You’d think that well-educated and qualified women who are in professional jobs would earn as much as their male counterparts. That the problem of the gender pay gap is at the bottom not the top. Well you’d be wrong if you did.
Professional male full time workers earn abut 20% more than professioanl female full time workers, on average $10,000 per year. And since 2000, the median hourly gap among men and women professionals has worsened, and it is worst among young women and men.
How can we explain this gap – what is fueling it? As Sarah Wilshaw-Sparkes and Galia Barhava-Monteith write in this morning’s Business Magazine of the Herald “Women’s pay has a direct impact on their ability to keep working full-time. If they don’t earn enough to afford childcare its harder for them to decide to stay on at work. High quality care means haing a nanny or in-home care [since childcare centres often close at 5pm etc]. That can easily cost $60,000 in pre-tax income. Its not hard to see that the $10,000 less that professional women earn than men in equivalent jobs would make a material difference to the professional working mother’s calculation.” I can say from personal experience that two-thirds of my income as a university senior lecturer goes toward child care while I work. In other words, you have to be in a really, really good job to afford the cost of childcare these days.
Wilshaw-Sparkes and Barhava-Monteith run a website for working women: www.professionelle.co.nz [like the feminine ending!] Their database shows 90% of 26-30 years olds are in paid work compared with ust 50% of 41-45 year olds. OH thank you school hours 9-3pm — what job can fit into those hours and volunteering at the underfunded schools to help their kids to read and write.
Wilshaw-Sparkes and Barhava-Monteith conclude: “There’s a lot of talent being lost to employers, to say nothing of sunk recruiting and professional development costs. The men who stay on and rise into more senior, high-paying positions cannot logically all be the very best candidates, but instead represent the best available after female contenders have left”.
How many men want us to leave the field open for them?
How many women and men reinforce the myth that mothers should stay home with their preschool children all the time?
Can New Zealand and New Zealand employers afford to lose professional women and indeed all women (and in such a tight labour market?)
– Jacqui
I think the most obvious reason for the continued income gap between men and women is the ‘hope’ that this income gap will discourage women from entering the workplace. The world is getting smaller and the job market more competitive – and more and more men are realizing they aren’t competing with just other men, they’re competing with women too (perhaps that’s why we don’t often read about professional men challenging the status quo because the status quo protects them).
But I think it’s interesting to read about how professional women are spending upwards of 60 per cent of their pre-tax income on child care service, and are forced to leave their jobs because it’s becoming too expensive for them. And I agree that the men who rise up in their spots are by and large not nearly as qualified as the women who have had to leave.
To make a point, it seems to me that this income gap protects men in the workplace by discouraging women from continuing in their professions however better qualified the women may be. However, in a world where the business market is getting more fierce and competitive, from rivals both at home and abroad, you would think that businesses (and the government) would want the best and most qualified people working for them (despite their sex). But we don’t see that. If we saw that, we’d see businesses (and the government for that matter) opening up child care centers for their employees, or offering cash bonuses in order to subsidize the cost for private child care service (although that’s not to suggest that there aren’t some businesses that offer these types of relief for women in the workplace – just not nearly enough).
In answer to the above question, New Zealand and New Zealand employers cannot afford to lose professional women who can do the job more efficiently and effectively than the men who rise to senior positions by default. Having a successful business and labor market means employing the best, the brightest and most competitive – both men and women.
I wonder how many employers are under somewhat of an illusion that mothers returning to the work force aren’t as focused as their male counterparts or other women who don’t have the ‘distraction’ of young children and therefore feel they aren’t worth as much, adjusting their pay accordingly? Of course I doubt any employer would own up to such an idea but the whole notion of gender associations fits nicely here. Females are ‘supposed’ to look after the home and family, its threatens male-ness when this is subverted.
Women also make it very difficult for other women. There is an expectation that women should reurn to work and reclaim their careers as soon as possible. We put alot of pressure on ourselves to have everything and to do it extremely well; family and career. Yet this can place unrealistic expectations in particular on new mothers. One girlfriend of mine, a mother to twin boys wanted to stay home with them but found this choice was being belittled by other mothers. In the end she took on work so as to bolster her own self-esteem shattered by other women.
Certainly some women have no other choice but to rejoin the workforce as soon as possible but for those who do have a choice shouldn’t feminism also be about celebrating motherhood?
Employers should also be celebrating parenthood, particulary in a declining population. Providing childcare or at least subsidising childcare as some employers do healthcare might be a good start. Children are afterall, their future labourforce.
With women childcare is something that has to become a priority whereas expectations of men being concerned with childcare is relatively low. Why shouldn’t men have to take into account their working hours depending on the hours available from childcare? I think this expectation and notion of women being responsible more than men for the care of their children shows how the social construction of gender inhibits women from succeeding in workplaces and limits their chance of being equal to men. The concept of women’s natural role as the ‘nurturer’ and ‘caregiver’ of the family in the private sphere and men dominating the workplace in the public sphere is something that needs to change in order for women to receive equal opportunity as men and become more successful in the workplace.
Has anyone ever raised the idea of having a ‘women’s union’ in N.Z?
If every woman in New Zealand went on strike for a day that would surely raise awareness of the gender pay gap!
Do you actually need to be in a union to go on strike??
it would be a lot easier to strike at work rather than at home…
At the very least I think it could be trialled at University, and the female staff and students could go on strike, and try to make it a sunny day and go and have a picnic! 🙂
I’ve often thought about the potential for a women’s party, but a women’s union? What a fascinating idea! Would we extend membership to women working in the home as well as in the paid workforce?
Tania
Yes I think it would have to include women’s work at home, although for care giving it might be harder because you would always want to look after people that are dependent on you, especially if you were a solo mum, it would be easier to not do care work for a day if you could ask someone else to do it or pay for someone else to do it, women across N.Z could also refuse to all do housework as well as paid work on a strike day.
I found a link about starting a union, http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/247521/how_to_create_a_union_at_work.html