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?