Coalition shows it doesn't care about equal pay for women
March 10th, 2010 by Mark Bahnisch | Published in Feminism, Industrial Relations, Policy, Politics, Women | 71 Comments
Writing in Crikey the other day, Eloise Keating suggested that “if Abbott wants to woo women, he should start with wages”:
Recent figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics show Australian women earned just 82.5% of the average male rate of pay across the country in 2009. On average, a female worker would have earned more in 1985 — and will be $1 million worse off over their lifetimes than their dads, brothers and partners.
That rather understates the size of the problem, because that differential refers to full time earnings, and 57% of women in work were full time, with 43% being part time or casual in 2009. As the recent House of Representatives Standing Committee Report on Equal Pay, Making It Fair, observed:
In August 2007, the average mean earning from all jobs for women was $680 per week (compared to $1022 for male employees) partly reflecting women’s greater participation in part time employment. On a comparison of full time employment earnings, women on average earned $910 per week and men earned $1131 weekly.
The point I’ve been making in my commentary and analysis of the Abbott parental leave plan is that there seems to be a perception that women in the workforce are much better off than they actually are. Otherwise it would be impossible to conclude that income replacement was ‘generous’ or ‘fair’. My argument has been that the Coalition’s approach would further entrench existing inequalities. In that context, it was interesting to note the comments from Eric Abetz on the 7.30 Report tonight. Abetz was responding to a case which starts tomorrow in Fair Work Australia seeking to revalue the work performed (very largely by women) in the community sector.
To say that Abetz was hardly filled with enthusiasm for a case which would raise women’s wages by around $100 a week would be an understatement. Pay equity was a principle no one would disagree with, he observed, but it appears that in practice, it’s never the right time to do anything about it.
This, of course, is the whole problem. The principle was accepted in Australian law in 1972, but the practice has lagged behind, and is now trending backwards.
The method by which the ACTU, the ASU, and the Equal Pay Alliance are proceeding is by a test case based on principles of work value. The Coalition removed the power of FWA’s predecessor, the AIRC, to hear such cases, opposes anything but minimal safety net awards, and rejects the principle of industrial tribunals determining pay rates by an assessment of the skills and values worked.
So, if they were still in government, this campaign could not succeed. And it they return to government, it will not succeed. The Labor government, by contrast, is intervening in the case in support of the union position, and Julia Gillard made a cogent argument as to the timeliness of properly valuing community sector workers’ skills and experience tonight.
The audacity, and gross hypocrisy, of the claim that the Coalition cares about working women has been exposed for what it is, only two days after Tony Abbott’s IWD speech.
Elsewhere: Useful background and context at Business Spectator.
Happy International Womens Day, indeed!
Well, at least they’re exposed. Maybe Rudd should use Abetz to hit about around the head really hard.
My hope is that Rudd, Gillard et. al really go on the attack on this one and that eventually someone in the MSM media might realise ‘Hang on a second! This Abbott bloke is speaking out of both sides of his mouth!’
One can always dream…
If males and females are in the same work place doing the same job then they should be paid the same. However, different jobs and/or different workplaces can mean different rates of pay.
Righto Razor. So it’s just a random coincidence is it, that in professions where gender distribution skews female like aged care, community care, nursing, early childhood and primary education – they attract a lower wage than professions that skew male, such as mining, engineering and derivatives trading?
Funny, ‘cos they all require years of training, and even more years of experience to do well, and they’re all important and valued occupations that our society wouldn’t function so well without (well, except for the derivative traders, anyway).
Nothing to see here, move along – right?
Are you really an obtuse and incurious person, or do you just play one on the internet?
I predict shortly a shower of comments saying it’s all the chicks’ fault, followed by massive thread derailment and a general free-for-all.
Of course sg: if women expect to get equal pay, then they shouldn’t choose to be born in a society in which the economic value of different activities is patterned by gender!
Not if I have anything to do with it, sg! I’m getting a bit tired of it…
Elsewhere: Useful background and context at Business Spectator.
Let’s break this phrase up into two parts:
1) the economic value of different activities;
2) different activities are patterned by gender.
