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# The Equality Act Can’t Change This
- URL: https://goodoil.news/the-equality-act-cant-change-this/
- Published: 2026-08-28T00:30:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-28T00:29:59.000Z
- Description: The Supreme Court can wield the Equality Act to bankrupt Next and Birmingham City Council all it likes. But it can't change the fact that difficult and unpleasant bloke jobs will always pay more, says Robin Fellow.
- Author: Reproduced with permission
- Tags: Education, Business

[**Robin Fellow**](https://dailysceptic.org/2026/08/26/the-equality-act-cant-change-the-fact-that-bloke-jobs-will-always-pay-more/?ref=goodoil.news)  
*Robin Fellow is a former NDT technician and his name is a pseudonym.*

If you didn’t already know that girls outperform boys at all stages of primary school, they get better GCSEs and A levels and form a majority of undergraduates, then someone, probably a woman, will soon come along to tell you.

So if men earn more money than women it must be the fault of the patriarchy, right? ’Snot fair and the Equality Act is there to drive the bulldozer that levels the playing field. Unison and the GMB trade unions fought Birmingham City Council all the way to the Supreme Court to mandate equal pay for work of equal value, though some sixth sense tells me it was not the boilermakers’ branch of the GMB that spearheaded the campaign. The court backdated the decision, Birmingham went bust (Leeds will soon follow) and the binmen went on strike.

The trouble is that *work of equal value* is a nebulous concept ill-defined by the act, and, to any observer with half a brain (thereby excluding the gender-diverse Supreme Court), it is blindingly obvious that manning a telephone, being a teaching assistant or collecting the rubbish are not the same jobs.

The concept of equal value has been extended to retailers. Next has already lost in the lower courts on the question of shop assistants (mostly female) and warehousemen (guess what – mostly men). All the big supermarkets are in the firing line, with an estimated cost of righting the wrongs, current and historical, at over £8 billion. That’s going to show up in your shopping basket.

The act also includes a list of *protected characteristics*, including disability, sexual orientation, race, religion and so forth. You may think that wheelchair-bound scaffolders, tone deaf musicians, autistic psychotherapists and homosexual imams is the stuff of satire but the direction of travel is clear.

A closer look reveals that there is no such thing as equality. Forget mathematical equations, we’re talking about people here and people are – *ahem* – diverse. The proper metric is not their protected characteristics but what you have to pay them to do a job they would prefer not to do. Given the choice (starvation not being on the menu yet), most would prefer answering the telephone and attending team development meetings with coffee and hobnobs to hoisting bins into the Vulture in the rain.

Here let me pause my rant temporarily and state my opinion that educating girls is a good thing. A society is much richer and happier if it makes use of all its people, as half the population of Afghanistan might agree. The problem of second- and third-order effects lies in the choices the girls make.

Naturally, girls want to be upwardly mobile, and maybe they are more motivated to achieve social esteem, while we rude mechanicals might settle for more money. Once upon a time, the typing pool performed the function of a lido: being pretty and reasonably competent might lead to an offer of marriage from a manager, with the prospect of a washing machine and trips in the car. But now men do their own typing (badly, in my case, but spell-check usually corrects my fat fingers) and the typing pool has gone the way of England’s reservoirs. So girls have increasingly turned to university to supply the social cachet.

Unfortunately they choose to study arts degrees and predictably this has led to elite overproduction of workers in the soppier branches of the economy. Wages – sorry, salaries, these are graduates – have not kept pace. In the charity sector average earnings are £36,000; in HR £43,000, in an NGO £35,000\. How’s a girl going to pay off her student loan and have a lifestyle on that kind of money? And remember, these are averages, median earnings will be lower. The ‘graduate premium’ is going down the plughole.

True, some sectors where female participation in the workforce has increased have partially bucked the trend. Lawyers get about 50 grand, but this may be down to the torrent of frivolous and vexatious legislation coming out of Brussels and Westminster. In 1960 there were 50,000 qualified lawyers in Britain; in 2025 there were 235,000\. Most practitioners in family law are female, and family law is one of the least remunerated sectors. Doctors haven’t done too badly thanks to lots of drug prescriptions and a ruthless trade union. Nurses? Forget it. Journalism? Now you’re having a laugh.

Bloke jobs just pay more money. Sixty years ago a schoolteacher earned twice as much as a bricklayer. Now a brickie can pull down twice as much as the teacher, without the student loan over his head. It’s not just construction and being prepared to get grubby for the money grubbing; sitting at a desk doing software development pays multiples of writing PR pieces for savethefluffybunnies.org. If you can code or get your head around Python, you don’t even need a degree; some employers won’t hire computer science graduates at all, considering them three years behind the curve.

It gets worse. In the USA, electricians average higher earnings than electronics engineers. Sooner or later this rise of the artisan class will come over here too.

An optimist might remark that this makes society more equal, which is a good thing. This isn’t happening much, however, because a professional female isn’t going to hook up with a tradesman, because he’s in trade, darling. Meanwhile a male artisan may be a bit commitment-phobic of a debt-crippled executive who’s likely to dump the sprog in a nursery at the first opportunity for the sake of her career. A sparks might make a tentative pass at the vice president for the conservation of the Patagonian bog warbler, figuring that the nuclear waste from a 2:1 in Psychology might be worth clearing up for the sake of some regular nookie. But what if she’s got a PhD? The horror!

Short of carpet-bombing the universities, restoring the married person’s allowance and a social revolution of esteem, the division will persist. The catastrophically low birth rate will continue, more holidays to Thailand will be taken, and there will be a population explosion of cats.

This article was originally published by [the Daily Sceptic](https://dailysceptic.org/2026/08/26/the-equality-act-cant-change-the-fact-that-bloke-jobs-will-always-pay-more/?ref=goodoil.news).