Unearned privilege: Why would powerful men want to give it up? - Women's Agenda

Unearned privilege: Why would powerful men want to give it up?

Women are running neck and neck with their male counterparts in Australia’s universities. And they are dominating important professional categories. That’s the good news.

The bad news? In the high-salary stakes, any semblance of equity appears a long way off.

Roy Morgan Research reveals that over the past decade the number of Australians with a university degree jumped from 18% to 26.5%. That increase was dominated by women completing tertiary education – up from 17% in 2002 to 26% a decade later. For men the increase was solid but less spectacular – 20% to 27%.

While the proportion of men and women in the Australian workforce has barely changed over the past decade, women are advancing on the professional roles historically dominated by men.

According to a review of the 2011 Census by demographer Bernard Salt there are more than 10 million Australians in the workforce with some interesting gender splits in occupational categories.

For example 99% of Australia’s 14,105 midwives are women. And half (49%) of the 1,170 gynaecologists and obstetricians are women (up from 39% in the 2006 Census).

More than half (55%) of all veterinarians are women (up from 45% in 2006), 58% of pathologists are women (up from 48%), and 53% of paediatricians are women (up from 45%).

The bar is still dominated by men despite an increase from 22% to 29% of women barristers.

Now for the really bad news: women are dramatically underrepresented in higher income levels.

According to Roy Morgan Research, of all Australians who earn in excess of $80,000 a year, three-quarters (74%) are men and only a quarter (26%) are women. While that represents an improvement for women over the past decade, it remains deeply iniquitous.

The gains made by women are remarkable. But why is inequity so entrenched in the workplace?

According to the ABS, the proportion of women CEOs in Australia’s top 200 ASX companies has remained below 5% for the past decade.

Boards and company directors, appoint CEOs and 85% of ASX 200 board directors are men. It’s not a glass ceiling; it’s gender inertia.

Unearned advantage, the advantage of being male, is a difficult prize for men to voluntarily abandon. Regardless of how sensitive to social injustice men are, they do little to change the system of dominance, to redress the widespread disadvantage women experience throughout their lives.

It is easier to understand why some women would want to get ahead in the male system even at the cost of leaving other women behind, than it is to understand why some men would want to jettison the privileges of male supremacy. This inability or unwillingness to disadvantage themselves by dismantling systemic advantage quarantines men from needing to confront the truth that they enjoy vast privilege that is unearned.

Most countries, asserts lawyer and academic Catharine MacKinnon, proclaim a commitment to equality and yet few, if any, deliver it substantively to women. “You don’t have countries saying, ‘Yes, we have sex discrimination here and want it. We’re entitled to it and enjoy it.’ You don’t have them saying that; you have them doing it.”

Men in power simply fail to do the unthinkable: disadvantage themselves by eliminating unmerited advantage.

MacKinnon believes society so comprehensively fails to recognise the hierarchies that have subordinated women for so long they have become perceived as natural. The dominance of men over women has been, she says, accomplished socially as well as economically prior to the operation of law, as everyday life.

Is it any wonder then that despite the gains being hard-won by women themselves, the system resists their advances and refuses to advance them.

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