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Rejection (in lieu of a Submission) of the Ministry of Women’s Affairs’ Discussion Document: "Next Steps towards Pay Equity" New Zealand Equality Education Foundation, 28 September 2002

 

 

1. Meta-Issues

Before dealing with the substantive issues, we will discuss the Structural Inequality and Structural Discrimination which are manifest in this Discussion Document (DD).

 

A document on islam-usa.com states,

 

“Refusal, rejection (of truth) and heedlessness are part of arrogance and the opposite of submission and lead to rebellion…”

 

It is in this sense that the NZEEF refuses to make a Submission, and instead makes this Rejection of this structurally anti-male Ministry’s DD. I call it anti-male, because in June 2000 the Ombudsmen forced the Minister of Women’s Affairs to admit to me that this Ministry is just a pro-women organisation – and not actually concerned with “Equity” and “No discrimination”, as claimed in its Forecast Report 1999/2000. After all, it took a male Minister of Justice (Phil Goff), rather than a female Minister of Women’s Affairs, to make women equally (with men) liable to criminal charges for indecent assault and other sexual crimes. And this Ministry has made no move to abolish the sexist offense of “Assault on a Female”, which carries a higher penalty than “Common Assault” .

 

We also want to make an explicit connection between Islamic theocracies and the Feminist theocracy that is New Zealand. These two sorts of theocracies have the same totalitarian approach to “truth". In both cases, anyone who dares to reject what these theocracies declare to be “truth” are regarded as “arrogant” – if not actually criminal – but at least the Islamic ones are open and above-board about it. There is nothing worse than a totalitarian theocracy that thinks it is a liberal democracy, because, in a country of that sort (e.g. New Zealand), opponents of the system find it hard even to get people to understand what they are saying – let alone to persuade them !

 

Before a Parliamentary Select Committee, I once stated in passing that Feminism is the State Ideology of New Zealand, and this evoked a shocked exclamation of “Bullshit !” from Mr. Gerry Brownlee. To his credit, he later apologised – after I had explained that my taxes paid for a Ministry of Women’s Affairs, several Women’s Studies courses, and a plethora of Feminist propaganda activities of various sorts – without these being in any way balanced by pro-male equivalents. This state of affairs can only exist because of an underlying assumption (taught as fact by numerous sources of education and information) that women in New Zealand are disadvantaged – or even oppressed. In other words, Feminism is the State Ideology of New Zealand.

 

The DD itself criticises alleged Structural Inequality and Structural Discrimination in the economy, but what could be a more blatant example of Structural Inequality and Structural Discrimination than for an anti-male Ministry of Women’s Affairs to publish a DD such as this, and then call for submissions on it ? It is a clear instance of Structural Inequality and Structural Discrimination for there to be a Ministry of Women’s Affairs, with no Ministry of Men’s Affairs to counter-balance it, and then for the Ministry of Women’s Affairs to sit in biased judgement over the points raised in the submissions. This is obviously a complete farce !

 

Moreover, the DD itself excludes men from the list of people that it wants policy input from (page 4). It lists only “women and their organisations”, “employer and union organisations”, and “government agencies and policy-makers”.

 

It would be absurd for men to “submit” to such a process, and therefore the NZEEF is posting this Rejection.

2. Preliminary Issues

On the positive side, it is very pleasing to note that the DD cites Dixon (2000) and admits that part of the difference between men’s and women’s average income has to do with differences in experience and educational qualifications. As I have been pointing out for years, if women take time out to have children (and then get sole custody of them on divorce), they must have shorter careers – which means they have less experience and seniority and lower incomes. This fact has been systematically ignored by state Feminist propaganda, such as Boulton, Amohia and Fiona Sturrock (1996).

Dixon (2000) is reported as stating that only 10-50% of the “gender pay gap” is unexplained. This is a huge range (i.e. 40%), and casts strong doubt on the adequacy of the theoretical models and statistical techniques being brought to bear on this issue. It is hard to take these women seriously, in other words, if they don’t even know if they are talking about 10% or 50% of the subject-matter under consideration ! Why do we have to be so chivalrous about female incompetence ? If only 10% of the “gender pay gap” is unexplained, then it is not worth spending taxpayer money investigating it.

Another instance of incompetence is the term “gender pay gap”. It is not a “gender pay gap”, because no effort is made to ascertain the Sociological gender (male / female / bisexual / transgendered / homosexual) of the people involved. All that they are asked about is their biological sex (male / female) – even though the word “gender” is stupidly used on such forms these days – and so what is involved is actually a “sex pay gap”. If the Ministry of Women’s Affairs can’t even get its basic terms right, it is not likely to be able to think straight – but then, I knew that already !

 

3. Value

The main issue addressed is summarised as follows:

This DD is concerned with the part of the gender pay gap that results from the undervaluing and therefore under-remuneration of women (and men) working in predominantly female jobs.

