Male full-time work is longer!

Why do men earn more than women? Feminists would have us believe it is because of sexist discrimination against women. New Australian research, though, suggests otherwise.

It's a well-known statistic that Australian women earn 67% as much money as men. This is partly due to the fact that many women work part-time. However, even when you compare full-time workers there is still a disparity, with women earning 85% of the male total.

What accounts for this 15% difference? According to workplace researcher Rodney Stinson, it is not due to sexism or a glass ceiling. The problem is that it's wrong to compare male full-time work with female full-time work, as male full-timers work longer hours than female full-timers.

Stinson's research reveals that of the 20 occupations with the longest hours, 18 are overwhelmingly male in composition, and the other 2 are largely male. The occupations with the shortest full-time hours, though, are largely female in composition.

The difference in "full-time" hours is quite dramatic, ranging from 35 hours per week to over 49 hours.

What this means in practice is that it's misleading to compare the earnings of mostly male hotel managers, three quarters of whom work more than 49 hours a week, with that of mostly female library assistants, 90% of whom work less than 40 hours a week.

Of course the men will earn more, as they are working much longer hours!

In fact, according to Roger Stinson men work longer full-time hours than women even when working in the same or similar occupations.

So when the topic of earnings comes up, don't let feminists portray women as victims of patriarchal men: just tell them that men earn more because they're willing to work longer hours than even full-time female workers.

As Rodney Stinson puts it himself:

It may not suit doctrinaire theorists, but it is a fact that males, on average, have longer working hours in full-time jobs than do females across the occupational spectrum.