Gender Pay Gap – why is it still here?

Have you ever wondered about gender pay gap? What do you think about it – is it closed?

In 2012 the book edited by Jane Caro, Destroying the Joint, Leslie Cannold’s response quoted statistics from the report, the Global Gender Gap Report 2011. Back then Australia was shown as moving backward: it had dropped “six points to eighteenth for economic participation and six points to 38^th for political empowerment.” (Cannold, p.37)

This 2020 report wrote in their Progress Over Time paragraph that “Since 2006, the Global Gender Gap Report has tracked progress in closing gender gaps. Each year, the rate of change can estimate the time required to close the divide between women and men in employment, education, health and politics.” 

Australia is continuing to move backwards. The 2020 tables showed:

Table 1: The Global Gender Gap Index 2020 rankings

New Zealand went up 1 in 2020 from 2018, now 6^th.

Australia went down 5 in 2020 from 2018, now 44^th.

(WE Forum, p.9)

Table 2: The Global Gender Gap Index rankings by subindex, 2020

Economic Participation and Opportunity

New Zealand 27^th

Australia 49^th

Educational Participation

New Zealand and Australia = 1^st amongst 25 1sts

Political Empowerment

New Zealand 13^th

Australia 57^th

(WE Forum, p.12-13)

World Economic Forum is predicting that gender gap will not be completely closed for 99.5 years.

So why is Aus going backwards? Why doesn’t Aus have women in leadership? There are a few women in federal government, but never federal leadership, except for one. The Wikipedia (which many of you won’t believe, but it’s real) shows that since 1989 all states except South Australia have had women in leadership as Premiers, Chief Ministers (state) and federally one only as Prime Minister – 12 in total: 10 from Labor and 2 from LNP.

The Australian government report from the Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WEGA) shows that the inequality is still double-digit, now 13.9%. At least, that was before COVID-19 and it may have changed quite a bit. You can download – or just read – the report. It has a lot of information and statistics, and not all good for women. 13.9% less pay than men is still reality. The WEGA report says “Australia’s national gender pay gap has hovered between 13.9% and 19% for the past two decades.” That’s only 6.1 percentage points that women have gotten better pay in twenty years! Why is that taking so damned long in this country?

The WE Forum shows that Australia is quite a way behind New Zealand in economics and politics. This country has only ever had one woman Prime Minister, quite a long time after NZ – and they’re onto their third woman PM. Why doesn’t Aus elect a woman?

Do I know your arguments? Yes, I do – you think that men are better than women. Well, chaps (and women who agree with them), I suggest you should look up women’s history, right back to the 1800s when the first feminist generation started trying to get votes for women. It happened, after a few years of women fighting men – and it happened in 1893 in NZ before Aus, which didn’t get it until 1902. That was the Commonwealth law which allowed women aged over 21 to vote, but some states didn’t allow women to vote until the last state, Victoria, in 1908.

In 2010 Glenda Strachan wrote an article titled “Still working for the man?” and looked at from 1950s up to recently (download the pdf). She said “in the 1950s and 1960s men were regarded as the wage earners and women the homemakers, with women barred from some jobs and paid less than men; in the 1970s legislation and equal pay cases removed overt discrimination against women; from the mid 1980s the complexity of achieving equality for women at work was recognised through equal opportunity legislation, work and family policies and equal pay inquiries. In 2010 the ‘good life’ for women is having the same opportunities and outcomes in employment as men. While policy provisions support this, the reality of achieving this is difficult. So in 2010 many women are still ‘working for the man’ in the context that most managers are men.” That seems to still be where women are.

The WEGA report said

“Latest results from the Agency’s 2018-19 dataset show:

•          Women hold 14.1% of chair positions and 26.8%18 of directorships, and represent 17.1% of CEOs and 31.5% of key management personnel
•          34.0% of boards and governing bodies have no female directors. By contrast, only 0.9% have no male directors.”

34% with NO female directors??  FFS. I don’t really feel like comparing this, because it’s still not where it should be.

Just like the pay gender gap. It’s still not where it should be. If this country is still throwing women backwards then this country should look into it and start working for us, to bring us up to our absolute gender rights.

Why don’t you do that?

