What a Mess?... But how about starting with Whitehall and not just 0.1% of firms

David Cameron’s bid to close the gender pay gap – in which women make 80p for every ￡1 earned by a man – is a laudable aim.

Yet, he’s going about it in the wrong way – and, possibly, for a less than admirable reason.

But, before I reveal where he is going wrong, I would like to rebuff a couple of popular arguments that falsely claim the wage discrepancy is actually women’s fault.

First of all, it is often said that women are paid less because they choose to have children.

Here, it is worth pointing out that females didn’t choose to become the sole gender capable of giving birth – and, unless they are a whiptail lizard, there is always a male involved.

The second common argument for why women earn less is that they choose to enter lower paid professions.

Yet the truth here is that they often, due to institutional sexism, find it much harder to land the same jobs as men in the first place.

Indeed, an American study found that with identical CVs – but with one for “John” and the other for “Jennifer” – the male name was not only more likely to be given the same jobs, but was, on average, offered 13% more than the female name.

Women are often paid far less for the same jobs in the real world too. British female doctors, for example, earn 29% less than their male counterparts.

So, in a bid to tackle Britain’s woeful gender wage gap – the sixth highest in the EU - Cameron wants to force employers of more than 250 people to reveal whether, on average, they pay men more than women.

Naming and shaming works. But, while millions of women may benefit, most will not.

This is because 59.3% of workers in the private sector are employed by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that have fewer than 250 staff.

Indeed, 99.9% of British businesses are SMEs, meaning that Cameron’s naming and shaming law would apply to only 0.1% of firms, according to the Government’s own figures.

Most bosses will, therefore, be free to carry on as usual – underpaying anyone who has the temerity to own a uterus and might help sustain our population.

A better start for the Prime Minister would be to look around him and ensure that women working in Whitehall are paid the same as their male counterparts.

Senior female civil servants were last year paid an average of 5% less than men at the same grade, a study by the Labour Party found.

And the Foreign Office found that it paid women diplomats 10% less than male embassy officials.

Even Cameron himself managed to pay a female minister ￡22,147 less than her male predecessor when he made Baroness Tina Stowell Leader of the House of Lords but had demoted her role from the Cabinet.

Amid the outcry, he was forced to use the Conservative Party’s private funds to plug the wage gap and bring her salary up to the ￡101,038 taxpayers afforded Lord Jonathan Hill.

Indeed, it is hard not to see Cameron’s actions in a different light: a mere reaction to people’s sense that he’s not quite the husky-loving, hoodie-hugging, egalitarian feminist that he periodically claims to be when the mood suits him.

As with his Government’s “living wage”, his lightweight fix for the gender pay gap is, I suspect, more about combating the unfortunate fact that austerity has hit women far harder than men.

And, while others might argue otherwise, his latest reaction to the damaging “nasty party” label is less about wooing new voters but keeping the ones he has on side.

These are Tory voters who like to think they are feminists or, at least, don’t like to think they’re the sort of person who doesn’t care about gender equality.

The Conservatives have excellent form in cynical deception, having deliberately used Margaret Thatcher’s gender to suggest they represented female Britons while she only promoted one woman to the Cabinet and actively reversed advances in feminism.

Her government ensured that more than half of Britain’s working women were denied the right to maternity benefits, paid maternity leave and shorter working hours because she resented “subsidising” mothers to earn a wage rather than staying at home to look after their children.

On a different but still informative theme, the Tories continually told people during the 1980s that they also cared about the mass unemployment they had caused – and then did little to tackle it, other than local vanity projects like regenerating east London’s Docklands into what has become a corporate cocoon that employs few of the deprived people from the surrounding area.

And, of course, this tactic worked because the Conservatives kept on being voted back into office.

Now, just like then, I suspect Cameron and Co have gambled that, despite people’s better instincts for compassion, the government only need to do just enough to show they care – whether in reality or rhetoric – and then they can get away with whatever other regressive policies they want.