Mind The Gender Pay Gap
The final frontier in defeating gender bias in the workplace.
Valentine Rugwabiza, the Rwandan ambassador to the UN said – “just freeing the potential of women is the fastest multiplier of our growth. It is such an accelerator in eradicating poverty’.
The gender pay gap between men and women looks different around the world. In the last decade, women in New Zealand and Spain were paid with a gap of 5.6% and 8.6% less than men, respectively. On the other hand, in South Korea, the gap is nearly 37% from men (McCarthy, N. (January 26, 2016)).
Back in the Obama administration, there was a phrase going around in the United States with respect to solving the problem of gender bias – “equal pay for equal work”. Quite a self-explanatory statement, although, it implies that women are being paid less just for being women. There is a word for that – discrimination.
But numerous studies in the past years have proven that discrimination, even though upsettingly still in the system, accounts for only a fraction of the gender pay gap.
Back in the last century, an overwhelming majority of women did not work or go to college. It was accepted that women needed to earn some money, yes. But a career? That was for men.
Why? – lower education rate, lower workforce participation, grouping into “feminine” jobs. All of this was going together with cultural norms – women are primary child carers, women should be homemakers, and some downright ridiculous beliefs like women cannot hold power and that they are generally less intelligent. In fact, discrimination against women in terms of wages was perfectly legal. Thankfully, there was a sharp change in these ideologies by the late 20th century and after. Slowly and steadily, all these cultural norms evaporated. Well, almost all. One thing remained and exists to this day – “women are primary child carers”.
Thing is that women, understandably, want to spend time with their children. After birth, even if a new mom works full time like her husband, she still spends on average 9 hours a week longer on childcare than her significant other. Extrapolate that to a year, and that’s 3 months of more time a father spends on work than the mother. THIS is the heart of the gender pay gap.
Imagine a young couple, graduating together from college. In their late 20s or early 30s they think about having children. The woman must somewhat pause her career to take care of the child, while the father continues to work and keeps his career trajectory on the rise. In Denmark, when the government increased maternal leave to a few more months to help mothers recover better from the challenges of pregnancy, it ended up broadening the gender pay gap. This is in a country where childcare accounts for nearly 80% of the gender pay gap. That is a huge number and is often referred as “the motherhood penalty” (Sarah Kliff, 2018).
So how do we overcome this? A good example to follow would be that of Iceland. In 1975, nearly all of Iceland’s women went on strike to protest unequal pay and unfair employment practices. Fast forward 5 years, Iceland boasted the first democratically elected female president of the world and a sharp increase in the number of women in the country’s parliament and workforce quickly followed. By the year 2000, the country introduced the The Icelandic Act on Maternity/Paternity and Parental Leave, which extended maternal AND paternal leaves to 9 months with the time-period distributed evenly between the mother and the father. This was a novel concept at the time, and something that worked wonders in reducing the gender pay gap, which went from 81% in 2004 to 90 % in 2018. By simply allowing paternal leaves, women became more active in the labour force as childcare responsibilities were shared equally between parents (Sarah Kliff, 2018).
Since then, many more countries and organisations have adopted this strategy which basically works in favour of all parties. Large organisations especially possess the flexibility to delegate and distribute the work of a couple on parental leave while keeping their bottom line intact. This practice, which we now see widely accepted in major organisations such as Amazon, Deloitte and various others, doesn’t punish women for deciding to have a child with that motherhood penalty.
Women should not have to choose between a prosperous career and motherhood, and if we are able to view this as a societal issue rather than just a gender one, then there is hope that someday we can only look at gender pay gap in the rear-view mirror. We need to simply accept the fact that we will be helping nearly half the world’s population prosper and contribute better to the world’s economy.
- McCarthy, N. (January 26, 2016). The Gender Pay Gap In Developed Nations Visualised [Digital image]. Retrieved May 23, 2021, from https://www.statista.com/chart/4279/the-gender-pay-gap-in-developed-nations-visualised/.
- Sarah Kliff. (February 19, 2018). The gender wage gap is really a child care penalty. Retrieved May 23, 2021, from https://www.vox.com/2018/2/19/17018380/gender-wage-gap-childcare-penalty