Don’t blame (female) boomers

I was born a boomer, I’m told. I never looked at myself as a boomer, but my parents helped to create the boom after WWII. Many people who were Gen X or Gen Y – our own children - held the world against us. I didn’t really start thinking about this until people directed their nasty comments at me! FFS, who am I, really??

I was born in 1956, had a lovely childhood with lovely parents, went to school, went to work when I left there, and worked pretty much every year until my stroke in 2014. I spent most of my time in very good jobs, but at the start of my working career there were a couple or three which proved (to me) that misogyny was still happening back in the 1970s – and it continued onwards.

I got married in 1980 and had my two children in 1982 and 1986, got divorced 11 years later, lived as a single parent for 11 more years and got married again (silly me). Divorced again 9 years later, just the year before my stroke.

Many people I had/have seen in top employment roles were/are men. Until fairly recently they were around the age I am, and yes, they set up shocking lives in what they did – such as mens-only clubs. They became shareholders, and yes, they made millions. Perhaps they were boomers – but they were very different from me and many, many of the women who are told we were boomers.

What has distracted me since the 1970s is environment, climate change, domestic violence, education, racism, disability discrimination, equality and much more, but I didn’t build the country. I am one of the many of the boomers who worked most of my adult life, but I have not made millions. I am one of them who have a disability. I am one who has sat pretty close to poverty since I went on to DSP after my stroke. And yet, these days, my age is against me rather than for me. I am not due any respect from the Gen X or Gen Y / Millennials or Generation Z.

Those who are due respect are the Lost Generation (WWI), the Greatest Generation (WWII) and the Silent Generation (otherwise known as the Lucky Few who missed the fighting). My parents were the Silent Generation, and they helped to rebuild the country after the war. They also taught us how to do things ourselves, like gardening, fixing our own cars, driving manual cars, reading books, playing, swimming, etc etc etc. They were wonderful people.

My own opinion, which I’m pretty damned sure that anyone in the generation I am to name will be absolutely against what I am to say, is that the generation I blame are the Generation X people. These people are born between 1965 – 1980. We, the boomers, had started to pick up on environment, climate change, domestic violence, education, racism, disability discrimination, equality and much more, but the Gen Xers threw their hands up and turned away from it. They had seen what we were getting, and they wanted more!

Of course I know some rich old boomers, but I also know a lot of rich Gen Xers. And I’m starting to meet some pretty well off Gen Ys. People like me, middle-of-the-generation boomers, didn’t really change much at all. We set it up, and the Gen Xers jumped on it. They set it in fast-forward for Gen Ys. Gen Zs, I have heard, aren’t getting anything like Gen X and Gen Y did. Nor, as I am told, what boomers had.

Well here are my opinions. You can agree or disagree, but don’t you ever argue with me because this is MY view, and probably not yours.

• I am a boomer, but I am only called that after people like my parents created a population boom after WWII.
• Recession recovered for the next decade after the WWII, changing the living standards upwards.
• New homes were built after WWII, before I was old enough to help build any of those that people like my father built. They were built so fast for the returned soldiers.
• The 1950s became the turn-around for car sales for the Lost / Great / Silent generations due to the end of the war. Boomers didn’t buy a car until the 1960s or 1970s.
• Workplace computers started in the 1950s. Boomers started using computers at work from the 1970s onwards.
• Until the early 1960s women were not expected to work when they got married. That was even before boomers were old enough to get married!
• Superannuation was available in the 1970s when I was in the NZ Army, set up by Lost / Great / Silent people in government.
• Boomers acknowledged drug use, but mostly used only marijuana and/or LSD. Ghettos used heroin.
• In the late 1930s holidays overseas were only for wealthy people. The chap who set up Horizon Holidays in the 1950s was an earlier generation than the boomers. 
• Hotels were set up all around Europe in the 1960s, and especially in Spain where they were looked on greedily by Franco who was an earlier generation to boomers.
• Pollution started a couple of centuries before now, from the industrial era started, again, by men.

I’ll finish my post now, because I could go on and on and on. I know what I am, regardless of whether I am a “boomer”, and I know how I lived with people who were generations before me and who were generations after me. I object to those who don’t really seem to know much about history but just want to blame us. Stop that, it’s disrespectful: that is, if you even know what that means.