We have to ask if this assumption is actually true: are predominantly female jobs really undervalued ? The aim of the DD is to achieve equal pay for work of equal value – but how do these Ideologues hope to determine value in any objective way ?

 

With the Ministry of Women’s Affairs being so anti-male, there are bound to be problems with its definition of “value”. For example, OSH (2002) shows that only 7 (SEVEN) females died from workplace accidents in the 2001-2002 year – out of a total of 73 workplace deaths. That means that 66 out of the 73 deaths (90%) were of males. This fact was about as carefully hidden as anyone could possibly imagine: the deaths are not broken down by sex, males are not even mentioned, as such, and it is only a footnote that gives a clue to this State-sponsored gendercide of males. It is State-sponsored gendercide, because it conceals the extent to which this is a male issue (as in the case of youth suicide, etc.), and meanwhile the State Ministry of Women’s Affairs is seeking to increase the pay of female-dominated occupations where the main occupational risk is probably OOS/RSI (Occupational Over-use Syndrome/ Repetitive Strain Injury) !

Men and women both have a certain amount of choice as to what jobs to apply for. If women choose to go into certain types of jobs, and those jobs happen to be lower-paid than those typically chose by men, by what right should women be rewarded by more pay, when they could have chosen the same jobs that men chose ? This is just pandering to women, saying (in effect), “You go ahead and choose the cushy jobs, and because we’ve got the Structural Inequality of a Ministry of Women’s Affairs, we can then make sure that you get just as much money as men do for doing the tough jobs !”

Pay is not the only measure of the worth of a job, and different people choose different jobs for different reasons. Some people do choose jobs on the basis of the salary, but others pay more attention to factors such as security, safety, how physical the job is, what the hours are, how far they have to commute, and so on. The Structural Inequality embodied in the Ministry of Women’s Affairs is now (in effect) telling women: “You chose this female-dominated job because it is very secure, but we’ve got the power to get you paid the same amount of money as those male suckers in that insecure job !”

The DD defines equal pay for work of equal value on page 4. However, the factors that contribute to “value” are limited to “skills, years of training, responsibility, effort and working conditions”. This excludes factors such as the amount of danger involved. In addition, it is very “supply-side”. It ignores the “demand-side”, i.e. what the job market actually wants and needs. If I have been learning and practising computer games since early childhood, for example, so that I have become very skillful, and I have responsibility for younger relatives using my equipment and learning to play the games, and I put a lot of effort into my playing, in order to achieve the highest scores all the time, and my playing conditions are cramped and uncomfortable – does that mean I have a moral right to the same income as a professional computer programmer who is similar to me in all respects – except that he/she does computer programming ? Obviously, the market demand for computer programmers is greater than that for computer gamers, though there are some highly-paid computer gamers. The market should continue to determine the difference between what is a profession and what is simply a hobby – and the market should also continue to determine value of labour, as it does with respect to all other forms of value.

 

4. Further Issues

1. In the DD’s Foreword, Laila Harre states, “Structural inequality has no place in modern and innovative workplaces.” What does that actually mean ? If it means anything at all (and that is not at all certain), it means that Structural Inequality creates inefficiencies in “modern and innovative” workplaces. In fact (even if this DD succeeded in proving that Structural Inequality existed in workplaces) there is no evidence – either in this DD or elsewhere -- that inefficiencies actually result. The NZEEF is against Structural Inequality of the sort created by the existence of the Ministry of Women’s Affairs, but we would find it hard (though not necessarily impossible) to prove that this results in actual inefficiencies. Politics is politics and economics is economics, and Laila Harre’s facile attempt to link the two, without providing any evidence – or even stating the issue clearly -- demonstrates the low level of intelligence that typifies Feminist propaganda. It is horrifying to note that this sort of downmarket thinking, coupled with Feminist bullying, is often quite sufficient to get Feminist proposals turned into policy in the Western World !

2. There is a fashion among Feminist propagandists to refer to previous Feminist studies along similar lines in other countries as justification for their attempt to introduce the same sort of thinking to New Zealand. In the case of the Law Commission’s biased “Women’s Access to Justice” project, I went back to the first in the sequence of Western copy-cat studies (the New Jersey one), and demonstrated that it was biased and anti-male (Zohrab 1996). This DD also refers to previous Feminist studies in Western countries, but it is obvious that they have no status as objective evidence, since they are necessarily just as biased as this DD is, because they are the product of the same one-eyed State Ideology. Since the flaws in the present DD are so obvious, I will not waste time examining its precursors.

3. The DD states (page 3) that “Progress on closing this gender page gap has been slow.” There is no reason for the sex pay gap to be closed – unless someone shows it to be based on discrimination, which this DD does not do. It is outrageous for this DD simply to assume the conclusion which this discussion process is supposed to be working towards in an objective fashion. It shows what a waste of time it would have been for the NZEEF to make a “Submission”, when in fact the relevant decision had already been taken.

