This is Customization. And this is how long it takes to make that customization: app: 3 min. – with upload of Foto

Just making a point ;o)

- Best, Jonas

Equal pay for equal work!” It sounds like an echo from 1968, a remnant from a bygone idealism, but it is indeed the parole telling us that the unions have engaged in yet another collective labor negotiation. Ever since the women acquired a right to vote, the same song has chimed from the unions in the traditional woman professions – well, probably before then, but at that time it seems women were more occupied with getting the right to vote rather than taking on the humongous task of obtaining a competitive paycheck at the end of the month.

Getting back to the “equal pay for equal work” statement; it’s hard to argue against in any context, but in this context I am sure there are some stubborn headed Neanderthals of the male gender that would beg them differ. But disregarding this dying race, the rest of us, males and females alike, can surely agree that it is only fair.

The problem is however not with the five words themselves, but in the underlying assumption behind the statement; namely that women provide the same work as males. I would argue that they don’t and if you hear me out, then I’ll explain why it should be evident – though obviously hard to swallow for the female rights activists who as all activists have become so caught up in their self-pity that they are beyond reason.

Let’s talk statistics for a short while – not the kind generally used by politicians where they provide a number of figures without the underlying assumptions to justify a political agenda – but a general intuitive kind of statistics: When we are talking equal pay for women and men alike, then we need to generalize both in order to talk the same language as the unions and to get beyond the numerous cases that falls outside of the norm. And that is a good thing, because the law of big numbers dictate that with larger numbers, the trend becomes systematic, thereby predictable and that is what we want to base our analysis and decisions on when we are rational.

In general, women are paid less than men. This could be because there continue to be more females represented in traditional women professions that tend to be less lucratively paid. Quickly eluding the discussion about whether these professions should get better paid, or if they are traditionally dominated by women simply because they are not paid well enough to attract men, we can even compare men and women in the same métier. Even here, statistics show that there is a gap from the female wage up to the male one. And that is only reasonable.

You see, the one signing the paycheck at the end of the month will inevitably look at the expected workload that the employee can carry – not today, not this week, this month of this year, but throughout their career. If we have an average Danish female – using Danes makes sense since this is the statistics I know best and since the equality is among the highest in the world as it is today – she will in her lifetime get 2,3 kids. At this time women often take approximately a year off on maternity leave – per child! Some spend it over a longer period and call it something else, but the fact remains that each child cost the mother a year off work – in fact is most likely more, but we are just illustrating a point here. Then someone who is more worried about what society can do for them, than what they can do for society, invented the term Paternity leave – really just another excuse for the spoiled westerners to work less, and suck the competitiveness out of a collectively misguided people, that insists that high wages and low working hours can keep us on track due to the power of an expensively acquired knowhow provided by a factually ineffective educational system. But paternity leave should even out the score a bit and we can afford to give it some credit, so let’s say the men take a month off in average.

Doing a bit of “back on an envelope”-math : With five weeks of vacation and a bunch of bank holidays there are approximately 220 working days in a year. Working from the age of 25 through 65 people work 40 years which gives us 8.800 working days. Men take an average of 2,3 months off work due to paternity leave – assuming they are smart enough to elude the given holidays they have 25 working days in a month, meaning they take an average of 58 days off due to paternity leave. Meanwhile women take 2,3 years off work to tend to the kids equal to 506 working days. In other words, men take 0,66% of their career off on paternity leave, while women take 5,75% off of their career – a difference of 5,09%. Based on this, men represent a 5,09% higher value to the employer.

But the math gets worse for the average woman. The mother us usually the one who gets called on when the little chump is sent home from daycare with some odd illness or when the kid needs to go to the doctor or dentist, further decreasing the female value to the employer. And all of these days is time wasted where the woman may learn a lot, but most likely not the kind of intellectuality that her employer is paying her to acquire. In other words, the time she spend away from work may be held in the beginning of her career, but the deduction in her value should be measured at the end of her career where the gap between the wage of her and that of her husband is greatest.

On top of this comes the uncertainty that her employer undertakes by hiring a woman before a man: No one knows just how many children she will get. As an added bonus to the employer the seemingly popular national pass-time of getting divorced will present a 50% chance that the female suddenly finds herself alone – and who usually winds up with the kids again? The children that are depending on their mother being home to feed and nurture them will at the end of the day make her less dynamic from a work perspective. I will not even try to quantify these uncertainties, but merely conclude that from an employer perspective a female is a more risky and less productive investment. Then why would he pay the same for the two alternatives?

By now it should be evident that men and women do not deliver equal work and an upside of, say, 10 – 15% for the male does seem like a reasonable difference from a commercial perspective.

Of course there are ways to defy the market powers and artificially try to even the playing field. In Denmark we have created a maternity fund, which all employers pay to and which covers most of the expenses of the employer when one of the employees goes on maternity leave. This money is meant to pay for the temporary substitute – a hopelessly naïve ambition considering the time it takes for a new employee to get settled in a company. In the public sector, the state even continues its pension payments to the employee while she is producing absolutely nothing of value to the employer. Further affirmative initiatives include a mandatory 14 day paternity leave for the men, a number of recommendations to get more women in executive management and on the boards of private organizations.

