2010 - 25 comments
Categories: sexism, wages - Tags: ,

Pansy Wong in the House on Wednesday on the gender wage gap: “It was the case that the gap was between men and women was at 12% since 2001. After 18 months of the National Government the pay gap is now 11%.”

Um. No it isn’t.

Who knows where Pansy Wong got her numbers from. She gives no source. I however can give you a source – the quarterly earnings and employment survey – and from it we can see the average hourly wage rates for men and women. Divide the latter by the former and you have the average female hourly wage as a percentage of the average male hourly wage, take that away from 1 and you have the gender wage gap.

Gap in 2008: 12.3%. Gap in 2009, 12.4%. Gap in first quarter of 2010, 12.3%. I can’t even see any English-esque statistical trick or misrepresentation that turns the gap to 11%. And you can clearly see the wage gap closing under Labour’s tenure.

Hmm. Looks like Pansy Wong is full of crap. When are these Nats going to learn that in the age of the Internet and publicly accessible statistics you can’t just lie and expect to get away with it?

Incredibly, Wong goes on to give the credit for this closing of the gap to the Government 2010 Budget – that’s right the wage gap in the past is affected by something (exactly what, we’re not told) in the Budget for the 2010-11 year. A Budget that hasn’t even started yet has affected the past.

Pansy Wong is paid $240,000 a year and we spent $77,000 in the first three months of this year on her expenses. Feel like you’re getting value for money?

25 comments on “Magical Budget causes imaginary closure of wage gap – Wong ”

  1. ianmac 1

    Pansy. You are wong!

  2. tc 2

    Lying and deception seems to be working just fine for the rest of them so why should Pansy be any different……again where’s the attack lines from the folks we pay to be the opposition?

  3. Rharn 3

    That’s gota be the headline of the year.

  4. Tigger 4

    Next up, the budget cures cancer and makes pigs fly.

  5. Con 5

    Give her some slack: she’s 11% underpaid

  6. frog 6

    This isn’t the first time Wong has done this. She similarly made up statistics on the gender pay gap back in February, as I pointed out here.

  7. BLiP 7

    She got her figures from Blingish and Smith.

  8. Draco T Bastard 8

    Incredibly, Wong goes on to give the credit for this closing of the gap to the Government 2010 Budget…

    It’s just a part of their faith based governance. If they say something enough it may just become true.

  9. deemac 9

    why should they stop making things up when the media never call them on it?

    • Craig Glen Eden 9.1

      That’s it in a nut shell deemac, as long as they keep lying with no bad consequences they will continue to do it and we the people are worse off for it. The country will be shit by the time they have finished.

  10. a human 11

    At the risk of sounding like a pedant…
    In every job i have ever had, the woman working beside me got the same money.

    The issue is job designation and promotion policies, both very important and currently unfair practises, neither of which have anything to do with some ficticious wage gap.

    Quite seriously, i have been hearing this crap for thirty years and am completely sick of it.
    Find me a job where two equally qualified people of different gender are doing the same job for different money and i will gladly eat my hat.

    • Rosy 11.1

      At the risk of sounding like a pedant from the other side – In every job I’ve worked at (IT industry) the guy working beside me has earned more money because he had a different job designation, but did the same work. And when I left a job (because that was the only way to get a promotion) the new guy got the same title and same money as the guy who worked beside me. And quite seriously I’m sick of hearing it doesn’t happen.

      • a human 11.1.1

        that is what i said
        it is not a gender issue, it is one of accurate and FAIR job designation

        neither of which the people paying the money out ever want to admit or resolve
        why would they when they can watch society run round in a flap blaming sexual discrimination

        • Rosy 11.1.1.1

          The designation to justify lower pay happened because it is a gender issue first. Your’e saying that it can be sorted by looking at the job designation, but it’s pretty easy to call a male fixing a computer a technician and a female fixing a computer a customer services representative and be blind to the fact it’s the same job if you have an inherent belief that men’s and women’s work is different. Both designations are ‘fair’. It is (was) a bias in the industry. The man is fixing the computer (boy’s job), the woman is helping a customer (girl’s job) – either way they’re both wielding the screwdriver, but only one is being screwed over.

          • a human 11.1.1.1.1

            “wielding the screwdriver…..” lovely line, can i steal it sometime?

            There lies the rub, the skewed perception of a gender’s character or ability
            which we all know is archaic hogwash and it’s the person that matters first and foremost

            My work history has been mainly in Hospitality and has not suffered the same inequality as other industries. I wish i had an answer that would bring more employers to understand how simple it is to treat people with respect

            • Carol 11.1.1.1.1.1

              Actually there’s more to it than how a job is designated now. Jobs that have traditionally been classified as “female” eg nursing have a legacy of being paid less than “male” jobs that require a similar level of skill and/or education & training. It’s hard to counter that legacy, because, for example, each occupation argues for cost-of-living increases so that they maintain their existing pay equivalence.

              Of course, the answer is for more women to do traditionally “masculine” jobs. But once large numbers of women get into that job, ‘society’ begins to value it less. Or often large numbers of women don’t get into a job until guys have already decided it has been devalued (often because of technological change).

              Some traditionally masculine jobs create a hostile environment for women (engineering, for instance), so that women tend not to stay long in those jobs.

              Then, when it comes to pay equality “on average”, it also has to do with promotion issues… class ceiling etc.

            • Rosy 11.1.1.1.1.2

              Any time you like, a human 🙂 and thanks, yeah it would be good if we were all judged on ability. We live in hope!

          • QoT 11.1.1.1.2

            Or take the Talley’s case, Rosy – women and men doing basically identical roles, but at different stages of the process – and quite coincidentally men got assigned to one stage, women to another, and men were paid more.*

            Which is not even to raise the question of, in this selfish day and de-unionised age, who really knows what “the person next to them” gets paid?

            *Of course this is probably because, as noted philosopher and committed examiner of human nature Andrew Talley said, “Some jobs are bloke’s jobs and some jobs are women’s jobs, like poledancing.”

  11. tc 12

    My point is that whilst some of the BS is exposed in QTime (when they bother to show up and answer)……it never seems to get beyond that and is seen by the majority as just parliamentary games rather than the more serious matters it actually is.

    Whatever happened to Blindtrustgate ? Sideshow was caught well and truly lying his currency dealing arse off.

    • a human 12.1

      take yesterday’s ‘Bill and Mary’ skit.
      A waste of Parliamentary time, no-one was working on anything but their next interjection,
      the clock just ticked along as the country was getting worse off with each passing second.

      A bloody disgrace and these idiots want a 10% raise.

  12. Helen Kelly 13

    It is likely the budget added to the real wealth gap between men and women. Top wage earners got the biggest tax cut and men are over represented in that group – the gap will grow – as will the gap between our richest and our poorest.

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