Ground Floor: It was perhaps predictable that the chief executive of the Irish Small and Medium Enterprise association (Isme), Mark Fielding, would have reacted strongly to the results of the National Employment Survey published last week by the CSO, writes Sheila O'Flanagan

On learning that the pay differential between the public and private sector was a whopping 40 per cent, Fielding said the survey showed the "triumph of public sector avarice, greed and bureaucracy over enterprise".

The words were certainly harsh, but of course greed isn't confined to the public sector as the inflated pay packets of many chief executives show. The truth is that people will always want to get the most out of their job.

I was always under the impression that public sector jobs were paid slightly less than the private sector, but the compensation was security of tenure. Now it seems that public servants have their cake and are eating it too. Higher wages, a job for life and the furthest you can be relocated is Kerry or Donegal! In comparison, the private sector employee looks towards Beijing and Delhi and wonders when they'll be replaced.

Bernard Harbor, spokesman for the public sector unions, justified their higher salaries by saying that half of public sector workers were graduates and therefore deserved more money, which is a pretty spurious argument.

Certainly a higher level of education equips you with more knowledge and skills, but it doesn't necessarily make you a better employee. The whole benchmarking issue for public servants wasn't supposed to be an issue of rewarding qualifications; it was about productivity.

If Harbor can show a 40 per cent increase in productivity across the board then the increases can be justified. But telling us that the Civil Service is packed with ageing graduates is hardly a reason for higher wages.

All the same, I wish that Fielding - and the media - had reacted just as strongly to the confirmation, yet again, that women are paid significantly less than their male counterparts. The average woman's hourly rate was € 14.93 compared to €17.74 earned by men.

Why are women still being paid nearly 16 per cent less than men? I wasn't entirely surprised to see that in the area of finance, women's average hourly rate is €20.32 against their male counterparts' at €30.63. It is hardly a matter of qualifications, as girls usually outperform boys so soundly in attaining them. It is surely a matter of opportunity and discrimination. Women don't place enough value on their own worth in the careers market and employers exploit this.

The gender pay gap is lower at younger ages, which surely reflects the fact that women are under-represented at managerial levels since those kind of jobs come experience and usually at an older age. It therefore makes perfect sense that that is where you find the biggest differential.

Of course in the private sector wages are much less transparent because there are no salary scales. In fact, your remuneration is usually a secret, which only helps employers to underpay their female workers.

Astonishingly, the report shows that the highest earning sector is education, a public service area. The average wage in the education sector is €27.24 per hour - nearly as high as the supposedly over-rewarded financial sector. However, women earn an average €24.36 per hour while men get €34.

There has been plenty of reporting over the past few years on the lack of male role models in education. Obviously there is a reason. Whereas 86 per cent of primary school teachers are women, they only make up 51 per cent of primary school managers.

Men aren't hanging around at the coalface being role models. They are racing into management with significantly higher salaries. I find this profoundly depressing. Every year we hear that women are doing better in achieving qualifications which, according to Harbor, means that they should be raking in the big bucks, but the bottom line is that they aren't, whether we're looking at the private or public sector. The gender pay gap is not confined to Ireland - in every developed country women are paid less than their male colleagues.

When I wrote about this before, a reader suggested that employers should fire all the men and hire only women. He (it was a he) had a point. But, of course, the elephant in the room is the fact that women just might ask for flexible working hours to combine their job with looking after their families. And women are so pathetically grateful when they find a job with flexibility that they accept a lower salary because the trade-off seems worth it.

When it comes to pegging our worth in the workplace, women are still insecure. And why wouldn't we be when, in even traditionally female interests, men are outdoing us financially? I have tried and failed to find a woman at the higher levels of the business world who spends as much on make-up as Bertie Ahern.

My highest-flying friend spends €10 a week and always looks great. But there you go, another massive gender differential - like all men, of course, he thinks he's worth it!

www.sheilaoflanagan.net