4. The DD (page 3) refers to the low incomes of women raising children alone. This problem is one of the Ministry’s own making. Generations of Feminists and Feminist organisations, such as this Ministry, have undermined the nuclear family by disseminating viciously anti-male propaganda and by making it easier and financially more attractive for women to end heterosexual relationships, while retaining custody of the children for their sole enjoyment. If the Ministry pushed for shared parenting/joint custody to be the norm in divorces and separations, women and men would be on a more equal footing – both as regards parenting/custody and as regards availability for work and a decent income. As it is, the Structural Inequality that the Ministry embodies has resulted in a perceived need for women to “have it all” – with men having nothing: no (or little) contact with their children, and their income reduced by child-support payments (which just support the mother’s lifestyle, as far as anyone knows or monitors).

5. The missing factor that might explain any unexplained parts of the sex pay gap is brain size. Needless to say, the Ministry of Women’s Affairs won’t agree that this is a factor – but stupid people never agree that they are stupid, so that is not surprising ! It is well-known that women have smaller brains than men, on average, and that this does not correlate with body-size, so the greater body-size of men is not the reason: big men don’t have bigger brains than small men, and big women don’t have bigger brains than small women. Adults have bigger brains than children (obviously), and Humans have bigger brains than other Primates. Einstein has been shown to have had a bigger brain in the section of his brain that relates to his abnormal conceptual abilities. Unless some other explanation is proposed, it is obvious that the most likely reason for women’s smaller brains is that they have reduced mental abilities compared to men over all (though this probably varies across the range of mental abilities that we have). All over the Western World, however, organisations like the Ministry of Women’s Affairs are intimidating researchers from investigating this issue objectively, in case they come up with the “wrong” answer.

6. Another possible reason for the sex pay gap that the DD does not mention is the way that women treat men as Support Objects. Men are generally expected to support women, while the opposite is not (generally) true. This means that having a well-paid job is more important for men than it is for women, and this also means that welfare benefits for solo mothers tend to undermine fathers and families by providing an alternative Support Object (paid for by men’s taxes). It might be argued that Society is changing, as far as these expectations are concerned, but I can see little evidence of that. So to enforce “pay parity’ might have the effect of undermining fathers and families still further, and increasing the truancy, suspensions, crime, suicide, drug abuse, and general unhappiness that result from family break-ups and fatherless families.

7. Chapter Four of the DD refers to CEDAW (Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women), but CEDAW is a vicious example of Structural Discrimination against men. Its very title embodies the (female) stupid and (male) cowardly assumption that no discrimination against men occurs. This refusal even to look for discrimination against men (in case it is found !) is part and parcel of the Feminist ideology that drives most Western countries and the United Nations. The fact that New Zealand is a signatory to CEDAW is an indictment – if yet another were needed – of this country’s multi-faceted discrimination against men.

5. Conclusion

The Ministry of Women’s Affairs is an instance of Structural Inequality and Structural Discrimination against men, and the processes involved in this Discussion Document are an intensification of this Structural Inequality and Structural Discrimination. It follows inevitably from this compounded Structural Inequality and Structural Discrimination that the points that the DD raises are biased against men, and are a totally inadequate basis upon which to carry out a discussion of the respective incomes of men and women.

 

6. References

Boulton, Amohia and Fiona Sturrock (1996):
Women in the Teaching Service. Education Trends Report Vol. 8 No. 1 July 1996, Data Management and Analysis Section, Ministry of Education, Wellington, New Zealand. ISSN 0113- 681X.

Dixon, Sylvia (2000):
Pay Inequality between men and women in New Zealand. Occasional Paper 2001/1. Department of Labour, Labour Market Policy Group.

 

Ministry of Women’s Affairs (2002):
Next Steps Towards Pay Equity: a discussion document. Wellington, New Zealand, July 2002.

 

Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) (2002):
Fatal Accidents Investigated by OSH as at 1 July 2001 to 30 June 2002. http://www.osh.dol.govt.nz/hazards/stats/fatals/fatals01-02.pdf

 

“Shawn” (steditrak@hotmail.com)
Work-Day Dream
workdrem.html

 

Zohrab, Peter:
Chapter 7: “Employment Issues & the Women Can Do Anything Lie” of Sex, Lies & Feminism (early, HTML version) 7emplies.html

 

Zohrab, Peter (1996):
Submission to the Law Commission on Women’s Access to Justice, on behalf of the New Zealand Men's Rights Association

Peter D. Zohrab
Acting President
NZ Equality Education Foundation

 

See also:

Non-Wage-Gap

Further to the Pay Equity Working Group

Pay Equity Scam

Sports Apartheid Matters !

Criminal Hypocrisy of Pay Equity Proposals

Why Men Earn More: The Startling Truth Behind the Pay Gap

 

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