On Wednesday night I tweeted, with my tongue in cheek, that on the days my husband goes to work before I wake up and is still at work when I go to bed for the night, it annoyingly undermines my personal narrative about working hard. One of the responses that caught my eye then next day was this: “I can think of other narratives published on Women’s Agenda that it undermines too.”
When my husband leaves for work before I wake up & is still at work when I go to bed it annoyingly undermines my "I work so hard" narrative.
— Georgina Dent (@georgiedent) September 24, 2014
@Lyall @WomensAgenda that’s a very valid point! As far as family friendly fields go my husband’s line of work rates badly.
— Georgina Dent (@georgiedent) September 25, 2014
I assumed he was referring to recent articles we’ve published about men playing an active role on the home front and replied it was a valid point. His subsequent reply took me a few moments to process.
“Shhhh don’t thoughtcrime too loudly. The road to higher pay is a tollway.” It included a picture of a book called Why Men Earn More which purports to explain why the gender pay gap is a myth.
@georgiedent Shhhh don’t thoughtcrime too loudly. The road to higher pay is a tollway. http://t.co/Ly8DyGRgiH pic.twitter.com/1fBo8nDPzO
— Lyall Furphy RN (@Lyall) September 25, 2014
The penny dropped. Of course. I am home in bed at 10pm while my husband is still at work, so any discrepancy between male and female wages is thus explained. Except it’s not quite so simple.
Working longer hours is certainly a factor in the pay gap, as are the choices men and women make. But the choices men and women make, and the hours men and women work, cannot be divorced from the environment in which they make those choices or the hours in which they work or don’t work.
The 18.2% pay gap is an umbrella figure and as such has its limitations. It doesn’t mean every female earns exactly 18.2% less than every male for the same work. In some instances that’s exactly what happens – though sometimes the gap is more or less. The 18.2% figure relates to full time earnings and indicates that full-time working men take home 18.2% more than full-time working women each week.
A friend recently asked me why the specific pay gap in each profession or field isn’t shared. It’s because unless individual employers were going to investigate and share exactly what they pay men and women in their organisations at a similar level, we’d never know.
Doing a payroll analysis is one of the simplest things a company can do and something the Workplace Gender Equality Agency encourages and makes very straightforward. https://www.wgea.gov.au/ It will confirm – for better or worse – whether any pay gap exists.
I recently learned of a medium sized organisation that conducted its own pay audit to assess whether any gender gap existed. To the directors’ collective dismay, it did. Women were paid 20% less across the board. It was a wake-up call that brought the otherwise abstract 18.2% pay gap figure very close to home.
It is easy to dismiss the pay gap in the same way it’s easy to dismiss gender inequality altogether if your eyes are averted. If you are wilfully or inadvertently blind to the issue, it’s impossible to believe it exists. That is where the umbrella figure, even with its drawbacks, is useful.
Because it clearly illustrates that there is a difference between what men and women earn and begs the question: should any gap exist? Do we really believe women are 18.2% less talented or qualified than men? Do women really work 18.2% less hard than men? Do women really just “choose” lower paying fields and less senior posts? Or are men better supported in higher paying fields and more senior roles? Do we, collectively, limit what women can choose and undervalue women’s work?
At the very least the 18.2% figure warrants a conversation about the latter.
No single household fully explains the pay gap but I accept what happens in my house contributes to it. In the same way that what happens in your households does too. I do work shorter hours than my husband and I earn less than he does. The pay gap between us is explained by industry differences and the hours we work. But our arrangement, which I’ve written about before, means gender is also at play. By working shorter hours and bearing the bulk of the domestic and childcare work as I do, our household is continuing to perpetuate the pay gap. In effect I am facilitating my husband earning more than I do, by doing more at home. This is driven essentially by the demands of our respective jobs. My role is part-time and more flexible; his is not.
The question is this: how many roles are inflexible and overly demanding and do they need to be? Earlier this year Harvard University economist Claudia Goldin conducted a study into the pay gap which revealed that the way we work is the biggest culprit. The pay gap is at its widest in industries like medicine, law and finance, where long hours are mandated and the demands are around the clock.
Considering women still bear the bulk of responsibility for childcare and unpaid domestic work, these fields are – generally speaking – harder for women to crack. Harder doesn’t mean impossible but it might require some role reversal at home for it to happen. Coca-Cola Amatil CEO Alison Watkins is a case in point.
Goldin said that the pay gap “would be considerably reduced and might vanish altogether if firms did not have an incentive to disproportionately reward individuals who laboured long hours and worked particular hours.”
Long hours might be entrenched in some fields and cultures but do they need to be?
“There will always be 24/7 positions with on-call, all-the-time employees and managers, including many CEOs, trial lawyers, merger-and-acquisition bankers, surgeons and the US Secretary of State,” Goldin explains. “But, that said, the list of positions that can be changed is considerable.”