I’d argue that 1 is being driven by 2, not because society values work done by women less, but rather due to simple economics. As women have entered the workforce, the industries which they enter into have had a dramatic change to the supply and demand within that section of labour market. #2 is the source of the problem, attempting to paper over that by artificially forcing wage equality it only papering over the issue.
I can’t understand that at all, desipis. In the context of the community sector, it was correctly noted that low wages in the community services sector are the result in large part of the outsourcing by governments of such tasks from the 1980s onwards to charities and poorly funded community groups. How that supposedly interacts with demand and supply within this particular labour market, according to what sense I can make of your comment, is a bit of a mystery, because the actual problem, again as correctly reported, is that there’s much churn in the sector because highly qualified people cannot make ends meet on such wages, and leave for better paid jobs.
Clearly, in this instance, because most employment in this sector is not in for profit organisations, it’s very much a matter of a social devaluation of women’s skilled work, driven by particular government policies. In other words, the services provided by this sector are decommodified to the extent that they are not traded on any market, but rather funded by government subventions, contracts, and the fundraising of voluntary organisations. So the demand for such services is not that for a marketable commodity. Hence the price of labour in this sector is a function of the level of funding, not of labour as an input into the market value of the services performed.
In addition, the whole point of work value cases is to attain a comparative measure of the social value of work by assessing the level of skill and qualification necessary to perform it. Thus, such cases are interventions in the free market for labour, and indeed a response to market failure to adequately reward skilled work, which is often not a function of the operation of markets as such, but of cultural attitudes about women’s work embedded in the historical structure of decision making within them and the values of some market actors.
The award system itself is a ‘distortion’ of the labour market, which is its point, and which is why Liberals tend not to like either awards or pay equity and work value principles (determined through a quasi-judicial process in industrial tribunals rather than through contractualism and bargaining).
even if your claim were right desipis, unalloyed by such simple things as straight-out sexism in employment practices, the industries which women entered were patterned by one particular gender – men. Not for nothing did women first enter nursing, teaching, libraries and the like – because that’s the sort of work which has always been characterised as fit for women. Even in the sciences, mathematics and taxonomy have been seen as acceptable for women compared to physics and chemistry since the 18th century at least (though even there there was deliberate sexist exclusion of women and belittling of their work).
There really is no chicken-and-egg argument here. It’s not women’s fault, and even the most commonly raised canard – that women leave work for children and come back to work part time – is not entirely their own fault, as we’ve seen in the heated discussions happening recently over Abbot’s latest warpspasm.
Mercurius:
If you’re talking about social value then you could argue that the individuals involved should be valued equally in a social sense (e.g. how they are portrayed in the media). However if you’re talking about economic value, then there is a great difference between the economic potential of talented employees in industries such as mining and the financial sector than in the nursing or general education service sectors. If we want to optimise the economy of our society then we need to attract these individuals to those industries, primarily by paying them more.
Why are women less willing to make personal sacrifices for economic benefit (both personal and communal)? Why are men less willing to make personal sacrifices for social benefit (both personal and communal)? I’m not sure you can accurately or fairly compare the rewards of certain careers based on financial rewards alone.
that’s funny desipis, because when my partner tries negotiating her wage, she gets told no, we can’t do that. But then she discovers that a younger, less qualified man was offered a higher wage than her without having to even ask.
Is that somehow related to this phenomenon of women being “less willing to make personal sacrifices for economic benefit”? Because it doesn’t seem to be related to anything so self-deprecating. And this is being replicated across industries as we speak.
If this sort of discrimination is being enacted in the ordinary human relations of ordinary individuals, why should we believe the causes that you point to on the aggregate level? These unequally paid industries are just bigger representations of the same phenomena.
Mark,
My comment wasn’t aimed specifically at community service sector, rather the general argument about women being paid less on average because of the industries they tend to work in.
If the sector is not providing services to an adequate level, then the funding should be increased to attract the quantity and quality of labour required. Which may arguably be the situation in the case here.
