Is it wrong for CEOs and business owners to make hundreds of times more annually than their workers?

A 55-45 split is not a landslide, and on a question this loaded — pay ratios, fairness, the whole post-2008 argument about who gets what — a ten-point margin from 49 voters reads more as a chamber leaning one way than the country delivering a verdict.

The generational pattern is the more telling thread. Voters in their twenties and early thirties, the cohort most likely to be on the sharp end of stagnant graduate pay and rising living costs, voted yes by a clear 64% (14 of 22), the platform's biggest bloc by far. Older voters were, if anything, cooler on the proposition or simply too few to read with confidence — the 65+ group split 1 yes to 2 no, a small sample but notable for tilting against.

Gender told a similar if gentler story: men voted yes more decisively (64% of 28) than women (54% of 13), both majorities but of different weights. None of this breaks cleanly along an obvious ideological line, which is itself the point — pay-ratio fairness has become one of those rare economic questions, like bankers' bonuses after 2008, that scrambles the usual left-right sorting and instead splits more by age and proximity to the paycheque in question.

If there is a kicker here, it's that the group closest to entering the workforce mid-career was also the group most convinced something in the arithmetic has gone wrong.