It’s no longer a man’s world. We don’t need the National Women’s Council

THE simple answer to the question posed by the National Women’s Council of Ireland as to whether women are “bearing the brunt” of the recession is “No”.

Men are “bearing the brunt” of the recession. Bearing the Brunt? Women and the Recession, a TASC document by Pauline Conroy and Ursula Barry, launched with the NWCI and the Equality Authority this week, includes employment statistics for men and women across different age groups. Women’s employment has dropped five points, from 60.8% of the workforce to 55%, since 2007, while men’s employment has dropped 14 points, from 77.1% to 63.3%.

It’s not a competition. Women’s and men’s lives are so interconnected that it’s hard to know where the “brunt” begins and ends. If he loses his job, does he bear the brunt or does she? Anyway, the young are the big losers in this recession. But if one gender is of particular concern in this recession it is men: men, whose unemployment rate has soared; men, whose mental health is more likely to be intertwined with employment status.

There is no National Men’s Council. And I am beginning to wonder if there should be a National Women’s Council. I am beginning to wonder whether this might not be the moment to pause the NWCI project and ask fundamental questions about gender equality? There is a huge shake-up going on in the equality sector anyway. Both the Equality Authority and the NWCI have lost directors due to swingeing budget cuts of 43% and 38% respectively.

Richard Bruton promised, in this newspaper recently, that the Equality Authority merged with the Human Rights Commission would be “a world-class, stream-lined system” by the end of the year. The jury is very much out on this. But could not the NWCI staff bolster this new authority? Women’s employment rights have always been a large part of the work of the Equality Authority, as they have been of the NWCI.

I think it might be good for Irish feminism to have a fresh start. I don’t think the National Women’s Council is asking the right questions any more.

The NWCI was set up in 1973 as the Council for the Status of Women. Its purpose was to ensure that the findings of the Commission on the Status of Women, which were mostly about equal pay and employment rights, were seen through. It had its origins in Hilda Tweedy, in the Irish Countrywomen’s Association and the Irish Housewives’ Association, though, interestingly, the housewives are not mentioned on the NWCI website. It has been funded by government since 1979.

Thus, 1970s’ activism was crystallised and became an institution. Although the NWCI has members as diverse as the Alexandra College Guild and the Association of Teachers of Home Economics, a strong ideology runs through every report it promotes: the belief that women and men would have identical career paths if patriarchy did not get in the way.

Conroy and Barry show a 10-point differential in the employment rates of men and women with children, and describe the gap as “the result of historical disadvantage and cultural differences”.

This is ideology, not reality. You would have to have tunnel-vision not to see that many women want to interrupt their careers when they have children. This is not surprising, considering how close they are to fore mothers whose children would not have survived without them. Thankfully, that is no longer the case in this part of the world. But women’s desire to be with their children is often overwhelming.

FEWER men prioritise time with their children, but those who do face great obstacles, notably the expectation that they will bring home the bacon. An expectation that is often shared by the mother of their children.

So, who faces the biggest challenge in expressing themselves as parents, men or women? Is this another competition? Caring is always portrayed as a penance by the NWCI, never a choice. “Women bear a disproportionate responsibility for childcare and caring work within families in Ireland,” sighs their submission on the Constitutional Convention.

While it is true that women’s caring role and time-out of the workforce cause most of the “gender pay gap” — the ERSI found only 5% was “unexplained” by the 1990s — it is open to question whether that role is “disproportionate”. Maybe the only problem is the disproportionate cost to the women in question? Ireland’s pay gap has been closing quickly since the recession, by the way, and Barry and Conroy show it at 8.3%. We are fairly average in EU pay-gap terms, while an EU Commission pay-gap map on the NWCI website shows some countries with extensive parental leaves, such as Germany and Austria, scoring worst.

Are the mothers who can afford to take those long leaves luckier than us, because they have more time off, or unluckier than us, because they are paid less than men? Shouldn’t we be asking questions like this? All over the world, enlightened thinkers are calling for a “quality of life” index to replace GDP and GNP.

How would Irish men, who have relatively little contact with their children and their communities, and whose lives are shorter than women’s by five years, fare in such an index?

But the NWCI does not ask these questions. Instead, it makes dogmatic statements, like this one from their submission on the new, merged Equality Commission: “Women’s unpaid, informal caring responsibilities are arguably the most significant factor that reinforces and reproduces women’s subordination in society.”

The NWCI’s submission to the Constitutional Convention opens with director Orla O’Connor’s alarmist comment that “since the 1937 Constitution was drafted, women in Ireland have lived under the shadow of its sexist and reductionist language and philosophy”. Quite clearly, the reference in article 41 to women’s “life in the home” being protected from economic necessity is out of date; but to call it “sexist” is anachronistic. Dev was influenced by the feminist writer Ivy Pinchbeck, who chronicled the exhaustion of mothers working in factories.

There are still issues specific to women which must be faced in this society, most notably abortion, but most of them have their own advocacy groups. Nearly every goal of the 1970s feminists has been reached and I question whether the State should still be funding an advocacy agency for women because they are women.

However, in the developing world, we still need women to be educated and enabled to control their fertility and to farm land on their own terms. It is there that women’s rights activists should focus their attention, rather than endlessly drawing circles around our decreasing “gender pay gap”.

Who the hell am I to make such a suggestion? I’ll tell you who I am. I’m a woman.