A large portion of the pay gap is because women fuck off to have kids too. I wouldn't hire an attached woman of child age unless there was a compelling reason if I was a small business owner, the costs and risks are too great.

The pay gap's there whether women have kids or not, otherwise the single female lawyers would earn as much as the male lawyers. Which they don't.

So this is an entirely pointless law, being passed for the sake of the appearance of doing something.

And we should all be more open about our pay, which would help. I don't get the British thing about pay being private.

Heard Ghastly Harman on the radio this morning justifying all this by saying that this would be of use to employers who have mainly female customers and would like to have female staff. Oh. So where you have mainly male customers and would like to have mainly male staff, ... no. Not allowed.

We already have an equal pay law, of course.

What they need to do is bloody well enforce it.

And we should all be more open about our pay, which would help. I don't get the British thing about pay being private. Not least when celebrities' pay is such a talking point that people are so interested in.

This is just a hunch, but I believe many employers have it written into contracts that you are not allowed to discuss your salary, and some places even your manager doesnt know what you are on.

Allows them to just make up a salary and pay people what they want to, not what the 'benchmark' is. Which sucks.

I talk about my salary with people.

Does your firm make salaries public? I know that some law firms do it, and I imagine it's very trying on the less well paid lawyers' enormous egos. People are petty enough to spend hours complaining that their meaningless job titles aren't exactly right, and adding public salaries into the mix would make it worse. Especially when the people arguing are professional arguers.

I do agree with you, but I think you'd have less trouble giving a group of kids different amounts of sweets.

This is just a hunch, but I believe many employers have it written into contracts that you are not allowed to discuss your salary, and some places even your manager doesnt know what you are on.

And we should all be more open about our pay, which would help. I don't get the British thing about pay being private. Not least when celebrities' pay is such a talking point that people are so interested in.

Do you see those 'diversity monitoring' forms which most job applications seem to have attached to them these days? I find them highly insulting and tend to tick 'other' - as far as I am concerned you might as well ask for my eye colour (which I can never remember) or how many cuddly toys I keep. Such information about as relevant as an arbitarily defined 'ethnic backgroudn'.

I'll stop now before you start thinking I've been channeling the Twatotron...

I agree, and the asking about your sexuality thing, why does that even matter? If I'm hetro you probably wouldn't think I wanted to hump all the guys so if I'm Bi or Homo am I going to suddenly want to turn all the girlies?

Of course this is also in the main true about people who find kids attractive, trying selling that one at a job interview.

I (and the people I worked for) got taken to court over discrimination before.
It was a now-closed night club in Bedford, and we hired 10 dancers to go in cages for a big night. About 20 came and auditioned, and I chose the fit ones.
One of the ugly (well, uglier - she wasn't bad) ones kicked up a fuss because we asked for 'dancers' in the advert, and then her dance school got behind her and took us to court.
We won that, but it's a good job no-one thought to look at my record of employing bar-staff

What was your defense?

"It seems, therefore, perfectly fair for two different rates of pay. I agree that there should be equal pay for equal work, but I do not think that there is a case for equal pay when you have games with different lengths."

What about the Wimbledon thing - should the winner of the female singles get as much money as the winner of the male singles?

There's also the argument that reasonably paced rallying play is actually more skillful than ace after ace after ace.

It should come down to how much money women's tennis at Wimbledon generates compared with how much men's tennis generates.

If it is the same, they should be payed the same.

One of the female players they talked too said they'd happily play against the men, but the men didn't want to be beated by a woman

One of the female players they talked too said they'd happily play against the men, but the men didn't want to be beated by a woman

If women want to compete with the men, they should be allowed to.

physical prowess

The less emphasis a sport has on physical prowess, the more likely it is that a woman may stand a chance competing with men.

In sports where physical prowess is important, women will be annihilated by men.

So much so, that it would be uncompetitive and uncomfortable to watch and result in poor attendances/viewing figures.

Absolutely, the ultimate example of that point is the 100m sprint