Women will continue to be poor if society only focuses on paid work

The size of the pay gap seems to have very little to do with the level of development of the countries involved, writes Victoria White

IT’S NOT often we read pure rubbish on the front page of the Irish Examiner. But I am forced to admit that this is what happened last Saturday. I was skipping through all that boring newsy stuff and about to get tucked into an interview with Kevin Barry when my eyes were arrested by the banner headline over a report by our trusty Europe correspondent, Ann Cahill: ‘Pay gap: women work for two months for free’.

Did you ever hear such nonsense in the whole of your life? Women do not work two months for free. If they have children, in Ireland and in much of the western world, they work at least a decade for free.

Half the women in Ireland have spent most of their adult lives working for free. These facts make a mockery of 40 years of feminism.

Eurostat has just done another tot-up of the gap between the earning power of men and women in the EU. These show a gap of 14% between what men earn and what women earn in this country. Cahill notes that “these latest shocking figures have drawn criticism from the National Women’s Council, which has been campaigning for decades to narrow the gap between the pay that men and women receive for work of equal value”.

She notes that our wage gap is 2% narrower than the EU average which is 16%. What she doesn’t say is that the size of the pay gap seems to have very little to do with the level of development of the countries, or with the success of their equality agenda.

Who are the pay gap stars in the Eurostat figures? Poland at 6.4%. Italy at 7.3%. Malta at 5.1%.

I have seen and heard chauvinist attitudes in all of these three countries; I have lived in Italy and sorry, Italians, it is a less equal society for women than Ireland is.

These comparative figures are misleading. Sometimes they measure the poor level of men’s pay. There are highly developed countries with relatively narrow pay gaps: Luxembourg (8.6%) and Belgium (9.8%), for instance.

But most of the countries which we admire for the high quality of their social services and strong equality measures have bigger pay gaps than we do: Austria, 23%; France, 19.3%; Finland, 18.7%; UK, 19.7%; Iceland, 20.5%; Sweden, 15.2%; Norway, 16%.

Looks like we’ll have to stop using the gender pay gap as an indicator of women’s wellbeing, doesn’t it? Looks like we’re going to have to start looking at the facts of women’s lives rather than concocting a politically correct fantasy.

In highly developed countries with good social services, the pay gap between men and women will widen because mothers will exercise the choice to down-shift and focus on family.

Sweden, continually held out as a paragon of equality has, according to UK economist Catherine Hakim, the highest level of occupational segregation in the developed world. Put simply, the men do different jobs than the women. This is because down-shifted jobs are available to women and they can afford to take them. Also, Sweden’s system makes it virtually impossible to stay outside paid employment by withholding benefit and pension rights. If you want to rear your own kids, the only option is a family-friendly job. Very often, Swedish women end up providing care services for others which in Ireland might be provided by women to their own families.

The country with the lowest level of occupational segregation in the world is China. The US, with poor access to leave and to part-time jobs, has much higher numbers of women in top jobs than the Nordic countries. In other words, the best way to get women to work the way men do is to force them. Offer them pay to stay home with small children, as happens in Finland, Norway, and France, and the pay gap widens.

Ann Cahill reports that the European Commission places the blame for the pay gap in EU countries “squarely on the shoulders of EU countries’ governments, saying there are laws in place but they are not being enforced”.

Sounds like they want to send us off to full-time jobs at gunpoint. They add that Ireland needs to provide better childcare which nobody would dispute. But get this into your collective heads: The availability of childcare is not the main predictor of women’s employment status in any country.

To prove this you have to perform a very technical exercise of great complexity. You have to look at the countries with good childcare services and see if their pay gap is narrower. It isn’t. Countries with enviable childcare services from France to Finland have bigger wage gaps than ours because they commit the sin of offering women the choice to stay home while their children are young, at least part-time. And this widens the pay gap.

The availability of childcare is not even a good predictor of whether women will work outside the home or not. When the ERSI studied this issue in 2000, they found the effects of childcare “are not as great as expected” in Ireland.

Catherine Hakim quotes research which showed universal free childcare only increased the number of women in work by 10% when provided in the US. She compares France, Germany, and the UK, with vastly different childcare provisions but similar labour force engagement by women; and then there is Portugal, with poor childcare provision, high levels of female employment and a gender pay gap in 2013 of just 13%.

The gender pay gap is a misleading lens through which to look at women’s welfare because it is focused only on paid work which is a small part of many women’s lives.

According to the ERSI, nearly all of the pay gap in Ireland is due to the amount of time women are out of the workforce rearing their families. Women without children actually earn 17% more than men.

If we want to close the pay gap, we have two choices: Force women into full-time paid work soon after the birth of their children and keep them there; or reward women for the work they do outside the workplace. It is conservatively calculated as accounting for between a third and half of GDP. Yet we continue to punish women who do this work. Joan Burton justified cutting the pension entitlements of people with fewer than 40 PRSI credits a year — mostly women who had worked in the home — with the words, “those who pay more benefit more”.

As long as we continue with the madness of economic measurements which see a carer in an orphanage as a worker, but a woman caring for her own children as a mere “housewife”, the pay gap will yawn at us from the statistics. And women will continue to be poor because they care.

The size of the pay gap seems to have very little to do with the level of development of the countries involved