“A Melbourne cafe went viral on social media this week after introducing an 18 per cent ‘man tax’ to raise awareness of Australia’s gender pay gap.” said an article in this newspaper. The Times of Malta has a penchant for putting quotation marks next to words it wants to cast doubt upon but it gets it wrong quite a lot, as in this case, where the quotes should be around ‘gender pay gap’ and not ‘man tax.’

The so-called ‘gender pay gap’, the mistaken belief that women get paid 75c to the dollar of what men receive, has been debunked so many times, and by so many sources, that it is no longer funny to disprove it; just hugely depressing that this kind of malarkey is still making the rounds.

Forbes states: “The Department of Labour’s Time Use Survey finds that the average full-time working man spends 8.14 hours a day on the job, compared to 7.75 hours for the full-time working woman. Employees who work more likely earn more.

The Washington Examiner continues that the gender wage gap, when there is one, “actually comes from the different career choices men and women make on aggregate – whether it be the hours they work or the occupation they choose”.

Even the notoriously feminist and left-wing Huffington Post says that “serious economists find that when you control for relevant differences between men and women (occupations, college majors, length of time in workplace) the wage gap narrows to the point of vanishing”.

CBS news states that: “The data is clear that for the same work men and women are paid roughly the same. When you compare apples to apples, it simply isn’t true. Simply put, men choose more stressful, dangerous and higher-paying jobs.”

Even the eminent Time magazine has this to say: “Women have a tendency to retreat from the workplace to raise children or to enter fields like early childhood education and psychology, rather than better paying professions like petroleum engineering.”