A piece published on the website of Justice for Men & Boys (and the women who love them), the political party of which I’m the chairman, in March 2018:

I recently had a video-recorded discussion with Karren Brady. The start of her Wikipedia profile:

Karren Rita Brady, Baroness Brady, CBE (born 4 April 1969) is an English sporting executive, politician, television personality, newspaper columnist, author and novelist. She is the former managing director of Birmingham City F.C. and current vice-chairman of West Ham United F.C.. She is featured in the BBC One series The Apprentice as an aide to Lord Sugar. She was the Small Business Ambassador to the UK Government under Prime Minister David Cameron.

She is known as “The First Lady of Football”. Her appointment with Birmingham City began in March 1993, when she was 23. In 2002 she became the first woman to hold such a post in the top flight of English football when the team was promoted. She oversaw the company’s flotation in 1997, thus becoming the youngest managing director of a UK plc.

Brady was interviewing me for a Channel 5 programme on the gender pay gap, Why Do Women Earn More Than Men? It will be broadcast from 22:00 on Wednesday, 4 April. We were filmed over two hours, plenty of time for me to give her the gist of William Collins’s article on the gender pay gap, which showed that for part-time workers, median hourly income for women has exceeded that for men for the past 20 years. For full-time workers, POST-TAX, median hourly income for women has exceeded that for men for a number of years. So the basic premise of the programme, along with its title, is a lie. I also found time to explain Dr Catherine Hakim’s Preference Theory (2000), which showed that while four in seven British men are work-centred, just one in seven British women is.

I explained the causal link between increasing gender diversity on corporate boards, and corporate financial decline. To say the discussion was a strained one would be an understatement. The programme’s (female) producer later filmed a number of people including myself promoting the conference outside Bond St tube station, holding placards and handing out leaflets. I understand that just 3-4 minutes of all that video footage survived the editing process.

William Collins’s important blog piece on the gender pay gap is here. Spoiler alert:

The median gender pay gap is in favour of women for part-time employees, and has been for 20+ years.

Post-tax, the gap for full-time employees has been in favour of women for a number of years.

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