Pay equity issues

NBR reports:

His views on pay equity – and the way they are couched – are as good an indication as any whether one is likely to find Dr Peterson’s world-view appealing or appalling.

Upon hearing of the New Zealand prime minister’s pay equity pledge, he notes there’s a similar drive in Canada – “because our prime minister is constitutionally incapable of having a single thought that isn’t completely ideologically motivated” – and then delivers his gloomy prognosis.

“So she says she won’t rest until that happens? Well, she won’t be resting for a very long time, because what’s going to happen is she – like other leaders who are attempting this impossible task – is going to find out that this problem is so intractable that it will eat them up politically.”

But wait, it gets worse.

“Give the government enough power to ensure equity of outcome,” he says, “and you will have simultaneously given them enough power to become tyrannical.”

 

Equality of opportunity is what governments should strive for, not a socialist one size fits all equality of outcome.

According to the professor, the problem is it proceeds from an axiom that Western economies are expressions of a “corrupt patriarchal system” and abetted by a confirmation bias that results in any statistic that appears to provide support for that proposition being immediately adopted as if it’s true.

The reality, he says, is “there are many reasons why a pay gap overall exists between men and women, and gender – sex, let’s say – is only one of those.”

And it’s further complicated by many of those other factors also being tied to sex.

For example, people who score high on the ‘Big Five’ personality trait of agreeableness (the other traits are openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion and neuroticism) “tend to get paid less whether they are men or women,” Dr Peterson says.

“But women tend to be more agreeable than men, so it’s not easy to tell if it’s a sex issue or a personality issue because those two things are inextricably tangled.”

It’s the old issue of confounding factors.