However if the sector is providing services to an adequate level, then clearly the price of labour for that market sector is attracting sufficiently qualified labour to provide the services. Any individuals working in that sector when they could be getting paid more in another sector for their skills or qualifications is clearly gaining some other, non financial benefit.
That’s pretty subjective. I’m curious how that judgement was made given the employer apparently disagreed.
It’s possibly to do with the employer assessing the women as being less likely to leave in response to the lower wage. It’s possible that this is based on a perception tainted by sexism. It’s also possible it’s a reality that is statically significant. That said, from the data I’ve seen, negotiating skills is only likely to account for a small portion of the gender wage gap.
No desipis, qualifications generally aren’t subjective. But saying they’re subjective certainly makes it easier for a sexist employer to make subjective judgements, doesn’t it?
Once the hurdle of sexist pay decisions has been overcome, then maybe we could talk about who is “less willing to make personal sacrifices for economic benefit.” Until then those kinds of subtleties are just a smokescreen.
This conversation is getting very close to Adam Smith’s paradox of value:
People value things (including services) subjectively, and – surprise, surprise – because men have run the show for a very long time, they have corralled the high subjective value positions (and other things) to themselves.
The solution is not to do away with subjective value, I’m afraid, mainly because it would be impossible to do so (and would involve reanimating some very dodgy economics, like the labour theory of value). Rather, it is to get more women into those positions with a higher subjective value, and to respect their choices when they would prefer not to (and vice-versa, of course).
Yaaah, Desipsis. Sorry, I know that in your mind the equal work of men and women are equally remunerated, but in the world it just ain’t so. Shocking, innit? There orta be a law! Oh, wait…
My wife in her 20s was succesasfully managing a team of (male) programmers and turning this fractious bunch into something resembling a functional team that could deliver projects on-time and on-budget. Most of the minions, she soon discovered, were getting paid more than she. As in, she was the boss, but the boys got more money. When she asked for a raise, answer was a firm and final “no”. For some reason 50-something male company owners find it easy to refuse pay rises to 20-something females. It happens, Desipsis. It really does. It’s not fairy tales.
But, SL, it’s amazing how the “high subjective value” of those positions starts declining relative to male average weekly earnings once large numbers of women begin appearing in said field! When was the last time you heard about a female CEO getting an obscene multi-million payout for non-performance?
Draw yourself a 50-year chart of the wages of high school teachers relative to male average weekly earnings – it’s a fairly smooth descending line. Now add the line of percentage of women in high school teaching – it’s a neatly ascending line. The two lines form a neat ‘X’ in the middle. Spooky!
Same trend in General Practice over the period. More female GPs, GPs not earning so high relative to av. male earnings as in the past. While more male-skewed sub-fields like dentistry stay at quite high levels.
Now zoom out to all white-collar/professional settings. Since 1970, the average starting salary of university graduates has declined from 120% of male av. weekly earnings to around 80%. Guess what’s happened to the gender distribution of degrees during the same period? Yep, it’s gone from overwhelmingly male to slightly skewed towards female.
SL, your solution ain’t a solution, because our society simply doesn’t value women’s work as much as that of men, even when the work is of equal value by equally qualified people. I know in our minds this ain’t true. But in the world, it is. It’s there in the data. Ouch!
This effect is even more pronounced in two other fields I know quite well: marketing and IT. You don’t have to talk to male programmers for very long before you’ll more than one who will kindly volunteer their 19th century theory that women just aren’t as capable at programming, you know, ‘cos of the way they think. Marketing is another one where men at the same level in a company are frequently earning more than the women.
I can confidently predict that if a whole lotta women in hard-hats turned up for work at the mines in WA, you would begin to see a sideways drift and then a gentle decline in the wages of that industry relative to average male weekly earnings…
I’l repeat Mark’s point that’s been made umpteen times: We are having this conversation because, even though statutorily men and women have had equal pay since 1972, it isn’t borne out in wages data, and all the fig leaf excuses we keep propounding to explain it just aren’t big enough to cover the, err, genital gap.
