George Calderon and the gender pay gap

Obviously I believe George Calderon’s life is interesting in itself — dramatic, even — but another reason I have written his biography is that many of the issues of the day that he responded to are still with us (e.g. Russian autocracy, the power of trade unions, commercial theatre, public philanthropy), and his take on them was original. Despite his reputation as a Tory (which he wasn’t), George never belonged to an Establishment, political, theatrical, literary, or other. He always strove to think outside the box.

His opposition to votes for women brought out the worst in him. However, since his reasoning, like that of the women anti-suffragists, was essentially based on gender difference (the ‘separate spheres’ argument) and gender differences are still with us, even here he can be relevant, or at least challenging, today.

One of the suffragists’ claims was that enfranchisement would raise women’s wages because it would raise their status (yes, it was italicised as a Latin word and presumably pronounced with a long ‘a’). Correspondence about this erupted on the pages of The Times in April 1909 and George weighed in with a very long letter, which was printed in full presumably because he put ‘Hon. Sec. Men’s League for Opposing Woman Suffrage’ after his name. He treated the wages claim with his malignest sarcasm:

In spite of facts and statistics, the woman suffragists continually do cry that the vote must raise wages; but they can never show any instance where it has. When put to it for the manner how, they take refuge in a meaningless parrot cry of ‘raising woman’s status’. And what is meant by status none of them can tell; it is a word like ‘Mesopotamia’, or the technical terms of metaphysics and theology. If they had to put it into English they could not do it, because there is no meaning in it at all. It is a magical formula, an algebraic symbol of the same order as the square root of minus one. If women workers are to be enriched, out of whose pockets is the money to come?

What George was driving at was that the suffragists could not explain the economic mechanism by which enfranchisement would close the gender pay gap, and in the absence of that it wasn’t going to happen. One of George’s many qualifications was that, unusually for the time, he had studied ‘political economy’, i.e. what today we call ‘economics’. He consequently thought he knew what he was talking about. Indeed, very slyly in his anti-suffrage tract of the previous year he had pointed out that Millicent Fawcett, president of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, was a trained economist and could ‘prick the wages bubble in a moment’. He had also ‘searched Mrs Fawcett’s Political Economy for Beginners in vain for any hint that legislation is one of the possible means of raising wages’. He in fact believed, like a French economist who had studied the subject in 1906, that ‘the cause of women’s low wages lies chiefly in the competition of women for whom the wage is a supplement and not a livelihood’. The economic mechanism, then, that would perpetuate the gender pay gap was, in the words of his Times letter of 13 April 1909, ‘the market value of women’s work’.

The title page of George’s anti-suffrage tract

As we know only too well from the recently published statistics, enfranchisement and equal rights won by women since George’s day have not led to equal pay for women. So was he right about the role of invidious market forces? Yes, and no.

The current public debate about the gender pay gap demonstrates how complex the subject is. To take three of the simpler aspects, are we talking of a gender pay gap for doing exactly the same job, or of some kind of aggregate gap, does anyone have ‘equal’ pay given the existence of performance-related increments, and are the figures for gender pay gaps based on gross pay or income net of tax and benefits?

One thing that men in their right mind seem to have agreed on for centuries is that it is inequitable, insupportable, and indeed incomprehensible, that women should be paid less for doing the same job:

I put a question to him [Samuel Johnson] upon a fact in common life, which he could not answer, nor have I found anyone else who could. What is the reason that women servants, though obliged to be at the expense of purchasing their own clothes, have much lower wages than male servants, to whom a great proportion of that article is furnished, and when in fact our female house servants work much harder than the male? (James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson)

So neither Boswell, nor Johnson, nor ‘anyone else’ in that Age of Reason, could explain why the gender pay gap existed! Since they were men of reason, the implication is that they concluded it was the result of a perverse prejudice. And, of course, that is the short answer. But what still escapes us, it seems, is the substance of this prejudice. What specifically is it that men object to in their women colleagues that even drives employers to break the law about equal pay and the minimum wage?

Here George’s defence of ‘market forces’ can perhaps enlighten us. He was right, and the suffragists who expected enfranchisement to raise women’s pay in a market economy were wrong. But what are the forces that determine the ‘market value of women’s work’? Having identified the economic mechanism, George seems to think he has found an irrefutable, perhaps even objective, explanation of the gender pay gap. But we know perfectly well that there are a host of market forces that are purely psychological — and hence open to prejudices. George himself inadvertently identified one such prejudice, when he wrote that for women ‘the wage is a supplement and not a livelihood’.

In Edwardian Britain, as another Times correspondent pointed out, this statement was literally true, because ‘as the law now stands, a man is bound to bear the whole charge of supporting the family’. Quite possibly, therefore, a woman’s wage was regarded by everyone, including the women themselves, as a ‘supplement’, and competition between the women for a limited number of jobs did drive down the ‘market value’ of their work.

It is a long time since a woman’s salary was just a ‘supplement’ to the family income. However, even though more women are financially independent than ever before, and even though it is an official and legislative truth that they are equal to men, I believe the idea that their income is a ‘supplement’ still lurks in the male psyche. I have been self-employed for most of my life, but whenever I worked in large teams or offices I sensed a perception, perhaps even amongst some women, that they were ‘dilettantes’ at work because, as one male expressed it to me, ‘women can have children and men cannot, so of course they put children before everything else, whereas men have only work to put before everything else’. The implication was that women were only working until their maternity leave kicked in, whereupon they would rush off to do what they were really interested in, and meanwhile could not even be expected to work as hard as men.

I hasten totally to dissociate myself from such views, but we are trying to explain something that is widely thought to be almost an enigma in modern liberal society and I feel George has inadvertently identified the chief prejudice beneath it. The ‘supplement’ prejudice is the market force that produces the income differential when men and women are doing the same job (e.g. in the BBC).

The deeper question then is, why do men persist in the ‘supplement’ prejudice? There can be no rational excuse, but I suggest it is simply because our brains are programmed by gender difference, in this case bearing/not bearing children. Gender difference, as George realised when he considered the fact that most women in 1908 did not want the vote, plays havoc with the equality project. I think this is now being increasingly recognised. A correspondent in The Guardian of 2018, for instance, presents it as a fact that ‘many women prefer jobs aimed at looking after individual people, rather than committing their energy to playing the organisation game’, thus excluding themselves from higher-paid jobs open to them. That fine feminist and anti-suffragist Octavia Hill would have understood.