The Trouble With (Paying) Women
NS May 20th, 2009
Further to yesterday’s post, I’m offering up my thoughts on part two of The Trouble With Working Women, which aired last night on BBC2. Entitled “Why can’t a woman earn as much as a man?” it tried to find an explanation for the pay gap (currently at 17% in the UK) by interviewing various people and exploring various theories about the “choices” that women make that result in lower status and earnings in the workplace.
Ah, yes. Choices. Women and all of their darn, conflated CHOICES. If I was to drink a shot of alcohol every time that word was bandied about in this type of discussion I’d be doing a Nicholas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas right about now, wandering around the supermarket in a drunken haze, slurring and hiccuping while piling dozens of bottles of Russian vodka into my trolley with merry abandonment.
“What about choices,” you ask? Oh, wherever shall I start? How about with the economist, Dr. Shackleton, who says towards the end of the program that, really, women have made the choice to take lower-level jobs and gone into traditionally female-dominated fields like teaching, nursing and the public sector (which are badly paid) because they get a greater sense of satisfaction out of those roles or because they provide women with the most flexibility. Thefore, according to his astonishingly arrogant and illogical theory, we have effectively made the choice to receive less pay than men.
Clank, clank went my vodka bottle.
After he and the male presenter smugly patted themselves on the back for discovering this phenomenon and solving all our lady angst, they trotted out the arguments always used to defend unequal pay: “But men work more hours than women and don’t take ‘breaks’ to raise children and so they have more experience and are more valuable than women as a whole and (insert more inane myth-spouting here), etc..” Yeah, let me tell you something about those two hours a week that women aren’t in the office when men are. They spend it picking up and dropping off kids, attending appointments and meetings associated with their care or education, doing the shopping, cooking, cleaning and helping with homework. In all, women do about 20 hours of unpaid work for domestic and childcare-related duties each week; men do fewer than 10 on average. 20-10 = 10 hours difference in time spent on household chores, minus 2 hours less at the office, which still equals 8 hours more work per week than men, and unpaid to boot. The fact is, women are doing more work than men, not less. It’s just that domestic labour is not considered “real work” and therefore not taken into account. And as for the patronising drivel that women actively choose roles that pay less because they are more “fulfilling”….well, I think you can see why my vodka bottle was raised again.
Let’s go back a bit now while I digest this potent potato juice.
Towards the beginning of the show we met some of the female machinists at Ford in Dagenham who went on strike in 1968 over pay inequalities between them and male machinists doing similarly skilled work. Even though production at the plant was severely affected and upper management held many ‘talks’ with these ladies in which they promised to increase their pay, it took 16 years and another major strike before they got it. Shameful.
Even more shameful is the present-day situation at Bolton Council, amongst others. Dozens of women who are or were employed by the council are banding together in a class action lawsuit, demanding compensation and redress of the pay discrepancies between them and men of the same skill level. Apparently, what the council had been doing was hiring them in on the same pay but then giving the men “bonuses” that were anywhere between 50-120% of their salary. Clever move on the part of the council, I must say. They thought they’d found a loophole so they could keep screwing women over without getting caught. And now that they have been caught and were told to pay back wages to all its female employees, they’re claiming that there’s just not enough money in their coffers to do so and that it wouldn’t be “fair” to the taxpaying citizens to raise the funds through tax increases. Fair?! FAIR?!! What part of FAIR is screwing women and their families out of hundreds of thousands of pounds over a woman’s working life? £369,000 to be exact. Because that’s how much a woman who works full time can expect to lose out on over the course of her career, due simply to being female. It’s absolutely outrageous and nothing a pompous economist can say will make me think it’s okay or fair, or somehow our own CHOICE.
And…swig. This drinking game is intense!
Another possible explanation we see given in the program is that men are just better at negotiating salary and payrises than women. This might be true in some cases, certainly, because women are taught to be grateful and ‘nice’ as opposed to assertive and selfish (in the good sense of the word — looking out for oneself over others), but it doesn’t account for such huge wage differences as 17%. Besides which, even if women weren’t demanding higher salaries, why is it still okay for businesses to screw them over — just because they can? Why is the onus on women to demand better ethical behaviour from the companies and catch them out instead of on businesses to treat woman as human beings when hiring and paying them?
The icing on the cake was the two presenters at the end discussing their findings and mulling over what it all means, to the strains of violins and laughing children in the background. Sophie, the female presenter, asked some good questions but in the end she just nodded and smiled when jerkface Justin told her that despite all of these pesky pay issues, women lead “richer lives” for being given so many CHOICES (dear god, make it stop!) and for being more involved with their children. Yes, Justin, tell that to the single mother raising three kids and struggling to make ends meet who finds out she’s been getting screwed out of a substantially better paycheque for doing the same work as her male colleagues over the years. I’m sure she’ll just smile and look wistfully into the distance while she muses over how very RICH her life is because of the CHOICE she made to get paid less because she has a uterus.
Unsurprisingly, I say to him: FUCK YOU.
The most sensible and intelligent comment came, not surprisingly, from Minister for Women and Equality, Harriet Harman. She said there is one (and only one) explanation for the disparity between men and women’s wages and it is this: institutional discrimination. You can dress it up in bows, make it into a jigsaw puzzle, a maze, a juggling act, a glass ceiling or any other silly euphemism but the plain and ugly truth is that discrimination against women is so deeply ingrained in so many areas of society and by so many people that all of the documentaries and focus groups and angry blog posts (I’m pretty sure this would count) in the world won’t change working women’s plight.
Until we stop asking that stupid question: “Can women have it all?” and instead start asking “Why do women have to do it all?” we’re infinitely, indefinitely screwed. And I will be drinking vodka for a long, long time to come.
