From someone who knows what they’re talking about — Eva Cox in today’s Crikey (she’s on your postage stamp for a reason), on this special anniversary of International Women’s Day, which first kicked off in 1911. One-hundred years on … it’s a bit of a moment:
The past 20 or so years have seen few major changes that matched those in the earlier years. Then, we made the obvious changes that seriously irked women in the mid-century years in which we grew up. We have removed the laws that formally restricted our access to certain jobs, paid work, promotion or to other goods and services.
This means that overt s-x discrimination is now neither obvious nor legally acceptable. We changed how some issues were once defined or ignored: violence in families is no longer private; there are funded (and controlled) women’s services; we have more child care but it’s now commercialised and still too expensive.
Schools and universities have expanded their numbers of female students, so we now have majorities in many professional areas and added women to the histories of what men did. And there are many more women in high positions and even in the top positions.
There are, however, many questions on where we are now and are going. Where has all that education got us? There are relatively few women in high positions in the media, arts, law and medicine despite being majorities of graduates. The pay gap is increasing and the cultures of most workplaces remain focused on male-style long hours and unbalanced commitments.
A key demand of Australia’s ’70s women’s movement somehow got lost: we wanted to change the inequalities of gender, not just to reshuffle numbers. We wanted the appropriate valuing of those activities that were primarily the responsibility of women, and still are predominantly. We didn’t define equality of women in male-defined terms.
We want to know what you lot think. And not just from our female readers, all of you. Email us at boss@crikey.com.au with ‘feminism’ in the subject line so we can build an item around your responses. The f-word deserves more reflection than just one day.
Can someone please explain the pay gap to me? I don’t get it. Male nurse/ female nurse = different pay? Awards don’t descriminate on basis of gender so no, it cant be that. Where is this gap occurring?
I believe the “gap” comes from averaging lifetime income across the entire population. Ie: over the average woman’s life she will earn less than a man with an “identical” background. This is largely because high-income jobs are dominated by men, jobs dominated by women tend to be average or below average income, and women (on average) simply work fewer hours a day for fewer years of their life (generally related to children).
Personally, I find the argument highly questionable.
The pay gap argument is valid not so much due to the pay gap in itself, but because it asks certain questions. For example, the question of why men are still dominating high-income professions, and women low-income professions. This is coupled with why it is that it is women rather than men who have disproportionately high caring responsibilities and take years off to care for children.
Obviously our culture is still ingrained with values that push men to earn more, women to earn less. And over the long term, women end up poorer due to our assigned gender roles. The pay gap argument is valid because it questions the way we value work based on gender.
Thanks Akane.
Does it not also question the value we place on family and raising children? More and more these days women are going back to work after children while men stay home – certainly not an overwhelming amount, but definitely more and more.
What value are we placing on a family unit where one parent works less years overall in the workforce and the other woks more? What exactly is wrong with that? If we value family on individual income then I just don’t see that as being a bad thing.
Also, what industries dominated by women are lower paid vs the other?
Because men and women prioritise things differently ? Or is the obvious and well-understood answer not good enough ?
No it isn’t, because it doesn’t. If you had examples of women being systematically paid less for doing the same work, you might be able to make an argument about how “work is valued based on gender”.