The unconscious bias has been so exposed that it now walks among us. As two gay women, when we found out we were expecting a girl, we felt the gravity of the giant gender gap.
To understand where we are now, we have to paint a portrait of ‘then’ – it’s pretty ugly – think Horror Realism meets Pro Hart.
Nicole started her career signing off her emails as a man in order to gain traction in the manufacturing industry. She built an entity while constantly butting up against the adversity of not being taken seriously. Subsequently, the premise of her achievement has been reduced to the improbability of succeeding as a woman in a man’s world.
On the other hand, Nat has worked in the creative industry throughout her career. She’s been bullied and given an A4 montage of women smiling with one circled and told to ‘smile like that.’ She’s had her boss ask a peer to take photos of her in her swimmers and been paid $10,000 less in the same role than a male colleague with no relevant experience or education. Regardless of industry, our experiences are not unfamiliar or uncommon.
You get the picture and it’s not one you want to hang on a nursery wall. The challenges we’re facing as a family are about more than a pay gap – it’s an opportunity gap and crossing it is going to take a lot more cogency than we’d imagined.
If we stop defining skill sets by gender, the cumulative potential would serve us all. When reflecting on the past, it’s easy to disguise the measly nudge toward pay parity as progress. In 1906, Elizabeth Magie created ‘The Landlord’s Game’ to teach players about land-grabbing, renting and land tax. Nearly 30 years later, Charles Darrow annexed the design and sold it to Parker Brothers as ‘Monopoly.’ Meanwhile, Magie was paid $500 for the patent and received no royalties. Fast forward 100 years and women are still not passing ‘go,’ and when they do – they’re only collecting $160 dollars. Ironically, financial services have the highest pay gap of any other industry in Australia at 30.5%.
With women taking centre stage for International Women’s Day, what better time to do the maths on the ovary-sized hole in our earning ability. ABS 2016 statistics state that full-time earnings in Australia averaged $78,832 per year. Based on these numbers, the price tag of our collective inequality looks like this:
Female One salary – less $15,766.40
Female Two salary – less $15,766.40
For our household, that means that every year, we’re $31,532.80 behind. That’s not unconscious, that’s appalling.
If we look back at the last 50 years, It’s easy to misconstrue the glacial shift as progress and so what if it is. It’s not enough. In the 1980’s, women were earning approximately 40 cents less in every dollar than their male counterparts. Fast forward to today and here we are earning a whole 20 cents less. It’s taken 30 years to earn an extra 20 cents, so hang in there vaginas of the world – by 2050, you may be equal but also near the end of your earning career.