After some thought on my last 2 posts about inequality in the workplace, is it that I have missed the point? Could it be that the point Harriet Harman is making, is that women are not reaching the higher echelons of their careers, if they have one at all, because of life choices? I know plenty of women at the top - I have worked with three of them this week - but they all have made life choices that meant they become competitive with their male counterparts. One chose not to have children, another chose to only have one and a third is sufficiently well off to not have to worry about how much child care costs. Is this her point? Should we, as a society, give a boost to those people with particularly strong family values? Should we positively disriminate to allow for such life decisions? Then surely the argument should not be, as Ms Harman puts it, countering discrimination against women, but against those who choose to have a family. But then would our businesses reduce their competitive advantage?

Oh the joys of anti-discrimination legislation.

Faced with the following:

“Yet listen to this figure - if you are a woman working part-time you get 40 per cent less per hour on average than a man working full-time.”

You would think that Harriet Harman was onto something. That women earn 40% less than men is astonishing. Indeed, she goes on to say

“Do we think she is 40 per cent less intelligent, less committed, less hard-working, less qualified? It’s not the case. It’s entrenched discrimination.”

Quite.

But a day or so ago, I argued that it is not so easy to compare full-time employee wages with part-time employee wages, since the wages due should be calculated on outcomes and not on inputs. Effectively, just because someone has the same job description does not mean that they should earn the same, and in my mind (and it seems employers) there is a significant difference between the outcomes of a full and part time employee.

So rather than comparing apples with pears, as Harriet likes to do by comparing full time men with part time women in order to come to some conclusion about women/male inequality, let’s compare apples with apples.

In the year to April 2007, according to the Office for National Statistics, weekly median gross earnings for a woman working part-time are £145.60 and for a man, £137.80. If you compare women who aren’t married or cohabiting with men who aren’t married or cohabiting, hourly pay for the women is £8.82 and for men £8.72.

So if part time women 40% earn less than full time men, you know what, part time men learn even less! Where is the outcry on that statistic Ms Harman? Do you think men are less intelligent, less committed, less hard-working, less qualified? Is it also entrenched discrimination? Or could it be that employers use a mechanism called the market to decide who should earn what, and that full time employees are more valuable assets than part time ones?

Of course, there is a gender pay gap and some of this is due to discrimination, but rather than comparing apples with oranges, or taking specific examples as I have done above, let’s look into the figures in more detail. According to the ONS from a few years ago, full time women earned 82% of the pay of full time men and the gap is widening over time. Again, this looks damning. But rather than making an emotive speach about how unfair it is on women, let’s continue with the analysis. Indeed, according to the ONS, the widening of the gap is

“largely the result of differences at the top end of the earnings distribution where the growth in men’s earnings has outstripped that of women.”

One must therefore look across the distribution of earnings and compare the mean average for men and women at each point on the cumulative distribution. When one does this, one finds that in the lowest 75% of the earnings, the pay gap between men and women is actually narrowing. Indeed, by 0.5%! But of course, there is always a disclaimer. If one reads the statistical reports, rather than listen to some dippy politician (and trust me, Harman is) then we find out

“Although average hourly pay excluding overtime provides a useful comparison of men’s and women’s earnings, it does not reveal differences in rates of pay for comparable jobs. This is because such averages do not highlight the different employment characteristics of men and women, such as the differing proportions in higher or lower-paid occupations and their length of time in jobs.”

So rather than worrying about absolute pay differences between men and women from the whole employment market, which is still comparing apples with oranges, one should compare how much men and women earn in the same job. And that is the subject of another post.

When we have a situation where men are affraid to help children who have hurt themselves, where mothers are banned from kissing their daughters goodbye, where parents have to have their criminal records checked before their children are allowed to play together, where the state bureaucrat bans a market trader from even giving away his fruit, let alone selling it, because it is the wrong shape.

