The so-called gender pay gap has been on everybody’s lips of late. The launch of WGEA’s comprehensive database has revealed significant pay disparities between the sexes and sparked all kinds of feelings from those who have long jostled for change – relief that salary data is publicly available, outrage that women on average earn less than men, and determination to fight for progress.

The launch of the WGEA database has not, however, sparked much thinking from those jostlers. In truth, ‘insights’ offered by the data are irrelevant at best and destructive at worst. Once the sensationalism subsides, it becomes all too obvious that the prevailing discourse around pay inequality is dishonest and intellectually lazy.

While some continue to claim that women make less than men for doing exactly the same job (even though it is both irrational and illegal for employers to discriminate in this way), most commentators have moved on from this urban myth. Recent coverage has instead been dominated by flashier fantasies of institutional malevolence.

One journalist, for example, proclaimed that, ‘…industry bodies have blamed systemic barriers that enable men to work more overtime hours than women as being partly to blame for the persistent pay gap. These barriers are especially stark in male-dominated sectors such as manufacturing, construction, and mining sectors.’ Curiously, this journalist failed to name a single example of a ‘systemic barrier’ that restricts women who dream of working 12-hour days in the mines.

ABS data indicates that over 70 per cent of Australians who work longer than 60 hours per week are men, 60 per cent of Australians who sustain workplace injuries are men, and 96 per cent of Australians who die at work are men. Moreover, a report from the Centre for Future Work at the left-leaning Australia Institute found that men spend 60 per cent longer than women performing unpaid overtime work. It just so happens that many of the industries portrayed as minted boys’ clubs are fraught with danger.

The suggestion that working long hours in high-risk jobs is a luxury only afforded to men is not just an absurd mischaracterisation of the truth, but also exhibits cruel disregard for the hard-working Australians – both male and female – who choose to make those sacrifices every day.

Elsewhere, consulting giant Bain & Company was chastised in the media last week for its 31 per cent pay gap – even though detractors happily acknowledged that senior roles in the industry tend to be less attractive to women than to men due to long work hours and intensive travel expectations. In other words, the gender imbalance among senior consultants at Bain is likely explained almost entirely by individual lifestyle choices. Even if it’s true that extraneous forces – such as division of household responsibilities or social expectations – discourage women from working longer hours, these factors still lie well outside the jurisdiction of employers.

Therein lies the problem with the prevailing discourse. Every time somebody says that companies should commit to ‘fixing’ the gender pay gap, what they are really saying is that companies should infringe on the decision-making sovereignty of individuals and households. That is a deeply paternalistic stance.

Finally, judging a company by its gender pay gap is not just a frivolous exercise, but may actively harm businesses that are trying to boost female representation within their ranks. That’s because recruitment initiatives generally operate at entry-level and junior positions as opposed to the executive level. A firm that hires a majority-female graduate class may, on paper, have a larger gender pay gap than a firm whose graduate cohort is majority-male.

If we blindly celebrate firms with narrow pay gaps and censure those with wider pay gaps, we will only weaken incentives for employers to give opportunities to women. For that reason, viewing the WGEA data as a way to ‘name and shame’ companies is a grave mistake.

The lesson in all of this is simple: inequality of outcomes does not imply inequality of opportunity. To raise the alarm over every statistical difference that exists between groups is both foolish and counterproductive.