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Equality Bill

That was emphatically not what I was saying and it was not the intention of my remarks or the impression that I wanted to convey. What I was trying to say was that this is a crucial and pernicious problem that has persisted for a long time, albeit improving at a very slow rate, so that we needed to target what we do about it appropriately. Different parts of the gender pay gap, which are caused by different things, require different public policy responses. My argument was that this particular public policy response is a comparatively expensive way of focusing on a very small part of the problem when we would do better to focus on all the other bits, which would reduce the gap much faster.