So after three highly repetitive threads specifically on the Abbott parental leave proposal, there is now have yet another effectively on the same subject (“the audacity, and gross hypocrisy, of the claim that the Coalition cares about working women has been exposed for what it is, only two days after Tony Abbott’s IWD speech”)?
I’m afraid my eyes glazed over three threads back, but the general conclusion from all this frantic activity around the yah boo Tony theme is unavoidable: boy, aren’t the Ruddists spooked?
I disagree as I think in some fields in the middle and lower classes the Coalition do want men and women to have parity. When Workchoices comes in we’ll see some men in shock as their pay is lowered to be in line with their female co-workers.
A rising tide raises all ships. And anyone who knows their science knows you can raise the big expensive boats higher if you throw the men and women on the lower decks overboard.
Mercurious:
And what has happened to the number of graduates relative to the total number of workers?
From the data I’ve seen the case is pretty close to equal pay for equal work, but there is certainly not equal work overall which means there is not equal pay overall.
If women really are getting paid significantly less for the same work, why don’t some smart entrepreneurial women start some companies that employ mainly women and make bucket loads of money by undercutting their male competitors?
Mercurius: you can also trend those declining wage effects (and get exactly the same statistical result) if you plot the decline in wages against full or partial take over of the relevant profession by the state. You’ll note (and it’s a melancholy note, I am no fan of the US health care system; it’s offensive to libertarians, too) that in the US, the wages of doctors have remained high — even in areas of medicine that are female dominated. The other healthcare trick (in order to keep the system as cheap as possible, and widespread in the UK) is to have fewer and fewer high-end people (both doctors and nurses are expensive to train, and highly skilled). Hospital wards seem to teem with employees, but very few of them are doctors or nurses. They are ‘allied healthcare workers’, and often very poorly paid.
Remember, too, that it is important to differentiate between universities when looking at graduate incomes. There are both more graduates these days, and more poor quality universities. Compare the salary of someone (male or female) from Oxbridge or an Ivy with that of someone (male or female) from a former Polytechnic or Community College. The gulf will be vast. Deprived of the ability to divide potential employees neatly into ‘credentialled’ and ‘uncredentialled’ (the situation prior to 1970), employers then begin to divide the different credentials ever more finely, by university first and then by grade. The standard practice in the UK is to accept an Oxbridge 2.1, but expect a First from everywhere else.
It may just be that we cannot have our cake and eat it too.
I’ve got a PDF copy of the Application to FWA in my virtual hands and it addresses exactly these points, desipis.
Pay rates in the industry are set by award, and funding to organisations is predominantly if not entirely dependent on Government grants, which are not distributed on the basis of economic value, but on need. More importantly, the usual ways of measuring economic value re. wages don’t apply—how do you measure caring?
In a sector where a market exists, that’s a potential solution. But in the one we’re talking about, where the test case will be argued, there’s no market, and no competition.
This thread has been hijacked. As terrible as the stories of women getting paid less than their male peers is (let alone their male subordinates) the thread is actually about how to place a value on work done in female dominated industries. Only sceptic lawyer has addressed the issue, but not offered a solution.
And what is the solution, other than something like “I reckon nurses are as important as doctors and should be paid the same as doctors”? Which is all very well, but it is only my opinion.
Rehijacking the thread, not all wage trends are the result of patriarchal dominance. University graduates get paid less (relatively) now than they used to because there are a lot more of them. A university degree used to have scarcity value, like a house with uninterrupted water views. Now a degree is like a project home in a new estate suburb. There’s an awful lot of them and new ones are created all the time. Inevitably this means graduates, on average, don’t get the wage premium they once did.
GPs get paid less because successive governments have screwed down the Medicare fee schedule to contain costs.
Come on guys, I think I require some solutions from you.
Should women work more hours? How do we make women work more hours?
Should women be paid more per hour than men, to even it out?
Should women be made to enter permanent work, rather than casual work? (I concede that some women are simply not offered permanent work).
The unchangable fact is women give birth to the young, and this requires time away from paid work.
