Guest post: Jordan Peterson and the very idea of pay equality
Guest post by Maureen Brian.
Midnight on April 4th was the deadline for companies to submit their data on their gender pay gap, if any, to the Equality and Human Rights Commission. Then some editor at the BBC had the notion of inviting wannabee-famous Jordan Peterson to comment on the whole exercise for BBC Radio4 Today.
In the course of a very scrappy interview it became quite clear that he didn’t like it. Not one bit. Certain things, it would seem, are ordained by God – that people who work long hours are all men and thus should be paid a lot more just for being, that the bulk of child or elderly relative care must fall upon women, that a woman who takes a career break should expect to return in a more junior role, etc. He also implied that people who work fewer hours should expect to be paid a lower hourly rate even with the same qualifications and doing the same work – the example given was a physician in general practice. Also, the figures are crude but we’ll come back to that.
Let us begin at the beginning. Employment law changes in 1970, when Barbara Castle was the Secretary of State, made clear that we were en route to equal pay. The law making that mandatory came in 1975. A small fortune was then spent on lawyers, expensive lawyers, to find or create loopholes so that bosses didn’t have to worry about abiding by the law. Far too important to worry about that, old boy! Finally a ruling by the ECHR in 1984 made it very clear that equal pay was for work of equal value. No more, no less. Trivial differences and different job titles did not count.
There has been progress since all this, led by the brighter employers ably assisted or firmly kicked by unions as required. Things got better but, again, slowly.
Come 2010 and we get the Equality Act which gathers together all the various bits of equality and anti-discrimination law. In the course of that, government took the power to demand that individual companies report how they were getting on with all this.
Years later and companies were given a year’s notice to report their current situation and answer just 4 questions – is there a difference between the pay of men and of women using median pay? And using average pay? And if you divide your workforce into four quartiles, how many men and how many women are in each? And bonuses, how much in total goes to men and how much to women?
They have all this data already for tax and national insurance purposes, as well as for the accountants. This must count as one of the simplest mathematical exercises that anyone over 15 has ever been asked to do. It just has to be input online and signed off by the CEO or senior partner. Also it applies this time around only to companies with 250 or more employees so no worries about small start-ups or niche forensic labs where the one person with a biochemistry PhD could give an outcome which looked odd. Imagine the cost of this done by civil servants.
So Peterson thinks it is crude? Yes, of course it is crude and quite deliberately so. These are very simple figures which you can generate in-house from data already on your computer. No statistician, not even an accountant required and virtually cost-free.
The thing is that each set of figures is owned by the company. They generated them and they own them. It doesn’t attempt to explain how you got there, what you need to do next. It simply says this is where you are. No philosophical arguments required, either, no-one else to blame. Hell, I thought Peterson was a psychologist and in that dimension it is very clever indeed.
Update: somewhere about 1500 firms did not report by the deadline. They will be getting a very sharp letter on Monday then it is a month’s grace or you end up in court. And overall the gender pay gap seems to be under 10% with the exercise to be repeated next year.
So – government collects pertinent data with little trouble or expense on anyone’s part, and this scandalizes Peterson?
I swear, the right makes a career of drumming up outrage over civilization.
As far as I can tell, Peterson has many of the qualities of a master showman from the stable of Barnum & Bailey.
Some of the time he is right, and some of the time he is wrong. But like many a religious leader, he acts as a magnet for the people who think like him, because he is very good at telling them how correct they are; nb not to be confused with how ‘politically correct’, which is a label his supporters commonly attach to their opponents.
The political right these days has opponents both human and ideological, which they like to lump together under only a small number of convenient labels:
1. Islam: a political ideology marketed as a religion, and which has many of the classic hallmarks of fascism. Low hanging fruit; an easy target.
2. Muslims. People whose Islam is their badge of tribal identity as much as it is a philosophy. Around 15% of them sympathise with Islamists. Low hanging fruit and another bunch of easy targets.
3. Socialism: a school of economic and philosophical thought which is on a downward slide to oblivion. Easy target.
4. Science, wherever it clashes with the needs of the major capitalist players in the Western economies, and particularly the clash of climatology with the fossil carbon magnates. Hard target.
5. Rivals on the right. All politicians, ideologues and operators disagree most strenuously with those closest to them in the political spectrum, as these are seen as rivals fo the favour of the established supporters and cheer squads. Trump, Putin and Kim Jong Un are all on the right of the politics operating within their own particular societies. A war is most likely between Trump and Kim. If such occurred, it is by no means certain that Putin would support Kim.
Jordan B Peterson. The B stands for Bernt. I reckon he should have been given an extra forename after the Bernt.
Steven or Simon, I don’t care. Anything beginning with S.
One bit of good news: the friend I mentioned a little while ago who had expressed such enthusiasm for Peterson seems to have been cured. At first I thought I had just browbeaten him into giving up the argument (I know, that doesn’t seem like me, right?), but in his more recent emails he’s been bringing up anti-Peterson arguments of his own (such as — paraphrasing — “isn’t it hypocritical for a guy who preaches that you should suffer your burdens with grace to freak out and threaten to slap people who give his book poor reviews?”).
I think my friend had been more attracted to the faux-Buddhism philosophizing of Peterson, so that may have been easier to address than if he’d been hard-core into the “sticking it to the libs” aspect.
Anyway, not bragging about my rhetorical skills — mostly I just linked my friend to the well-written criticism that have been published recently — just saying that there is hope that Peterson’s star will fade.
SM:
Could be that he’s tried it before, and has found that it works, at least against some targets. “Dump on this book of mine, and it’s you who will get dumped on in my next.” That could conceivably lead to an exponential increase in sales, as scholars scramble to find out who has copped it this time, and for what. But it would probably turn and decline just as fast. Such curiosity markets get saturated pretty quickly. Also, as Peterson goes out of fashion, his remaining followers will likely form a little church of their own. They could even call it something like The Church of the Holy Echo Chamber and model it perhaps on the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, in which a holy round-the-clock cacophony of competing sects prevails.
Such a church might in time become a little universe in its own right, with nobody entering, and nobody leaving, and no information passing in or out either.
One can only wait and see.
PS: I should have mentioned above (#2) that one of Peterson’s favourite chosen bits of low-hanging fruit is Postmodernism (PoMo). But that has been so thoroughly clobbered it’s cruel to attack it further. It’s a bit like going after the few remaining members of the Phlogiston School of Combustion, or the Lamarckian biologists.