From the BBC:
Mothers in part-time jobs are being hit by a "pay penalty" and are often not given pay rises linked to experience, a new study has suggested.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies report found by the time a couple's first child is aged 20, many mothers earn nearly a third less than the fathers. A key factor was women working part-time in motherhood, the report said.
A gender pay gap between graduates has not improved since 1993, despite gaps narrowing for non-graduates, it added.
The original headline and article was much less nuanced and just wailed on about the 'gender pay gap' and highlighted that the 'gender pay gap' was larger for graduates than non-graduates.
Happily enough, somebody then sat down and actually read the report and did a more accurate write up to explain it's a 'mothers pay gap' and how it arises. The point about graduates is that their salaries tend to increase with seniority much more steeply than for non-graduate jobs, so hitting the pause button on pay rises by going part-time will lead to a bigger gap between mothers and everybody else.
Conversely, seeing as so few jobs require much physical strength*, any natural advantage that men used to have is being eroded. (*Call me a chauvinist, but how many female rubbish collectors do you see?) So we'd expect the 'gender pay gap' at the lower end to flatten of its own accord.
On the subject of graduates, also from the BBC:
Many graduates receive "paltry returns" for their degrees despite racking up £50,000 in debt, says the chairman of the Education Select Committee.
Robert Halfon will say in a speech on Monday, that between a fifth and a third of graduates take non-graduate jobs, and that any extra returns for having a degree "vary wildly". He will also suggest that too many people are studying academic degrees.
University leaders maintain that a degree remains an excellent investment.
Well duh. There are only so many jobs that really need graduates (precious few, if you ask me). If more people are doing degrees than there are graduate jobs, clearly, for the excess, the whole exercise is pointless, purely in career terms (good fun though). People were saying this twenty years ago when Tony Blair went mad and decided half of school leavers 'should' go to university.
And university leaders would say that, wouldn't they?
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