This is in effect affirmative actions. The problem is that this is not a temporary solution to square a historic inequality. Not before the doctors are able to reproduce Schwarzenegger’s male pregnancy on a regular basis – and I wouldn’t hold my breath on that – can women be relieved of their destiny to ensure the reproduction of mankind – an ability that carries a high value in the minds of their gender counterparts, and which could be sold at a high premium if just the females of the world could join up in a sexist-duopoly and start charging the men for spawning their brats. The problem is of course that the competition is fierce.

The affirmative action defies the market powers and consequently is expensive to maintain. The good news is that women tend to live longer than men – if women were working for that period, then the amount of work would even the playing field and make up for the maternity leave. Does that sound like a solution? I doubt its viability, though the cynic surely would approve.

I look forward to the day when I buy a newspaper and find it to be four pages shorter than usual. I imagine finding a small notice in the paper politely excusing the unusually thin paper bundle: “Dear reader. We have had to shorten the newspaper today, since the world was unusually uneventful yesterday. Yours sincerely, the editor.” – Personally I would gladly pay the full price for the newspaper – I would even consider subscribing to it – because I would have found that one, odd newspaper that actually gave the content a second thought before shipping the news to its oblivious readers.

Now, unlike many of my peer bloggers – who live in alternative housings, have found a zen way of living and who wish to spread the naïve seeds of love and harmony – I work in a global, private organization, whereby my primary professional responsibility (and ambition for that matter) is to increase the wealth of the shareholders. Consequently, I am very much aware that no newspaper would remove four pages from the print due to a slumbering world – It would replace the news with advertisements mixed with the completely irrelevant vox-pop (the journalistic equivalent of bankruptcy) in order to cover the loss of readers and financially satisfy the owners – and who can honestly blame them?

There are four main reasons why I start by writing about shortening newspapers:

First off it’s a cry for readers to stop being indifferent and uncritical about what they (you?) read. With the emergence of free newspapers at every train station, public bus and waiting room, the news content has become ever more hallow and shallow. One person’s success or fall from grace evidently attracts more readers than the development of international financial indicators or implications of political bargains. And there is something terribly wrong with that picture: Surely everyone must be more interested in the development that actually affects their job, education, financial state and ultimately their quality of life, than the short life story of some insignificant talent show contestant or whether some distant movie star has been divorced from whichever fool he or she was married to… or that he or she is marrying a new celebrity, looking to revive a bygone career through the mindless media coverage of a celebrity marriage. Surely there are enough likeminded people out there, to create a market for a free newspaper which focuses on the essential and significant news with a sober analysis of some of the circumstantial, indicative reports produced every day in the world. Let’s create a demand for meaningful news – then one of the newspapers is bound to pursue the market when the competition for mindless waste of time has finally drained its equity.

Secondly, I have a professional job which urges me to be rational in my thinking and action. I may not always be so, which is probably why I am not (yet) running the organization, but making my way at the lower ranks. I know what a business case is. I believe in balanced scorecards and enlightened, fact based decisions. In other words, I consider myself to be driven by rational thinking. Consequently I get aggravated when anyone – including the media, religious organizations or self-proclaimed authorities, political parties or leaders  – seek to mislead and deceive – intentionally or by simple ignorance – me, readers, religious followers or anyone else for that matter. It is, however, not only the media, religious spokesperson or politician that is to blame for this to be even possible. Those of us who, through an ignorant and uncritical attitude, expose ourselves to these malicious impulses need to step back and reassess the intent of the message. Who sends it? What are their motives? What are they emphasizing and more relevant: What are they exempting to stress their point? – And obviously I expect you as a reader to contemplate the message in this very blog (which I of course hope you will find to be sincere and meaningful enough to follow in the future).

Thirdly, I intend to “call ‘em as I see ’em.” There will be no sugar coating things. Earnestness is the only road to improvements. We will accomplish nothing by exuberating well-intended but inoperable empathy – How can we expect anyone to improve their act if we indulge their ways by mindlessly consenting to their erroneous or ignorant ways? Naturally there are people out there that have the right mindset and encourage honest feedback – meaning the willingness and ability to take in new information and adapt their viewpoints. But by painting the picture with broad strokes and thereby generalizing, there will be unfortunate but inevitable collateral damage.

And yes, I do generalize! Stereotypes don’t come out of nothing – they are bread through long-term fine-tuning on the essence of a given message, action or behavior – it is essentially an intuitive statistical derivation of our collective observations. Hence, generalizations hold a truth, but through all my use of generalization, you must keep reminding yourselves, that generalizations are just that – there will inevitably be numerous exceptions to the generalization. When for instance, I state that Middle Eastern immigrants and their descendants drive recklessly, then it is based on the experience that very often when I encounter a selfish fool in traffic, endangering pedestrians, bicyclists and drivers in the street, to show off or shave a couple of inconsequential seconds off their trip, the driver happens to be an immigrant or a descendant thereof. But does that mean that all immigrants drive recklessly? That no Danes behave as kamikaze pilots behind the wheel? Or that I have a racist undertone? No, of course not! It is merely a generalization spawned by numerous observations. Stating that one should never generalize is equivalent to denying the forecasting ability of statistics.

Finally, I will not post a blog every day, or every week for that matter. You see, if you are interested in paying attention to my thoughts and viewpoints (and that is yet a big if!) I do not want to suffocate you by submitting a mindless mass-production of blogs. When I have something on my mind that I believe the world would be enriched by hearing, then I will post it. If not… well, I don’t want to be the newspaper that comes out just to sell adds.