The gender pay-gap is a contentious issue. But the source of the contention seems to centre around just one question, namely: “Does a gender pay-gap exist, or does it not?” But there is another question which receives far less attention, and yet is worthy of just as much consideration: “If there were a gender pay-gap, would it matter?” It seems to be taken as given, both by those who argue that the pay-gap exists and by those who argue that it does not, that such a pay-gap would be unjust, and that something would have to be done about it. It is almost axiomatic, in most people’s minds, that it would be an injustice, one to be solved by means of the law. The law would rectify the apparent injustice by compelling employers to furnish their employees with equal pay for equal work. I suggest that this is not the case. Rather, I propose that, even if a pay-gap exists, we should not consider it as a problem to be solved.

Let us imagine a textbook case of pay-inequality. I am a man, and you are a woman. We are both equally qualified, equally experienced, equally fit; as equally valuable to an employer as one cares to stipulate. We both have an identical contract with our employer, whereby we do the very same kind of work, for the same number of hours, and we do our work equally well. We are equally productive. However, we differ in one respect, aside from our respective genders: I earn more than you do. You earn, say, £10 an hour, and I earn, say, £11 an hour.

The question is, what should be done about it? It seems to me that, if you are seeking to “rectify” this inequality, then there really are only two ways of going about it. One option is to establish some rule, whereby no one may be paid more than the lowest-paid employee doing that same job. The other option is to establish a rule, whereby no one may be paid less than the highest-paid employee doing that same job. And that’s it. These are the only options, it seems to me. Where one employee is earning more than another, you may either bring the higher-paid employee down to equality, or bring the lower-paid employee up to equality. It is my argument that neither of these courses of action is particularly desirable, when all’s said and done.

Let us apply the first option as a solution to the inequality case described above. If no one may be paid more than the lowest-paid employee, then I am not permitted to earn more than £10 an hour, when that is your wage. To rectify the inequality, then, my wage should be brought down from £11 an hour to £10. On the one hand, the inequality problem has been rectified. “Equal pay for equal work” has been achieved. And yet, has the situation improved? Your situation has not been improved, at least not in any material way. You may be happier with the fact that your colleague has now been brought down to your level, but your employment situation has not, in itself, been made any more attractive. My situation, obviously, has only worsened. The only person who profits from this “equalised” situation is our employer; that is, the very person who (one may say) is responsible for the unequal situation in the first place. He, the very source of the discrimination, now has more money in his pocket.

Clearly, this is not exactly “progress”. Equality has been achieved, and yet no one who should be better off actually is better off, and the only person who is better off shouldn’t be. I don’t wish to harp on this point, but I think that this is an important observation: equality for its own sake, equality “come what may”, does not seem to be a desirable outcome. As Margaret Thatcher captured it, the moment you start talking about a “gap” in wealth, you are committed to saying that you would rather the poor be poorer, if only it meant that the rich were less rich. In keeping with Thatcher’s point, it seems to me that a situation wherein I earn £11 to your £10, for the very same work, is a preferable situation to one in which you bring me down to your level for no other reason than to achieve a parity in pay.

But, these are not the only options available to us. There is the application of the second rule, described above, whereby no one may be paid less than the highest-paid employee. Application of this rule would bring your wage up, from £10 an hour to the £11 an hour which I receive. Comparatively, this seems a far better situation. You, the victim of the inequality, are materially better off, and our employer, the erstwhile perpetrator of the inequality, bears the cost of rectifying it. To be sure, this certainly seems to have more promise. But is it truly a just outcome?

To answer this, we must consider why it is that you were earning only £10 an hour in the first place. The obvious answer, of course, is because this is the wage to which you contractually agreed. Moreover, it is reasonable to suppose that this wage is commensurate with what your labour is worth, commercially. One would think that, if your labour were worth more than you were being paid, you could barter up, threaten to find a job elsewhere, and, failing that, you might carry out your threat and do precisely that. And if you find yourself unable to do any of these things, then it may simply be the case that your labour really is worth £10 an hour after all. When I speak of the “worth” of your labour, I am of course assuming a market situation, wherein prices are determined by an equilibrium of supply and demand curves.

Supposing that this is the case, the obvious question is: if you are earning £10 an hour because that is what you are worth (by market standards), and we are doing the same work and are equally productive, then why would I be earning £11 an hour? There are two possible reasons for this. One is simply that the market can only be so exacting when it comes to determining prices. It will not refine the price of a good or a service down to the nearest penny, and perhaps not even to the nearest pound sterling, so that £10 an hour and £11 an hour are both within the range of our market worth as workers. The second possibility is that I am simply being paid more than I am worth, where you are being paid merely what you are worth. It may even be the case that we are both being paid generously, relative to our market worth, only I am being paid slightly more generously. In either case, the problem is not that you are being paid less than what you are worth. Rather, the problem (if in fact it is one) is that I am being paid more than the bare minimum that I am worth.