This is the country, dear readers, that you have brought about. This is the country where state control over our every day lives was brought about by your votes. So just remember, next time you read about something like the above, that you voted for Labour and you only have yourself to blame. People wonder why I have become a supporter of the opposition. I wonder why they have to ask.

Today, Harriet Harman, said

“Yet listen to this figure - if you are a woman working part-time you get 40 per cent less per hour on average than a man working full-time.”

Does this not defy logic? In all of my experienced as an employee, working part-time results in less efficient work. Let’s take an example. We have many secretaries in our building - ten in fact. We have only 7 permanent academic staff. So that is more than 1 secretary for every member of staff. But they all work, apart from one, part time. If you add all of their hours together and calculate the full time equivalent, we would be 6 secretaries. Still nearly 1 full time secretary per academic member of staff.

In my old university we had 3 full time secretaries. They all worked full time. We had 25 members of academic staff (more now!).

In other words, we had a secretary/staff ratio of 0.12 compared to 0.86 now. How can so few academic staff make so much work for secretaries - some 7 times the work? Inefficiency is the answer. Because almost everyone is part time, when they go home and the job is not finished, then someone else (who did not start the job) has to finish it. This is because the jobs have deadlines - there is no point waiting until after the conference to send out travel details to the delegates, for example. And therefore the work is inefficient, because the second person does not know what the first person has done.

So since the quality of the work can be lower when part time, is it right that a part time employee gets paid the same as a full time one? The job description may be identical, but that is an input. Should someone be paid based on the input? Or should they be paid based on the quality and the quantity of the work, which is an output? This is exactly the same problem that I have with the NHS or teaching - this government often cites “we have doubled NHS spending”. But they are citing inputs, not outputs. Indeed, it seems that

“Ministers hope the Bill will promote a new era of openness on pay following pressure from trade unions for mandatory pay audits to make sure women are not receiving less money than men for doing the same job.”

The same job description or the same job, Ms Harman?

I am completely for equal pay for equal work. It is in my bones. But I am also realistic - for an employer, it is often much less convenient (and don’t forget more costly - twice the admin) to employ two people to do the job of one. And it is right to for the employers to bear the cost of this inconvenience, as for most jobs it is relatively small on the grand scale of things. However, is it right that an employer bears the cost of employing two people when the sum of those two people’s output is smaller than the output of a single person?

I am at a meeting at the moment hosted by the IAEA. We are here to discuss how to increase participation in “exotic beam studies”, which basically means how do we get more people involved in facilities research. Now, there is considerable bias towards getting developing nations involved.

But I have a dilemma. Surely would it not serve these nations more to build roads, factories or irrigation than to spend many many millions on central facilities? What is the IAEA’s agenda here? Could it be that they have realised their is a decline in nuclear facilities and therefore they must do something about it? After all, the number of research reactors in the world has plummeted in the last decade, the same can be said for Mössbauer, there are no stand-alone muon sources and 3 out of the 4 are quite old.

Why are the IAEA actively encouraging nations to spend hard currency on research that will have no direct effect on their people, just the possibility of an indirect effect on a new technology maybe at some undefined time in the future that the population of said country will probably not be able to afford? If the IAEA actually funded this research, so that it was effectively free for the countries involved, then it would be a different matter. But they won’t do this.

What they will do is fund developed countries to send scientific ambassadors to developed countries to try and get them interested in doing facilities research. So that will be funding a 3 month holiday for retired scientists to exotic parts of the world, costing many many thousands (there is a rule, you see, that if your flight is longer than a certain limit, you travel business class…).

So my dilemma is, do I continue to contribute to this meeting or do I leave, which would cost me quite a tidy sum since I would not be able to claim my expenses for being here? I don’t think I’ll be contributing to any more meetings, no matter how good it is for my career….

When you have to rely on votes from homophobic bigots, who want to cure homosexuals, to get your fascist bills through parliament.

