As an economist and a feminist I can’t tell you irritating I find articles like this one from Lucy Kippist in The Punch, “Screw equal pay; what do women really want?”
Academics and feminists who continue to prioritise the closing the gender-oriented wage gap disregard the huge list of unmanageable priorities that come with a top job.
Kippist is getting so many things wrong here. Mainly she is conflating two problems, the gender wage gap and workplace inflexibility, and then deciding that campaigning for one comes at the expense of campaigning for the other.
The gender wage gap persists, and we’re not talking about the fact that average weekly hours worked by women (for pay) are less than the average weekly hours worked by men – which is on account of the fact that women are more likely to be working part-time than men. The gender wage gap is based on comparing the pay rates of men and women with the same qualifications, working the same number of hours, with the same level of experience in the same jobs. In other words, the gender wage gap is the gap we can’t otherwise explain between identical male and female workers. So, let’s head off at the pass the first stupid counter-argument to gender wage gap discussions, which is that women work fewer hours and so of course earn less money, and feminists should stop saying this is about discrimination. (Because anyway, there is a bigger argument to be made here if one wished to, and that is that we do in fact have a problem of discrimination on a much broader scale when the typical life course for women leads to such inevitable short-changing of financial security in comparison to that which occurs for men in their typical life course, but I’ll leave that for another day).
It seems unnecessarily simplistic of Kippist to generalise about women’s priorities to the extent where she contends that we all want work-life balance over more demanding, higher paid career opportunities. Not to mention, higher paid career opportunities may actually afford their recipients greater real choice about arranging work-life balance.
Yes, women still earn approximately 17.5 per cent less than male counterparts in full-time work. Actually, it’s been that way for about 25 years.
And yes, only a handful of women sit on boards of the ASX 200 companies, and only six of those companies have a female CEO. But maybe that’s an accurate reflection of just how few of us actually want a slice of that pie.
An accurate reflection? I’d be happy to bet that there are more than six women in this entire country with an ambition of being CEO, and that there are many more than six women with the skills and qualifications to do that job. And while I don’t think work-life balance is only about parents, many non-parents would also like the flexibility to meet needs and responsibilities outside work, I do think it is ridiculous for mothers to wipe their hands of those women who do want a career above all else. Even if I don’t want to be in the highest reaches of executive management, I care about fair pay and career progression for those women who do.
Really everybody should care about the gender wage gap, men and women alike, because discrimination is a form of market inefficiency, if nothing else. More than that, the gender wage gap hurts our chances of introducing proper workplace flexibility for all. We need women to progress to high places in workplaces because some of those women will know first hand how hard it is to juggle work and family responsibilities, and they, being at the top will have the actual power to institute change.
Kippist says that:
Most women – and probably many men would feel the same way too – don’t want to sacrifice everything for their career. So companies have to stop demanding total sacrifice.
It won’t be companies that stop demanding total sacrifice, it will be employers. Let’s make some of those employers women.
Contrary to Kippist’s arguments, the feminist fight for gender wage equality doesn’t come at the expense of the fight for workplace flexibility. Who does she imagine fights for the necessary workplace changes to accommodate caring work and paid employment? Feminists. Feminists fight for parental leave. Feminists fight for affordable childcare. Feminists fight for the right to return to work part-time. Feminists fight for lactation breaks. Feminists fight for the recognition of elder care responsibilities.
Finally, Kippist notes:
Sixty per cent of Australian women employed by the public sector say their current working conditions let them balance their life and family commitments.
That’s according to this year’s annual Community and Public Sector Union survey that shines a rare light into the realities of life for working women. And it’s largely ignored by the tired chants of the equal pay debate.
The public sector outcomes weren’t ignored by academics and feminists, these are the workplaces that have instituted some of the most progressive family-friendly policies in the country, and some of the more formal gender equality measures, too. Coincidence?
Kippist’s piece also assumes that working women are working mothers – obviously not always the case.
Loads of the comments on there are really depressing too. I must resist getting sucked in…
Oh so depressing, it was a vipers nest of ignorance and sexism.
so because having a topflight job is hard and sometimes the workplace is inflexible and some people value lots of family time … it’s totally cool to pay women less for equal work? IDGI.
Great post. As one of those reasonably senior women (I was on the executive of a company employing 1500 people) I do think women make a difference. I didn’t always speak up about everything, but I think I made it more acceptable to be open about family responsibilities, to hire part time people for senior roles (not just the call centers) and questioned the potential sexism about the way in which people were rated at performance review time.
The more you have a diversity in senior management, the more people realize that ther is more than one way of doing a good job.
Misrepresenting feminist action and, indeed, the truth is not a bug of this kind of journalism, it’s a feature. In fact, it’s the whole point. When you have an injustice that is so obvious, you have to obfuscate in order to give people an excuse not to address it.
I think what makes me maddest is the way she turns the whole thing into a conversation about the very top end of the workforce, again. If unequal pay is hurting any one group the most, it’s the women working at the bottom of the pile. Another obvious truth that articles like this are all about – ooh look, shiny! – distracting from.
