[m2c] Why You Will Be Paid Less Than Your Contemporary Male Graduates

[usman x]

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=91&ItemID=7662

Why You Will Be Paid Less Than Your Contemporary Male Graduates, Regardless
Of Your Degree Classification, Skills And Experience.

by Catherine Hodgson; April 18, 2005

So, you’ve applied for your ideal job. You sweat over the application and
covering letter, and when the deadline passes – ‘We would like to invite you
to an interview. This is the second round of the application process.’
Preparing and presenting yourself well, you perform to the best of your
abilities. And the next you hear? ‘Congratulations. We would like to inform
you that you have been successful in applying for the position of “ideal
 job”. Welcome to the organisation.’ Even if you have landed your ideal job,
how much you will be paid is still likely to be of your first questions.
Naturally, how much pay matters to you is completely idiosyncratic.
Fundamentally, for all employees in a democratic system, the only
requirement of a wage is that it pays all workers doing the same job the
same amount. But regardless of the welcome bonus, pension package or
discount dental care, a survey conducted by Labour Force shows that in
countless cases this doesn’t happen. Since the starting salary for female
graduates across all professions is on average £12,584 – over £2000 lower
than the comparable £14,768 of their male counterparts - whether you will be
paid equally to your colleagues depends on your gender.

According to career advice from Monster, female graduates should expect
their salaries to catch up with men in the same positions within the first
few years of working life. But only temporarily: the gap will widen once
again, to an even greater extent than before. After 13 years of full-time
employment, working women will earn on average £9000 less than men doing the
same job.

This inequality is excused on two counts: the first, concerning the lower
starting salary, is that more women enter poorly paid areas of work than men
do. The second, with regards to a lower and slower salary climb later on, is
that women themselves impede their salary progress by taking career breaks
to raise families. But why are women consistently entering the more poorly
paid professions, frequently associated with lack of skills and education,
when female graduates are in plentiful possession of both? And just because
a woman takes, on average, less than a year off work now to raise her
children, why does this necessitate up to a £9000 salary deficit once she
returns, and a substantial gap that will never be closed years later?

In the second question lays the key to a Pandora’s Box of gender-based
inequality issues facing today’s women. Basic salary rates are just one of
the instances where females face economic discrimination.

Neither male nor female employees who take a career break should expect to
waltz straight back into the position they held before leaving the
organization. Undeniably, women who take time away from work can impede the
company or institution’s productivity and/or profit margins on their return,
if they are not up-to-date with the current job requirements. But with 67%
of women returning to work within a year of maternity leave, does it really
justify a considerably lower wage more than 13 years later? This sum implies
that it costs the industry around £100,000 for every woman who takes
whatever little time off to have a child. What about the women who return to
work a few weeks after birth? Or those who never even have children? By
paying a female graduate a lower starting salary, she is being treated as a
stay-at-home mother before she has even considered the possibility of a
family.

It is almost as if the Equal Pay act of 1970 was a fleeting legislation
brought into silence the first-wave feminists. Today, if the government does
not wish to discriminate against new female workers, then it should
implement a scheme by which all women are paid equal until the day they
choose to leave work to have children. The returning wage will then be
assessed according to the amount of time taken off, and the money needed to
re-train female workers, or to make up the profit or production lost during
their hiatus. In the pre-Budget speech, Gordon Brown emphasised that
childcare and working parents are priorities for the Labour government. The
national minimum income guarantee for a couple with one earner and one child
will rise to £258 a week, and £199 a week for a single parent with one
child. This is equivalent to £12 per hour. About 250,000 single parents will
be offered a £40-a-week bonus in their first year of returning to work.
Finally, Labour pledges that the proportion of childcare costs parents can
claim will rise from 70 per cent to 80 per cent from April 2006. All credit
to Labour, should these changes be implemented. However, although ‘childcare
’ may strictly refer to the amount charged by the nanny/nursery where you
leave your children during working hours, what about the cost of ‘family
care’? By this I mean the services which have to be paid to allow a woman to
work in the first place. This expenditure includes: cleaners, gardeners,
shopping delivery services, presents for the family and friends who help
with childcare, sports and clubs for children whilst women work and
‘guilt-treats’ to appease their own anxiety because they do not have enough
quality time with their children. According to a survey conducted by British
Gas in 2003, 2.3 million of working mothers had less than 10% of their
salaries left after all this family maintenance. According to the Guardian
article which reported further statistics, of the women surveyed, ‘Four in
10 had full-time jobs and the remainder had part-time jobs – but of the
part-time workers, 60% had two jobs. Some 89% of those questioned said they
never spent their wages on themselves.’ Yes, (in most circumstances)
individuals choose to sacrifice their single or childless couple’s wage to
start a family, and once they have children, we, and the parents themselves,
should expect their children’s needs to come first. But to be left with mere
‘pocket money’ to spend on yourself when you are working so many hours to
keep career and family in orbit is demoralising; it begs the question, why
bother returning to work at all if your status as a working mother is
insulted by such a paltry financial return?