Incidentally, it’s probably worth linking to the test case’s campaign site, which makes the very valid point that it’s one thing for the arguments about equal remuneration to be accepted, and another for the Commonwealth and States to fund the NGOs to wear the increases (and make sure they don’t simply plough the increase into some other part of their budgets).
Wozza @ 22,
Not spooked, Wozza. My guess is at the moment they can’t think of much else to talk about. (I grant you its a bit dull.) But the glaring inconsistencies in the Mad Abbott’s position did need to be exposed.
Oops, last post crossed with scepticlawyer’s.
To make the same education point as her in an Australian context here, graduates of what used to be called CAEs (and who get a lower starting salary than university graduates) are now badged as university graduates. They get the same starting salary as before and thus pull down the university graduate average.
Of course, blatant sexism still exists. A friend who works for a very enlightened employer told me of a recent conversation with the CEO.
Friend: “How come X (male, fairly recent graduate) gets paid 20% more than Y (female, fairly recent graduate) when they are equally qualified, equally experienced and equally good?”
CEO: “The deal for X was struck by manager Z”. (Z has since left the company.)
Friend “So are you going to increase Y’s salary to be the same as X’s?”
CEO: “No. The problem isn’t that Y is underpaid. It is that X is overpaid”.
Friend: “So what can you do about it?”
CEO: “We’ll make adjustments in the annual salary rounds to equalise them”.
Friend: “But that will take years and anything could happen between now and then”.
CEO: “Yes”.
Liam:
I’d imagine that the NGOs involved in the service delivery have a certain budget, and that they pay staff on the basis of providing the maximum level of service with the limited budget. Thus the value point would be where they would forego better quality staff for simply more staff. It’s possible that the current award is artificially holding that value point high, in which case one would expect the majority of staff would be on the award.
It’s also possible that the award for this sector is lower than the award for other sectors that require equivalent skills or qualifications. I think it’s important to note the balancing factors in wage determination in these cases. When considering the wages for private sector employees the direct effect of an increase is the lower profitability of business, something which society can arguably afford. The direct effect of raising wages in the social services sector is to reduce services as budgets are much more rigid.
You could. But also because management in the sector is largely unskilled, volunteer or amateur; they’ve historically found it much easier to leave the job of measuring economic value to the various award-setting tribunals.
Not just possible, it’s a fact universally acknowledged. It’s rather the point of the test case.
And looking at the bigger picture—the story of the job of looking after the very vulnerable is the story of the retreat and decline of religious orders. The work used to be done not by women who were paid less; but by women (and some men) who were paid nothing.
Mercurius @ 20 – programmers getting paid more than their managers? Sounds right to me :-) Its actually not that uncommon especially in companies that recognise that management and programming are quite different career paths. Though I would agree there is most likely a gender pay gap in programmers – the numbers of women programmers are so low it can be really hard to tell. There is as you say definitely a problem of some people believing that women can’t program. Though I’ve also wondered if the better women programmers are getting encouraged into management roles – was even at a diversity event where we got told that women make better managers than men :-)
Sam @ 31 – I’ve seen similar situations, although some of them have just been between men. Its very hard for companies to reduce someone’s salary and obviously they don’t want to pay another person more than they need to and so they rely on people not talking about what they get paid. Its certainly possible that these targeted hirings where people are paid more to attract or keep them is done more for men than women (perhaps due to some boys club issues).
This is what the organisations are afraid of and I think is a pretty likely result in the short term. But over the longer term this strategy is likely to be more successful at getting more funding into these areas as the general public will put a lot more pressure on governments over reduced services than they will over low pay for the workers. Not so good in the short term for the workers who will end up out of a job or the people who use the services.
Chris,
Or perhaps the services will become supplied by fewer but better paid staff, along with more volunteers to replace the staff let go.
Sam@31,
I’ve seen cases like that too, not always between staff of opposite genders. The best way I can think of to deal with cases like that is to legal enforce publication of all wages/salary/bonuses/etc to all staff. That would enable employees to negotiate on fairer terms with their employers, particularly given the ease of gather evidence of ‘what the market will pay’.
I’ll bite Howard. Not all women have children and even those that do might not while in your employ. Why should they suffer a tarrif or ‘risk tax’ because of this?