Yes, good point orlando about the focus on women at the top while ignoring women at the bottom in this conversation.
Looking again at your first quote from Kippist above, it actually makes no sense at all as a statement, does it? Who says that ending wage discrimination has anything to with “a top job” and its supposed unmanageability for women? It’s a complete non-sequiter; one of those nasty little slides of thought like in the chip ads when they say “fatty food is bad – but our chips are cholesterol free!”
So, even in the public sector, forty per cent of women do NOT think their current working conditions let them balance their work and family commitments? Forty per cent is a lot of women. And I assume public sector employers are more flexible than most? (I don’t know about Australia but the public sector employers in the UK are about as flexible as they come, and even then far from perfect.)
Sorry for the ignorant question, but I actually thought we already did have equal pay for equal work’ in Australia; did I miss something? Or am I just remembering some government catch phrase that got bandied about but never actually became policy?
I agree with the author of the story. The main flaw in the “equal pay for equal work” mantra is the assumption that all workers in the same jobs all across the entire country have equal value. That’s just not so. I’ve done this with my particular job description and invite others to do it as well. If you google your job title, you’ll likely find some below your salary, some above and quite a few near it, but where do want to live? How often do you move? How well is the business doing? Was there a recession that prevent a raise in certain areas and not others? There are plenty of other factors to consider too.
Yes, there’s good reasons for differing levels of pay for what appears to be the same job across an entire population, and economists attempt to identify all those reasons (some of which you’ve noted, like a ‘location’ bonus) and them remove them from the data so that we end up looking at what’s left over, the gap in pay unexplained by all reasonable factors. And the difference left over between identical male and female workers in the same job, that’s the gender wage gap.
Sticking to the “equal value” theme, I guess my question would be (and probably along with the author of the original story) is, where does equal work = equal value among any groups of any kinds of people? I suppose you could point to some Nordic countries in Sweden, Switzerland and the Netherlands where they purport to have a near equal gender pay but then how would you know that they were doing equal work? My guess would be just to assume that since the pay is equal, then the work must be equal. That would be a far worse assumption in my opinion.
Furthermore, if you assume a male dominated work force that has been in place for centuries and one that values the alpha top-dog as a value, then I think that the author is correct. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with women or anyone else that are saying that they don’t want to participate in that culture just to make the big bucks. In fact, women may represent a grass roots movement that will change that culture by not participating in the jocular high-risk, only money motivated culture that exists today.
So, I’ve always wanted to ask this question of a feminist economist (because I don’t trust non-feminist economists): does the phrase “women earn 73 cents to the dollar” mean that at the same company, a female and a male working in the same position (say: district manager II, or assistant professor, etc.) earn e.g. 73,000 vs. 100,000 (USD, PPP$, or whatever unit) respectively? This is what I always understood it to mean and I was frustrated when I learned it was not so, because it felt like my outrage was misplaced. Is it rather a mean across a given profession/industry? Is that what you mean by “The gender wage gap is based on comparing the pay rates of men and women with the same qualifications, working the same number of hours, with the same level of experience in the same jobs”? I guess I am asking what the data set is for evaluating the wage gap. (Forgive me, I’m in the humanities.)
The gender wage gap is looking at data across the entire industry/sector and not just within an individual firm, but the bigger the sample the more meaningful the calculation so your outrage isn’t misplaced at all, and the gender wage gap does indeed translate to real world cases where women and men employed in the same company doing the same job are doing it for different levels of pay.
Gender equity pay looks at something broader – female-dominated jobs and their pay rates compared to male-dominated jobs of equivalent skill/responsibility level and their pay rates. Is it possible that female-dominated jobs are ‘undervalued’ by the economy simply because they’re associated with women? This can be contentious for some because they will say that there isn’t an equivalent ‘male job’ for something like dental nurses or childcare workers (both of which are typically ‘female jobs’ and both of which, surprise!, have poor rates of pay) and that’s where economists and industrial relations practitioners have to work hard at unpacking the tasks performed in jobs across a range of industries/sectors in order to find sound comparisons for analysis.
Even within the public sector, there are anomalies where people have similar qualifications. Museums and art galleries are staffed predominately by women, who have post-graduate level qualifications and experience, and who are paid less than many admin assistants or inexperienced new graduates in the rest of the public service. Equivalent qualifications and experience in other fields would get you a job a couple of bands higher up on the payscale.
Well, now I am both more knowledgeable and more outraged. Thank you for the explanation!
Anecdata from other blogs also suggests that a few women have been nastily surprised to find that their male juniors (i.e. answering to them) are being paid more than they are. The answer given by their employer was that ‘he bargained harder’.
What I really want to ask Lucy Kippist is: why aren’t men equally concerned about flexibility in their jobs?
Wait. Right. It’s because it’s usually the woman’s job to take care of the family. Of course that’s what she really wants to do anyway. *eyeroll*
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