You owe federal civil servants $7 billion in back pay, thanks to the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal.

In late July, the Tribunal ruled that the federal government has underpaid almost 200,000 current and former female employees over the past 13 years, and ordered taxpayers to fork over $7 billion in the name of "pay equity".

So what is this pay equity that is going to cost so much money We are not talking about "equal pay for equal work". Paying men and women differently for the same job has been illegal for decades. Pay equity, which has been federal law since 1978, is based on a different concept of "equal pay for work of equal value". It doesn't compare wages for, let's say, office clerks of different genders - it compares completely different jobs. Using complex formulas and calculations, a secretary's work is compared to a janitor, a clerk, a plumber, or an astronaut for that matter.

This is fraught with difficulty, as you might imagine! Bureaucrats sitting in an office somewhere trying to assess different jobs for their "value" by weighing skill, effort, responsibility and working conditions. There is simply no objective way it can be done. Pay equity is basically a kind of wage control since it takes wages out of the marketplace and turns them over to the arbitrary attention of government bureaucrats and appointed tribunals.

Can we compare apples with oranges The Tribunal says "YES WE CAN!" and you get to pay for it to the tune of $7 billion or about $500 per taxpayer.

All this came about because of a complaint launched by the Public Service Alliance of Canada on behalf of its workers. The government offered $1.3 billion to settle the dispute, but the union went ahead with its complaint and won.

The Tribunal ignored an earlier decision by a Federal Court judge. In March, a judge ruled that the Tribunal had no right to weigh the value of different kinds of work, but only to compare wages on a job-to-job basis. Using this ruling as a baseline, the federal pay equity settlement would have been about $100 million, instead of $7 billion.

And what about the wage gap that pay equity is supposed to bridge Women as a group earn about 72% of what men do, but that gap is closing. The difference in wages is largely related to factors like education, choice of employment, a shorter average workweek, and taking time off to have children.

Lots of things contribute to the wage gap, but systemic discrimination is not one of them. In fact, women who never marry enjoy about the same earnings as men who never marry. According to recent Statistics Canada data, university-educated single women working full time actually earned slightly more than their male counterparts in 1996 ($40,787 compared to $40,182).

The best way to address the wage gap is to ensure men and women have equal access to education, training, and job opportunities, not with pay equity schemes that paper over the issues with your tax dollars.