and ain't I a woman?: Still fighting for equal pay
Thirty-two years after Australian law first demanded equal pay for equal work, women are still receiving just two-thirds the average weekly pay of men. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, in November women workers took home just 66.7% of the average male pay packet. This figure has not changed much for a decade.
Before 1969, differential pay rates were justified on the basis that women didn't "need" as much money as men. This was based on the assumption that women's primary role was in the home — caring for children, looking after the sick, cooking and cleaning. While men's wages were the "breadwinner's" wages, women were assumed to either be single and preparing for marriage, or to be wives supplementing their husband's income.
While cases of women being paid less money than a male co-worker doing exactly the same job are now rare, women are still actually receiving much less money in the hand every week than men — because women's role in the family, and sexist attitudes flowing from it, still disadvantage them in the work place.
The single biggest contributor to the gender pay gap is women's concentration in part-time work. Tax rebates introduced last year benefited most of all families with one parent working part-time or not at all.
In a speech delivered at the Liberal Party Women's Policy conference on April 11, Prime Minister John Howard argued that most women want to combine home-work and part-time paid work. He accused his feminist critics of ignoring women's desire to spend more time at home and avoid the "double-burden" of a stressful career and unpaid housework. According to the ABS, 20% of women part-time workers would prefer full-time work.
But Howard has gone a long way to increasing the "double-burden". Since 1996 childcare has skyrocketed in price and decreased in quality. Women still do an average of 35 hours a week of unpaid domestic work, as opposed to 10 hours for men.
With strong financial and social pressure pushing women towards part-time work, it is impossible to claim from these statistics, as Howard does, that women are just happier in part-time work.
Without access to full-time work, and childcare, many women have little or no financial independence. Howard's "perfect" family, dependent on one-and-a-half wage, with the woman receiving the half, condemns many women to staying in unhappy relationships, because they have no comfortable financial alternative.
A far better approach would be to lower the average working week to 35 hours for both men and women, with no loss in total take-home pay — combined with the social provision of childcare, care for the elderly and sick.
Even women who work full-time, earn less than men. According to the ABS, women who work full-time earn 84.3% of average male full-time workers' earnings, excluding overtime. Since women are twice as likely as men to work unpaid overtime, but half as likely to work paid overtime, this figure underestimates the disparity.
Women are less likely to get basic conditions than men — sick leave, holiday leave, holiday loading, flexi-time or rostered days off. They are more likely to be casual employees. While, according to the ABS, more female workers than male workers had had extra duties added to their job from November 2000-November 2001, less had been promoted.
The March 28 NSW librarians' case was significant. The NSW Industrial Relations Commission ruled that librarians were underpaid in relation to similar occupations, because most librarians are women.
Unequal award wages for female-dominated professions is a major cause of women's poor pay. A 1998 case study that formed part of the librarians' evidence compared wages of geologists to librarians. It found that, at similar qualification levels, geologists were paid considerably more.
The librarians' case will hopefully set a precedent that other women workers will take up.
Women workers are still overwhelmingly concentrated in a few employment sectors. More than 50% of women workers are employed as clerical or service and retail workers. Female-dominated "professions" include teaching, childcare and nursing.
Many of these areas are associated with the work that women do in the home — cleaning, serving food, looking after children, the elderly and the sick, cutting hair and being polite to visitors.
The establishment media, governments and educational institutions tell us constantly that women enjoy doing these tasks and that they are naturally good at them. These ideas are used to justify paying women less — because even when, as in childcare, women need to get qualifications, the work is still regarded as "not that hard" for women to do.
Sexist ideas also convince many that the jobs themselves are less valuable to society than "real work" — building bridges, making cars and fixing teeth.
BY ALISON DELLIT
[The author is a member of the Democratic Socialist Party.]
From Green Left Weekly, April 24, 2002.
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