A fellow blogger has a question. When faced with a kettle with too much water in it for your needs, is it more energy efficient to throw away the extra water or boil it? That is, does it cost more energy to boil 2 cups of water or purify them?

Since this is (used to be) one of my favourite themes - calculating what is the most environmentally friendly thing to do - I thought I would do the calculation for him.

1. Assumption: 2 cups of water = 0.5 l = 500 g
2. The heat capacity of water is 4.186 J / g C
3. Assumption: the water is heated from 20 C to 100 C
4. Therefore, if a kettle was 100% efficient, it would use 167kJ to heat the water
5. However, 3 kW kettles are not 100% efficient. The average kettle needs 1 minute 26 seconds to boil 0.5 l of water.
6. Therefore, the average kettle uses 258 kJ of energy to boil 2 cups.
7. It takes around 2 kWh of energy to purify 1000 Gallons of water.
8. 1 US Gallon is 3.78 l.
9. Therefore, it takes 0.95 kJ of energy to purify 0.5 l of water.
10. Therefore throw that water away, Gav!

Now this does not take into account the energy needed to make the kettle or the treatment plant. But it’s safe to say that the energy needed to make a kettle is marginal compared to the energy used when boiling water in it over the kettle’s lifetime. The same can be said for water treatment plant and we need one of those anyway, whether we boil the extra 2 cups or not. In effect, the energy is already spent.

So the conclusion is that throwing the water away uses around 250 times less energy than leaving it in the kettle, if you don’t need it. You could of course empty the kettle into a jug and use it later, or just drink the extra water.

It seems that a decision has been made. We are most likely moving to Colchester. Will be house hunting there next week and two weeks after that (Canada in between).

There doesn’t seem to be much political activity going on there….. there is a PPC, but where is the website?

I was having a chat with my PhD student today, who has conservative leanings (how strange to have *two* academics with conservative leanings in one place?). I was telling him about the disastrous time that Labour are having at the moment:

• Darling causing chaos with the PAYE system by making changes to the tax system in mid-financial year, due to his inability to spot a political disaster and do a u-turn before it was too late.
• The first run on a bank in living memory (almost), which was then bailed out to the tune of £50bn.
• The crackpot idea of introducing HIPs, which have the effect of making buying a house more complex and expensive, just before the onset of a housing crash.
• Literally hundreds (!?!) of tax rises in the last decade.
• The non-sensical traffic congestion schemes that are being brought into our regional cities.
• Locking people up for 42 days for no apparent reason.. but it’s ok, because we’ll give them a wod of cash for the inconvenience…
• The compulsory purchase of land and property in the cheapest area of London, at current market values, so they can build that big white elephant called 2012. Only to rake in all that profit from the redevelopment in a few years, while those that they have displaced struggle to find suitable accommodation in the more afluent areas to live or do business.

And why are his views significant? Well he is an outside, someone who has an interest in politics but knows nothing about British politics - being a German living in Switzerland.

But the list above was not the main reason for him stating “When’s the next election? They’ll never win…”. The reason was all about timing. Just as the fuel prices surge to their highest levels ever, in one swoop the government decide to increase fuel duty by yet another 2p and to tripple tax on family cars, pricing poorer hard working families off the road. And they do this when we are in grips of a house price crash, slow growth and increasing inflation (which appears to be considerably higher than “official” statistics).

Timing like this is not an accident. It’s political incompetence. And when governments are incompetent with their money - our money - then they are doomed. Roll on regime change - let’s hope it is less of a disaster than our last attempt at such things.

Now that the decision has been made - that I will be returning to the UK in September - will my thirst for politics return? The answer is that I do not know. This blog was originally set up as a soap-box for my political views, but on moving to CH, I became somewhat disheartened with not just politics, but the UK in general. Switzerland has a lot of things right; but that does not mean that I want to live here forever. And so, now that the move is definite, what will happen to this blog? Will I move onto local politics and events? Will my thirst for national politics return? Or will languish in inactivity, as it does now? Only time will tell.