Gabriel Rozenberg (Extracted from "Gender pay gap stretches to 24%"), The Times, 4 November 2005

"The gap between the average pay for men and women has grown for the first time in four years, according to a survey of 1,000 company directors published yesterday.

The Institute of Directors (IoD) said that women directors earned an average of £55,000 a year in their 2005 survey, compared with the average basic salary for male directors of £72,000 a year. The 24 per cent difference was the widest gap between the sexes since 2001, the IoD said."

[Ed: The basic fact about the gender gap which is never commented upon by sociologists and politicians is that, generally, females find partners who have more status than themselves while males prefer the prettiest females. (I repeat "generally".) Females require maximum security in which to raise children and the males want trophies for status reasons. That's the instinct laid down by millions of years of hominid evolution -- with, presumably, acceptable results. "Aristocrats marry Gaiety Girls" was the refrain in this country in the 1920s. Thus, the hard-done-by women directors mentioned above (earning three times the average national income) tend to be married to men directors (earning four times the national average). Perhaps this is why the rich are now the only parents in developed countries able to afford to raise more than 2.1 children per family, the necessary replacement number in order to prevent our species going extinct.]