Ahhh, Howard Cunningham, I wondered when that might come up.
I happen to have actually given birth to a child or two myself, and there was not a great deal of the early child raising which only I could do. The birth thing, if it goes well, requires a couple of months off, perhaps. Breastfeeding takes some getting used to, but by the time my babies were three months old I could express breast milk and I was back at work for a couple of days a week.
Where was my poor, neglected baby, you ask? With her father, drinking her mother’s milk. It’s not rocket science, but it did require some alterations to my work, and a private room for some of the time to express, and a partner with a flexible workplace.
Of course, it all went to shit when he was offered either a redundancy or promotion and standard hours.
Let’s not pretend that women have to take a year off work and then only work part time because of their biology. Children have two parents and if fathers go back to work as if nothing happened after their babies are born, of course mothers have to do less paid work.
Joanie,
It’s not that men can’t take care of children, it’s that our society encourages them not to. This leaves women taking (on average) longer breaks from work, and working less hours. It also leaves them less likely to be willing to take on the high intensity (long hours, travel, etc) jobs that earn the big dollars.
There’s all this talk about how society values women’s work less, but then all the talk of change is about trying to get women to do more “men’s” work. There seems to be little talk about getting men to ease back and have a more balanced life.
.
Expressing doesn’t work so well for everyone and sometimes babies will end up refusing expressed breast milk from the bottle (like mine did) so there are exceptions.
Thats one good example of why we end up with women doing the child care. When my wife went back to work it was very easy for her to negotiate part time hours – eg what do you want?. I work for the same company and the negotiations for me to work part time took a lot longer though I did eventually get what we wanted.
Mercurius: ” I can confidently predict that if a whole lotta women in hard-hats turned up for work at the mines in WA, you would begin to see a sideways drift and then a gentle decline in the wages of that industry relative to average male weekly earnings…”
My impression is that there are more men entering the aged care and the disability sector so I think there is already a natural experiment underway (although in the reverse direction) and it will be interesting to see what happens to wages.
It’s not that men can’t take care of children, it’s that our society encourages them not to.
That’s why feminists are about questioning and at times opposing what “society encourages”. We may have failed miserably according to Mr Nowra, but a glance at marriage handbooks and other historical material from a century ago suggests that this is a Very Good Plan. I recommend it for you, too.
There seems to be little talk about getting men to ease back and have a more balanced life.
If you mean combining paid work and domestic work/childcare, although I would question the “ease back” component – these jobs aren’t the cakewalk lots of people still think they are – again the ber-loody feminists have been talking and writing about this for yonks, but unfortunately few people listen. I recommend Leslie Cannold’s great article in the AGE yesterday (refer to Fairfax National Times site.)
That depends on the standards you hold yourself to as a parent; standards that are to an extent reinforced to an unreasonably high level by the keep-up-with-the-Joneses culture.
New Standard reply I see – seen it before – wimminz can’t claim any difficulty whatever with the domestic load/second shift because, “standards too high, it’s your fault.” (Of course. As usual.)
Mate, not incurring botulism is about as high as the standards get in our household, but having a young baby/babies and toddler/toddlers is work. But I know I might as well be talking to the wall.
It was a series of honest questions searching for honest answers.
I would never suggest a baby was poor and neglected without personally knowing the circumstances.
Do men and women do the same work for different pay? If not, how on Earth do we solve the issues raised here?
As interesting as the questions like why do female dominated industries attract such poor pay – because the have no unionisation or weak unions. Ergo join a militant union to improve your pay and conditions.
Interestingly over the past 50 years high paid jobs that used to be done by women have become male dominated industries. In the 1950s a computer was a woman science graduate who used to spend 3 weeks doing a complex maths calculation. They used to stop for morning tea, lunch and go home at night. Now 80% of programmers etc are male, this shift has been achieved by building a macho ethos of work all night to save the run. Women who want to remain partnered or rear children can’t work under those conditions. A little bit of project scoping, accurate problem identification and realistic scheduling would go a long way.
Howard how many women and their partners have to say exactly that before you accept it’s true?
