The gender pay gap isn’t just about sexism

‘More work needs to be done,’ is what people say whenever some unachievable social goal is shown to be another 200 years away. And it was said a lot this week after it emerged that women still earn 18 per cent less than men on average. As the Guardian reported:

The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) also found that the gap balloons after women have children, raising the prospect that mothers are missing out on pay rises and promotions. That was echoed by a separate report yesterday suggesting that male managers are 40 per cent more likely than female managers to be promoted.

What’s odd is that almost nowhere in the supposedly intelligent press, let alone BBC Radio – where biological explanations for almost anything are taboo – can I find an attempt to explain why this is, other than societal explanations that can be solved by government intervention. For example, as Ben Southwood of the Adam Smith Institute points out, the gender pay gap has much