Madam, - Your Editorial of May 8th on the continued prevalence of wage inequality in the paid economy relies mainly on the customary mode of comparison on this issue - i.e., men's pay is taken as the benchmark figure and women's pay is stated according to the extent to which it falls short of it. Hence the statistic that women's hourly earnings in the private sector are 8.2 per cent below those of men.
However, if hourly wage inequality between men and women represents anything, it represents gender-based privilege - it is the readily quantifiable privilege which attaches to being employed in the private sector as a man, rather than as a woman.
The nature and extent of that privilege would, I believe, be more easily apparent if women's hourly earnings were taken as the benchmark figure of 100 and men's earnings were shown in relation to same. From such a perspective, it would be difficult to avoid the elephant in the sitting-room. Men working in the private sector in Ireland enjoy, on average, an hourly wage premium of 9 per cent above the earnings of their female colleagues. - Yours, etc,
PAT ROONEY, School of Business Studies, Trinity College, Dublin 2.