But to return to Labour’s proposed legislation. Is this increased income for
working parents a ‘feminist’ pledge from the government? The cynics amongst
us might read this as Labour’s plan to boost the economy by maximising the
number of workers at any time, and the party’s bid to win over female voters
in particular before the next election. If the government is really so eager
to encourage and to support working mothers, it needs to do more than
provide a short-term financial fix, and the later pay gap and pension
shortfall need to be redressed too. Perhaps the £40-a-week bonus Labour plan
to introduce will ‘justify’ the pay gap later on. After all, from the
Treasurer’s point of view, the money to support all those single parents
wriggling back into the workforce has to come from somewhere


In spite of these setbacks, many women do choose to work, regardless of the
problems they face with family care and finance. But for many, leaving the
day job and returning home is not finishing work. When Naomi Wolf published
her book, ‘The Beauty Myth’ in 1991, she described a phenomenon known as
“The Second Shift”. She was referring to the unpaid, domestic labour a woman
returns home to begin, having finished her waged job. Fourteen years later,
there has been a slow decline in the number of women doing the majority of
the household’s housework. According to a poll conducted by the University
of Ulster in 2004, two thirds of women still do the majority of domestic
chores, with the average working woman spending seventeen hours per week on
housework, in comparison with the average man who invests just six. Better
than nothing. But 85% of women do all the laundry, and one in five men
admits to doing nothing at all around the house. ‘Housework’ here does not
include childcare either, the majority of which still falls to women (unless
a family pays for a nanny. And this is a privilege only an elite minority
can afford).

Let’s presume though, that the majority of women are prepared to accept a
lower wage and longer ‘working’ hours, and live accordingly. Is it cheaper
to live as a woman? In a few instances, yes. Women can buy lower-priced,
gender-specific car insurance since statistically they cause fewer
accidents. Arguably (at least according to my father, brother and male
friends) women can find desirable, cheaper clothes more easily. To a
traditional viewpoint, the reason women’s clothes are often cheaper is
because women are more interested in fashion. Consequently we have a supply
and demand situation, where designers, manufacturers and retailers are
simply providing a competitive consumer market with much more than it needs
and so prices are chopped in the competition for sales.

However, it’s worth considering why a woman feels she needs so many
different outfits. Most women have a ‘working’ wardrobe which is separate to
their out-of-hours clothing or dress wear. The same goes for men. But in
contrast to most men’s work clothes consisting of a few suits, shirts and
ties, women require suits, separates, coordinating shoes, tights, the right
underwear, jewellery, make-up etc. etc. The list is endless. To look
‘acceptable’, women have to invest more in their appearances than men do.

And not only do they spend more money, but minutes too. Naomi Wolf refers to
this as ‘The Third Shift’. In ensuring an acceptable professional
appearance, women have to put in ‘overtime’ both before and after work when
the beauty regimes of body and hair priming, eg manicuring, tanning,
buffing, haircuts – and the most time-consuming of all – exercise – must be
done. This is not to deny that the workplace and modern life do not require
certain standards of appearance and physical form from men. But the
standards for women exceed these in duration, cost and the level of
perfection expected.

Judging by this rather pessimistic picture of a working woman’s life, why
bother? Well, retirement and a pension of course: the financial reward for
all her pains. Unfortunately the current pension situation is only likely to
further women’s hardship on retirement. Our parents have already been warned
that the state pension system is unlikely to pay out, and are taking steps
to bump up their retirement income by investing in private plans. If you
have given this any thought, you will have probably realised that today’s
younger generation will be doing the same. But irrespective of this, we
still hope to be able to claim a sizeable sum of our income from the state.
However, if you’d hoped that the treatment of working men and women here
would be equal, you need to reconsider.

