Page 2795 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 6 October 2021
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the number of children a woman has increases. Lower wages for mothers may be related to reduced working time, employment in more family-friendly jobs which tend to be lower paying, hiring and promotion decisions that penalise the careers of mothers, and a lack of programs to support women’s return to work after time out of the labour market.
There are also discriminatory hiring practices and promotion decisions that prevent women from gaining leadership roles and highly paid positions that sustain the gender pay gap. We also see that migrant women in particular are over-represented in the informal sector and around the globe. There will be a lot of domestic workers, cafe staff and other roles that women fill. These jobs are often informal and fall outside the domains of labour laws, trapping employees in low-paying, unsafe working environments, without social benefits, and further perpetuating the gender pay gap for women working in these conditions.
Lastly, another key cause of the gender pay gap’s persistence is women’s over-representation in unpaid work in addition to their paid work. UN Women Australia report that women do three times as much care and domestic work as men, globally. This includes household tasks such as cooking, cleaning, household errands, and taking care of children and the elderly. An almost inconceivable amount of capital is produced daily from this work—work without which none of us would be able to survive. It is therefore extraordinary, but predictable, that this labour is both socially and fiscally undervalued.
The gender pay gap impacts not only on women’s daily lived experience. In Australia, the amount of money a person earns over their lifetime directly correlates to their financial outcomes in retirement; that is, quality of life in retirement is explicitly linked to how much money you earn throughout your career. According to Australian Super, women retire with 42 per cent less super than men on average. Many factors influence this outcome, but the gender pay gap remains a very large one and perhaps the most significant.
As noted earlier, industries with a predominantly female workforce will pay workers significantly less, on average, compared to industries with a predominantly male workforce. An early childhood educator will accrue a lot less super than a construction worker. Their contribution to the economy is equal, but at the end of the day the early childhood educator has the double whammy of less pay from week to week and less superannuation on retirement. Consequently, Australian women are made to disproportionately rely on the inadequate public pensions provided by the commonwealth. In fact, as of June 2021, approximately 60 per cent of the 25,000 people reliant on the age pension in the ACT were women.
We know that women perform a much larger share of unpaid labour in our society—child care, domestic chores and other caring tasks. This means that they are again expending their labour not only without pay but also without superannuation. When women take parental leave—and it is still usually women who do take parental leave—they miss out on superannuation. I note that there are advances in the number of men taking parental leave in lieu of their partners. This is great, but there is a long way to go.
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