Still longing for a day when equal pay isn’t a pipedream

Jessica Munday hopes for the time she doesn’t need to mark Equal Pay Day

HAPPY Equal Pay Day to all those women in paid work out there … though it isn’t really cause for celebration. I, for one, am not proud of the fact that today, September 4, marks the date past the end of the last financial year that women have had to work in order to earn the same amount as men.

Put simply, a woman needs to work over an extra couple of months (about 14 months) to earn the same amount as a man does in 12 months. Seem fair to you? No, it doesn’t seem fair to me either.

“But our laws mean women get paid the same as men!” I hear you say. It’s a question a lot of men and women ask. How is it that in 2017 there is still such a big gap in men’s and women’s earnings?

The Women’s Gender Equality Agency is tasked with tracking Australia’s gender pay gap. They use data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics to calculate the difference between men’s and women’s average full-time weekly base earnings then express the difference as a percentage.

This year, the gender pay gap sits at 15.3 per cent. Last year it was 16.2 per cent. Unfortunately, a 0.9 percentage point drop isn’t anything to get too carried away about particularly given the gender pay gap has hovered between 15 and 19 per cent for the past 20 years.

Unions legally won the right to equal pay for work of equal value in 1972 but Australia has barely made practical headway in closing the gender pay gap for the last two decades.

There are a lot of reasons women earn less than men including (but certainly not limited too) the lack of flexibility for women to balance their work and their caring responsibilities, unconscious bias in hiring processes, outright discrimination in hiring processes and time away from the workplace due to pregnancy and parenting. Women also experience occupational segregation — that is, they are often confined to support roles in organisations — or they work in female dominated industries that are low paid.

Despite making up nearly half of the Australian workforce, women are consistently undervalued, underpaid, discriminated against and penalised for having children despite the progress in our laws around anti-discrimination and equal pay.

Take the results of a study by Cornell University in the United States. Fictitious job applications were provided to prospective employers, varying only their parental status. The study concluded that one very common life event has very different consequences on your career depending upon your gender.

You can guess that event — it’s having a baby.

Prospective employers rated mothers as less competent and committed to paid work than women who were not mothers but — and here’s the kicker — no such discrimination was experienced by fathers. In fact,

being a parent was actually a bonus for the men who were perceived as more committed to work and offered higher starting salaries if they were a father.

Outdated gender stereotypes still persist to hold women back and we’re well into the 21st century.

Equal Pay Day is a good day to reflect on how far we’ve come when it comes to women’s rights at work but also how far we’ve got to go.

There are many ways we could work towards pay equity and gender equality in our workplaces and there is not enough space here to list every single one. The union movement is certainly fighting for women, recently launching a campaign to change the rules for working women and their families. We will argue in the Fair Work Commission that all employees should be able to access part-time working hours when they have caring or parenting responsibilities and go back to their previous role when those caring responsibilities reduce or cease.

One of the things we could also do is stop undervaluing the work of women in female dominated industries. We need to push for equality in actual rates of pay for work of equal or comparable value, particularly in sectors such as disability and aged care and early childhood education.

Our early childhood educators are some of the lowest paid professionals in Australia yet they are entrusted with the most important job of educating developing hearts and minds. Some are paid as little as $20 an hour — and it isn’t a coincidence that 97 per cent of them are women.

Early childhood educators are rallying for equal pay in Hobart at 4pm on September 7 on Parliament Lawns. They are calling on the Government to fund professional pay for educators and the union movement supports them in their campaign. We hope you’ll join us.

We shouldn’t be rallying for equal pay in 2017 but we are.

I have a young daughter in primary school. And I know this — I don’t want to be marking equal pay day with her in another 20 years’ time.