Also, the other issue is that areas considered “womens’ work” are under paid.
More insidiously in professional areas, the example given is an engineering office where people keep their pay secret you can have 2 people doing the same job and one person earns twice the wages of the other. Other examples would be the bright young things who work for consulting firms like KPMG, SMS, Price Waterhouse
When I have looked at CVs, and I have viewed ’000s, I have found women usually have far better qualifications than men. Men have had far more interesting / responsible positions than women.
Even now women regard their careers as supplementary to the [imaginary / hoped for] male partner and are less likely to have a continuous employment history.
This means that at the end of their working life women have much less than half (if I remember correctly 20%) of the retirement assets of men. In an era when women live 5 years longer than men, elderly women live far more frugal lives. The first single women able to get a mortgage without a male guarantor are just approaching 50 so these women retiring now first bought a house with their husband or bought housing in their late 30s or rent.
Not just work, Helen, bloody hard work. I thought it didn’t get much harder than dealing with the public 7 days a week, 12-16 hours a day. Then I had my first baby, while still carrying the same workload. It was and still is, harder being a mum.
But it’s not like it’s compulsory to have a baby. The world is over populated as it is…
Which isn’t an argument against parental leave, which I hasten to add I support.
Runs away.
Don’t recall anyone saying it was compulsory, just that many dads didn’t pull their weight at home. And no, claims that they are out earning the money don’t count either.
Fair enough Mindy. Pulls head in.
Why not? ABS time use studies have shown in the past that men and women spend about the same total time doing the combination of paid work & work at home. With men spending quite a bit more time doing paid work and women doing a lot more work at home. Individual experience may vary of course….
And that gets backs to employer expectations of how much work men should be doing and the general lack of flexibility given to them to work family friendly hours. Improving the situation in that area is likely to have about as much effect on evening things out as making it easier for women to do paid work.
And that gets backs to employer expectations of how much work men should be doing and the general lack of flexibility given to them to work family friendly hours. Improving the situation in that area is likely to have about as much effect on evening things out as making it easier for women to do paid work.
It’s happening. It may not be happening quickly, but it’s happening. I see it with the young Dads around me. And to think men don’t have more power to improve the situation, once they perceive a more balanced life as worthwhile? Pull the other one.
They’ve got the same power women have.
So we attack the coalition for this and ignore the fact that Anna Bligh has just slammed the female dominated teaching workforce and refused to raise pay standards above a measly offer. If teaching were a male profession then it would be paid far more than it is. Bligh, a woman from a so called Labor party is just as responsible for keeping the so called caring professions such as teaching and nursing underpaid and she gets away with it because many of the workforce are women. Be consistent and attack the ALP for its disgusting treatment of these professions.
Helen @ 55 – I agree the situation is changing. I have flexibility in my job that my father would not have considered possible for a father. But I’m lucky to work for a company that overall is very good at these sorts of things and have a very understanding manager.
In terms of power I think this is a case of where the status quo works against men. Employers expect that many women will want to work part time after coming back from maternity leave. They don’t currently have the expectation that men will want to go part time and so it can be harder to negotiate, but as more do it will get easier.
It also could be helped along by the government by introducing (even unpaid) parental leave schemes that men are more likely to take (eg schemes that allow sharing of parental leave, allow for leave starting a year after birth, etc).
Desipis @6
I work in this sector and I’m thinking there’s not alot of efficiency gains to be had. Better paid people don’t necessarily work faster or more efficiently when doing case management or something. Doubling someone’s case load just means you spend less time with people in need and sometimes that’s just what they need, your time. As for volunteers – you would be surprised to know how much time it takes to organise a volunteer.
Billie:
I can’t speak for every company and every person. But from my experience in one of those firms over the past 6 years in both London and Sydney I know from speaking to my colleagues (at least at non senior executive level) that this is not true. The pay scales are very well defined and you would never have a situation where one consultant was earning twice what another was as someone mentioned earlier. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen elsewhere, but I do think it is often exaggerated and I would be very surprised if most of these corporate firms didn’t have similar policies. You can’t just come-in and demand higher pay than what is defined for someone of your level.
