Society still favours men over women
ACROSS the globe women earn less than men do and according to the Less Than 100 popup project in Pittsburgh, US, this is a problem. As a way of creating awareness of this discrepancy they have come up with a way to restore equality not by changing what women earn, but by changing how far their earnings go – at the store women pay less than men do. By engaging in price discrimination based on gender they seek to create equality through buying power.
It’s a powerful and tangible example. In the state of Pennsylvania women, on average, earn 76 percent of what men do. At the Pittsburgh pop-up shop women therefore pay 24 percent less than men.
While the project is a great initiative in terms of creating awareness of the earning differential, attempting to restore equality by changing prices is misleading in terms of what is actually causing the problem. The store makes one economic mistake that changes the dynamics and the integrity of the debate around equality; it confuses wage gap with wage discrimination.
Let’s take the South African workforce as an example. According to 2013 South African Revenue Service data, women on average earn 28 percent less than men. But does this mean that equality would be reached if women paid 28 percent less for goods and services than men do? No.
Wage discrimination
Gender wage discrimination occurs when a man and a woman in the same job holding the same education earn different amounts. The gender wage gap however, takes into account all jobs, skill sets, and personal choices and shows the difference between what the average man and woman earns. In most families women still assume the role as the primary caretaker of children, often sacrificing their potential earnings to do so. This difference is captured in the wage gap.
Price discrimination would be appropriate if it was wage discrimination driving the difference between men and women’s earnings. But it is not. Wage discrimination does occur in South Africa but it is categorically illegal and not as common as the wage gap suggests.
Excluding personal choices of whether to work or not, the problem in South Africa is that men have better access to higher paying jobs than women do. In lower income brackets, men and women on average earn about the same.
But as the income bracket rises the difference between men and women starts to grow. In 2013 only 306 women earned R5 million or more per year. In contrast, 3031 men fell into this category. The wage gap between men and women does not apply to the majority of the workforce and only starts to take effect in the top 5 percent of income earners. This is where mixing wage discrimination and the wage gap can be misleading.
In South Africa, however there is another problem. While earnings may be similar among men and women for most of the workforce, this is not true for the entire population when including those who do not work. In the fourth quarter of 2014, unemployment among women was 26.6 percent while among men it was only 22.4 percent.
South Africa’s laws protect employees from blatant gender discrimination, but society is still structured around a system that offers more opportunities to men than it does to women.