Female pensioners are notoriously one of the poorest social groups in
Britain today, with 1 in 4 hitting the government’s poverty line. This
generation of men and women made up the families of the 40s and 50s, when
women’s liberation and equal workers’ rights were but a twinkle in their
new-born offsprings’ eye. Many only worked part-time, if at all. (This, of
course, overlooks the fact that many women were employed in full-time unpaid
jobs as housewives and mothers.) Having paid no National Insurance
contributions, around 90% cannot claim full state pension. Arguably, these
women did not contribute to the economy, trade and the professions to the
same extent as working men – but naturally, without their contribution to
domestic life, men would not have been able to work everyday in the way they
did.

Current female pensioners can claim from their husband’s NI contributions –
which gives them a weekly income of £47.65 a week, in comparison with the
full rate of £79.60. BUT an unemployed man is entitled to exactly the same
amount, even though his wife probably carried out the majority of domestic
duties. Currently, she receives just £28.50 for her efforts. Widows can
claim their late husband’s pension but what about separated, divorced or
abandoned women?

The average working woman’s pension stands at £212 a week. The average
pension for a non-working man is £191. This very small gap screams of the
vast inequality in how our current pension system treats men and women.

And what about our generation? To receive the full state pension, you need
to have worked 44 years. You qualify as having worked for every week you
earn just over £79. One year worked equals one year of some rate of state
pension. Previously every year a woman looked after a child, she lost a year
of pension. This has been changed. Now, a woman can claim pension for the
years spent at home provided she also worked 20 years in paid employment. On
average though, no matter how hard a woman struggles with juggling work,
then motherhood, and then a combination, she will still end up being paid
less for her working life by the state upon retirement. With a lower income,
how will she be able to fund an adequate private plan? This begs the
question, why consider employment at all? When a woman who has worked
receives just £21 more a week than a man who has never bothered, why should
she?

This is not just a discriminatory anachronism, relevant only to an older
generation. Unless the new batch of graduates challenges the system, they
too might as well reconcile themselves to a frighteningly similar fate.

The current wage system supports the institution of marriage and
heterosexual relationships. It does not support working women’s rights. It
does not support childless women’s rights. It does not support independent
women’s rights. It decrees that, in the majority of instances, women wanting
a standard of living equivocal to current societal levels of comfort must
seek a male partner to help supplement their income.

It is our responsibility as the post-sex-discrimination, equal opportunities
generation, to continue the progression of women’s rights. Whilst ever women
are paid less for doing the same jobs as men, we are condoning the labour
market’s treatment of women as second-class citizens. With the western
working culture showing no signs of slowing down, the work place becomes
perhaps the most crucial arena for equal rights. If we accept that women are
generally paid less for every single job they do, we might as well condemn
women as being good for nothing bar reproductive and domestic duties.
Admittedly there are more well-paid professional women than ever before. But
as long as a porn star or prostitute can earn more than a health educator,
research scientist or member of parliament, we are rewarding women for
perfecting their pouts over training their brains.

Clearly, the issue of women’s working rights during all stages of their
lives is a complex, multi-pronged problem. Yet, currently, the state refuses
to provide available, adequately-funded childcare for those women willing to
earn a living, be it porn star or MP. It also refuses to support women
adequately in old age, ignoring any contributions they made to the economy,
pre-retirement. Whichever party takes over government at the next election,
it needs to recognize that not one of the issues mentioned above can be
overlooked, if it is to act in the interests of more than half the British
population.

But it is also women’s responsibility to ask for equal working conditions if
they believe in their own equal rights. We live in a democracy, with the
freedom to ask for what is fair. And if nothing else, we should honour the
memory of women that suffered greater inequality before us. The suffragettes
campaigned so tirelessly, and at such risk to their own lives to give women
the vote. It is a slight to them if modern women merely shrug their
shoulders when the man sat on the desk opposite receives an extra £50 a
week, for no better reason than the sheer fortune of his gender.


---------------------
Prospero, you are the master of illusion.
Lying is your trademark.
And you have lied so much to me
(lied about the world, lied about me)
that you have ended by imposing on me
an image of myself.
underdeveloped, you brand me, inferior,
That ís the way you have forced me to see myself
I detest that image!  What's more, it's a lie!
But now I know you, you old cancer,
and I know myself as well.
- Caliban, in Aime Cesaire's "The Tempest"
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