Is this an unjust state of affairs? I see no reason to think so. Supposing that you are being paid at least as much as you are worth, and perhaps more so (not to mention the amount to which you contractually agreed), I do not see how you might become the victim of an injustice if you should later discover that our employer has decided to engage in an arbitrary and unprofitable act of charity towards me, your colleague. We might imagine that you were only too delighted to accept the terms of your employment, that you considered yourself exceedingly blessed to have been employed under the terms which you managed to secure. And if, in due course, you discover that the terms that I managed to secure were still more generous, does this mean that you were unfairly treated? Surely not.

If I am being paid more than I am worth – that is, more than my employer can reasonably get away with paying me – then anything that I am being paid above and beyond the minimum is, in effect, an act of charity on the part of my employer. As such, you have no more reason to complain about the present situation than does a charity, if it should discover that one of its benefactors has given even more generously to another charity. The British Heart Foundation is not a victim of anything, if I have given £1000 to it and £2000 to Save the Donkeys. I am not obligated to do either.

There is one more variable to consider. I have been assuming that, in each case where there is an inequality in pay, the employee who is being paid less is still being paid at least as much as their labour is worth, on its own terms. I have been assuming that, in the illustration we have been using, the £10 an hour which you are earning really is commensurate, by market standards, to your productivity, and the extra pay which I receive is simply an arbitrary act of charity on the part of our employer. But what if this is not the case? What if, instead, you are being undervalued and underpaid, where I am receiving my fair due? Is this not an injustice?

The hard-nosed capitalist in me is tempted to suggest that, even if this is the situation, personal responsibility should be taken for the fact that this inadequate wage is still the wage to which you contractually agreed. But let’s leave this aside. Granting that your earning an inadequate wage, where I am receiving my due, is an injustice, what is the nature of this injustice? It seems to me that the problem here is not a problem of inequality first and foremost. This may be seen clearly enough. We established earlier that rectifying a disparity in pay does not necessarily achieve a positive outcome. Indeed, to bring my adequate wage down to the level of your inadequate wage serves only to make the both of us underpaid. But we may go further still. Suppose that I, and all other employees, are made unemployed, so that you are the only employee left. Such would remove the inequality problem entirely. You now have no colleagues relative to whom you are unequal. And yet the principle problem – the fact that you are being underpaid – remains.

Therefore, even granting that there is an injustice here, the injustice is not one of inequality first and foremost. The principle injustice is not the fact that you are being paid less than I, but the fact that you are being less than what you are worth in yourself. Supposing that this is rectified, that your wage is improved, by whatever means, so that your pay is brought up to what it should be, the inequality problem is solved incidentally. The gap between your inadequate wage and my adequate wage is closed, not by addressing the inequality directly, but by addressing the fact that you are not being paid as much as you can reasonably demand in the market, relative to the value of your labour. As such, even conceding the fact that the inequality here is indeed a problem, we may see that it is a problem in a secondary, incidental sense, and one that is solved by addressing the more pressing problem.

We have considered several variations of one very straightforward situation of pay-inequality. We first considered a case in which I, a man, earn more than you, a woman, but without specifying the reason or circumstances which brought this about, and without addressing the question of whether either or both of us are being paid what we are worth in ourselves. To this situation, we applied a rule which rectified the inequality by bringing me down to your level. We saw that this is not an effective means of achieving equality, for it leaves us with a worse situation in the final analysis. We then considered an alternative strategy, in which your wage is brought up to match mine. To this end, we assumed that your wage was adequate and that mine was more than adequate. In such a state of affairs, I suggested that this does not make you the victim of an injustice, any more than one charity is the victim of an injustice for being given a smaller donation than some other charity. Finally, we considered the same state of affairs again, only with the stipulation that you are being underpaid for the work that you do. Here, I concede, there is a problem of inequality. However, I argued that it was a less pressing problem than the fact that you were being paid an inadequate wage for your labour, and that, if this problem were rectified, then the inequality problem would be dealt with incidentally.

I submit that the gender pay-gap, even if it exists, is either (a) not a problem in any sense, or (b) a problem in an incidental sense, that may be resolved by addressing a yet more pressing problem related to inadequate pay. Therefore, we should not consider the gender pay-gap as a problem to be solved in any sense.