Complete and Utter Zebu

In the House of Commons on Thursday, Leader of the House Harriet Harman accused Mark Harper, Conservative MP for the Forest of Dean, of being “a gender pay discrimination denier.” Harsh words, but she was angry with Harper for daring to suggest that men who work part-time are paid less than their female equivalents.

Harper’s figures came from the Office for National Statistics and the MP dared to ask “how we measure accurately the difference in pay between men and women”. Harman claimed that the true figure is 22% in favour of men and she challenged Harper to say that women are 22% less intelligent, less hard-working or less valuable to their employers.

How did Harman have the bare-faced cheek to say this? She knew full well that what she said was untrue. If she didn’t, then she must either have an appalling memory or be staggeringly stupid. For the Office for National Statistics has told her it’s wrong. Several times. The ONS, you may recall, was established by Gordon Brown in 2007 so that the public would know that there was “no more spin”. Unfortunately for the government, the superbly-named Sir Michael Scholar and his statisticians took him at his word and have speaking out about horrendous statistics abuse.

Like Home Secretary Jacqui Smith over knife crime, Harriet Harman has had her knuckles firmly rapped by the ONS for abusing gender pay gap statistics. Launching her Equality Bill in April 2009 as Minister for Women and Equality, she said: “Women are paid on average 23 per cent less per hour than men”. She said this even though the ONS’s National Statistician, Dame Karen Dunning, had complained to the Government Equalities Office the previous November that the department’s way of calculating gender pay differences was confusing and potentially damaging. They were not, she said, comparing like for like, but setting men’s full-time pay against women’s part-time pay. For full-time pay, the gap was 12.8% while, as Harper dared to point out, for part-time pay women were actually paid 3.4% more than men. As part-timers get less than full-time workers and there are four times as many women part-timers as men, the GEO’s way of presenting the statistics exaggerates the gender pay gap.

As there are apparently no statisticians employed in the GEO, you might have thought they’d pay attention to the National Statistician. Not a bit of it. After Harman came out with that 23% figure in April, Sir Michael Scholar wrote to her saying that the use of the statistic “may undermine public trust in official statistics” and “risk giving a misleading quantification of the gender pay gap”.

When Jacqui Smith was discovered to be fiddling the figures on knife crime, she apologised. Not Harman. Far from saying “sorry”, she simply goes on quoting the same figure (shaded down very slightly) with gay abandon. Perhaps she has realised that Sir Michael and the ONS have no punitive powers. More shame on her.

There’s more on this and other misuse of statistics by politicians, of course, in Complete and Utter Zebu.