Women, work and worth
Forget the three Rs, let’s look at the three Ws: Women, work and worth
By the time you read this, women in Canada will be effectively working for free compared to their male co-workers.
How is that possible? Well, the wage gap between women and men sits around 30 per cent. With the lower wages, from a time-based point of view, the period between fall’s arrival and the end of the year means women work for free.
The Canadian Women’s Foundation released some dismaying statistics this week on the inadequate remuneration women’s work receives. Take a look:
It doesn’t matter how you measure it – by pay rate (hourly, weekly, annually), by time worked (part-time, full-time), by kind of work (same, similar, or value), women’s pay packets are lower than men’s.
It matters who you represent as a woman: Statistics Canada says “Indigenous women face a 57 per cent gender pay gap, women with disabilities face a 46 per cent gap, immigrant women face a 39 per cent gap, and racialized women face a 32 per cent gap.”
It doesn’t matter how old you are, what your level of education is, what amount of money you earn, or where your job is, women are paid less than men everywhere.
Deloitte LLP analyzed the wage gap in 2016 for the Ontario Ministry of Labour. The research concluded that the wage gap for women means $18 billion in “foregone income.” For Ontario, the equivalent value is 2.5 per cent of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
I don’t know about you, but $18 billion in foregone income is quite a chunk of change. On top of being underpaid by vast amounts, there is the knowledge women still do a fair bit of volunteer work in their communities and carry out significant labour in the home with housework and child care.
My past two columns have looked at why and how we know what we know, in response to Pam Hall’s “Towards an Encyclopedia of Local Knowledge.” I’ve talked about how valuing local knowledge is integral to developing effective public policy. Hall’s book looks at different kinds of knowledge and she clearly notes the limitation of her work to date in representing indigenous knowledge. In recognizing this gap, Hall opens the door to future work from those communities we have here in Newfoundland and Labrador.
Today though, I think it is important to consider who creates this knowledge from a gendered point of view. Hall documents a variety of activities most frequently performed by women, and occasionally men: salting and drying fish, hooking mats, preserving foods, knitting mitts, socks and sweaters, picking berries and other wild foods, creating and nurturing a garden, fresh processing fish, tanning skins, butchering meats, making and repairing nets, baking bread, tarts and biscuits, and sewing quilts plain, crazy, starred and striped.
It all seems basic until you look at it closely. If you don’t salt and dry fish properly, it will spoil. If the fish spoils, then the season’s catch is worthless. If there’s no saleable fish, what will keep the family going? If you don’t know what to pick and when, how will you get ready for the winter and spring when fresh foods are scanty? Long before deep freezers, women were bottling moose and wild sea birds. They were managing root cellars, organizing their preserving pantries, and innovating solutions to keep food fresh and safe when either the root cellar or the bottle didn’t suit.
So much of this work is in the background, you don’t really notice it until it is gone. And when women are the ones primarily responsible for it, attaching a value to it becomes challenging. No one balks at paying several thousand dollars for a dory, but charge $600 to $1000 for a handmade quilt and all of a sudden the discussion turns to price gouging.
So it is in the workplace. The wage gap supports systemic sexism and send the message that women’s contributions aren’t as important as men’s. We cannot continue to develop policy and programs that treat women’s work as invisible or unimportant and we cannot continue to expect women to absorb the costs of sexism.