My union (in a very male dominated area) regularly publishes salary vs length of career stats.
These show a very very positive correlation between length of career (not age) and total remuneration, as well as salary.
Thus it would seem that if men were to take out time to raise kids (at least in my area of work) then those men would have a lower salary outcome.
So, a question I would have is whether or not the existing salary outcome differences would disappear or significantly reduce if men were to take off time to raise kids?
If so, then maybe the focus ought to be on getting men to do just this, rather than as one poster above put it (without much comment I was surprised to note) women should be assumed to be the ones looking after children.
Anecdotally, I have a cousin with five kids whose wife is a fair way through her accountancy degree and who is in the workforce and is powering along in her career. He looks after the kids, does the housework etc – and I bet won’t have a terribly good salary when they all lly get off to school.
So, further question, are we talking really about an unfair and discriminatory outcome because of an unfair sharing of the cost of raising children…rather than an unfair workplace?
Reason I say this is that maybe a social change to get more guys to stay home and look after kids might be more effective and easier to implement than somehow trying to address salaries. (Not saying don’t do that, but rather, is it a second order effect compared to getting more guys to look after kids/do housework).
Marks, this is what Leslie Cannold has been pointing out. (Me as well, I might add ;-) ) This is where the rubber will hit the road.
Pingutthepenguin I apologise for including at least one company that has published pay bands. I stand by my comments based on review of CVs.
Labor surveys report that the difference between men and women’s pay has grown larger in Australia in the past 2 decades, even though there are more women in post secondary study than men. 58% of university students are women.
A great example of a failure of progressive politics. They pick some simple but arbitrary measure of inequality attempting to apply a quick fix by contorting society to produce the arbitrary outcome they’re chasing. Then when the results aren’t what they expect (practical equality) because they didn’t look for the root cause of the problem, they turn around and blame some sexist conspiracy.
Angharad@59,
Why do you work in that sector if there are better paying jobs elsewhere to be had?
I don’t think it is surprising that a programmer might get paid more than a superior. You wouldn’t be surprised if a top surgeon was being paid more than his manager. The variance in programmer productivity is massive and this can cause some weird remuneration situations. Though funny seeing people complain about people lower in the org hierarchy getting paid more on a lefty site.
Desipis @65
You assume sills in the sector are transferable to other sectors. Your average child care worker or mental health caseworker doesn’t have a whole lot of other options.
In my case, I’m in a management role so the fair work case won’t affect my salary. I’ve made a few attempts to change sectors, but on the whole, management experience in a charity is not rated very highly by those parts of the economy that pay better.
desipis – my Latin isn’t up to understanding the significance of your nom de plume – too busy getting a technical education and performing at a far higher standard than the languid possessors of penises.
Over the past 40 years, men [I use the term advisedly] have been relieved of the need to marry in order to get regular sex. Women are starting to rear children without the security or financial input of the sperm donor. You could argue that as women have the more onerous social responsibility that they should be paid more than men. I can see the day when the second tier fellows won’t pass on their genes as women will select their sperm donor in the same way cattle breeders select the donor sperm for their herds. As 40% of Australian marriages end in divorce it makes sense to select a sperm donor with the most desirable attributes rather than pairing up with a second rate fella who buggers off after 7 years leaving mum to rear the kids.
Like most internet nicknames, its the echo of a crazy idea from a time long ago, with a twist of bad translation, that stubbornly decided to stick.
Do you want a gold star sticker or a smiley face stamp?
Interestingly enough, so have women.
Good for them.
Or you could argue that we should move towards equality and get men more involved with raising children, by embracing shared parenting and countering the perception that men are bad at it.
And men will find a high end egg donor and a surrogate womb to have their children.
With women like you who see men as nothing more than their own personal wage slave I’m not surprised that so many end so badly.
Exactly what your “bbb-but women have kids!” non-argument or your misandrous comments have to do with an equal pay for equal work discussion I’m not sure.
Point well missed, desipis, by a country mile.
What point was that? I missed it amongst the trolling.