Jordan Peterson says Iceland's equal pay laws will fail | 60 Minutes Australia

well in Iceland an energy company was about to go bankrupt a new manager came in and said ok we've got to throw everything out and start again and made a conscious decision based on his belief that it's a human right that men and women are paid equally and so went out of his way to make the workforce within that company 50/50 as much as he could in terms of men and women being represented so we're talking about engineers we're talking about trades people we're talking in workshops we're talking it at the managerial level if you if you hire 50% women engineers and 50% male engineers then the women engineers are less qualified because the pool of engineers is lower among women so you can't hire 50% women engineers without producing a decrement in the quality of the engineers because their selection pool is too it's too small you can't do that on a large scale you might be able to do that in one company yeah and they certainly argue that they're not then it's not tokenism and they're not hiring second-rate women they might argue that but if you do get it in a large scale that's what would happen because there look you think about it mathematically if there's 10 times as many male engineers as there are female engineers and you insist upon hiring 50 50 then obviously the degree to which the female engineers are proficient cannot be the same as the degree to which the male engineers are proficient it's mathematically impossible so you're saying don't even try no I'm saying something much more specific than that now one company might be able to do that for a short period of time in one isolated location you know but there of course if you have a new manager come in and he's doing all sorts of new things there's 50 reasons why the company is going to fail or succeed and you can say well it was because of the gender equity policies it's like yeah well it's a multivariate problem but they they do point to the diversity now of the workforce to improved morale to improve strategies on how to come up with solutions to their increase profitable known of that research is credible there's no evidence whatsoever that diversity as measured by racial or gender representation has any bearing whatsoever on creativity productivity outcome any of the things you're measuring none of that research is credible in the least it's not at all men and women make difference amounts of money well sorry that's not a fine-grained enough analysis more agreeable people get paid less why they're not as assertive so does a great billet II mean that you just not as good at the job no so shouldn't depends on the job I would say yeah it's actually probably makes you better it probably makes you better at jobs that involve care of people because agreeableness seems to be that trait that facilitates interpersonal care so my suspicions are it's the research on this isn't solid but my suspicions are that agreeable nurses are better than disagreeable nurses but but we don't know and the effect isn't that large agreeableness tends more to tilt you in terms of interest in in terms of competence that's that's how it looks so far if I'm understanding what you're saying the picture you paint is a bleak one no I don't I don't think it's particularly bleak you know it looks like real salaries are on the rise and general levels of poverty around the world are declining incredibly rapidly women are being educated at an unbelievably high rate compared to thirty years ago like there's all sorts of reasons to be optimistic but equity is not one of them it's a bad idea and we're gonna pay for we're gonna pay for toying with it

Channel: 60 Minutes Australia

Views: 1,121,934

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Canada, Iceland, pay gap, equality, discrimination, women, men, equal rights, controversial, debate, Tara Brown, 60 Minutes, 60 MInutes Australia

Id: xQu9-LR4GcE

Length: 3min 25sec (205 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 29 2018