The Orwellian Deception of the Gender Pay-Gap

Announcement posted by The Unshackled 21 May 2018

The Unshackled

2+2=5; this is a fact you are meant to believe in and profess blindly without question. The smallest amount of pressure will turn this fact on its head, but in Gorge Orwell’s famous book “1984,” society had been primed to blindly follow and parrot the facts and ideas being fed to them. The term “Orwellian” is often used as a proxy to discuss oppressive regimes but it is actually meant to describe a state of affairs in which one is made to believe so blindly in a system that they can be primed to believe even obvious falsehoods.

The gender pay-gap is a widespread deception that is meant to be believed and parroted without question, not due to the fear of persecution on behalf of a corrupt and oppressive government, but for fear of persecution of the society around you. Certain ideas, such as the gender pay-gap, are being established as the only acceptable ideas to hold in polite society, and to skew from these pre-set notions is to be morally akin to the worst dictators and genocidal regimes in history.

The deception of the gender pay-gap begins with a general statistical comparison between the median hourly income of all men and all women which shows a 20% disparity for women. This is a gap that undoubtedly exists, yet the political and social talking point regarding this statistic is that it proves men and women are being paid differently for the same jobs, a flat-out lie. Multi-variate analyses of salary that take into consideration education, position, and hours worked, reduce the pay-gap to the point of inexistence, which is where the Orwellian deception seeps in.

Much like the math problem “2+2=5,” one can choose to believe what it says at face value and carry on, whereas digging a bit deeper will show the obvious error of the equation, and while the findings of statistical analyses of large population samples are not as simple to dispel as a primary school equation, the inaccuracy of the gender pay-gap talking point can be easily debunked by anyone with the proper know-how. The problem is that to point out the factual findings of the multivariate analysis of male and female wages is itself considered, in Orwellian fashion, unacceptable.

To point to the facts is considered socially unacceptable and a direct attack on the suffrage of women. The truths that have been laid out for those in society who believe themselves to be actualized and considerate human beings are not to be tampered with less they be branded a “persona-non-grata” and ostracized by the people who surround them. Keep in mind that these are peer-reviewed academic findings that are refuted not due to a faulty process, sample size, or analysis, but to insensitive conclusions.

If that is not a war on our cognition of Orwellian magnitudes, then what is?

Emilio Garcia
Deputy Editor, The Unshackled
Host of the Front and Center Podcast
www.frontandcenter.net.au
@FrntAndCenter