Opinion: the pay gap between employed mothers and fathers aged 35 to 55 is 38%, while women with children earn 17% less annually than those without
Since I wrote a year ago about gender pay gap reporting, I have noticed a subtle shift in the public conversation around gender equality. A friend recently said to me 'you're into all that gender equality stuff, aren’t you? I don’t know about all that, I think men and women have different roles in the family'.
But what do family roles have to do with the gender pay gap and why might change be seen as undesirable? In a cultural moment where 'tradwife’ trends on TikTok and voices in the ‘manosphere’ such as Andrew Tate and Ben Shapiro profess the merits of strict gender roles to young viewers, could gender equality as envisaged by a narrowed or eliminated gender pay gap actually be sliding backwards?
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From RTÉ Radio 1's News At One in 2019, Orla O'Connor from the National Women's Council of Ireland on an OECD finding that there is a high gender pay gap among degree holders
The gender pay gap is the difference between the average wage for men compared to women. In the main, it represents the tendency for jobs that women do to pay less, a shortage of women in higher-level positions and, depending on the measure used, differences in working time. There is very little difference in earnings among younger cohorts, but income starts to diverge after parenthood.
Why is this the case? Because women do, and always have done, most of the caring work. Women birth babies and pregnancy and birth are physically taxing and sometimes dangerous. Women care for new-borns and might breastfeed. Motherhood can be all-encompassing in those early years.
In the liberal feminist conversation about gender equality, it isn’t fashionable to focus on these realities. It is perhaps seen as undermining women’s ability in to excel in their work or to ‘lean in’, thereby legitimising low pay. Instead, the realities of parenthood are glossed over. TV and film media show heavily pregnant women fighting in battles, leading companies, and women with babies carrying on normal, perfectly healthy, uninterrupted lives.
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From RTÉ Radio 1's Saturday with Katie Hannon Citizens' Assembly chairperson Catherine Day, Orla O'Connor of National Women's Council of Ireland and Caitriona Lynch of Cúram on the Assembly's recommendations on gender equality
Perhaps this is possible, but it is not the experience for most. This is why there is not just a gender pay gap of 14% but a far larger parental pay gap. Using 2020 Survey on Income and Living Conditions data for Ireland, I estimated that the wage gap between employed mothers and fathers aged 35 to 55 is 38%, while women with children earn 17% less annually than those without.
Closing the gender pay gap is often framed as requiring women to work longer hours in higher paid occupations and sectors or for men to take on the caring and domestic work. To many, this seems neither desirable nor realistic. To ignore this and present the issue as a culture to be changed or a barrier to be overcome, is to risk increased scepticism about what gender equality policy is trying to achieve.
For women to work longer hours without equal male involvement would require increased childcare provision. Without improvements to the pay and working conditions of the mainly female childcare workers, this just kicks the can down the road. Policies aimed at encouraging men to take a more active role at home such as extended parental leave are positive, but for many families unpaid leave is a financial impossibility. People understand these practicalities - they live them - which is why the gender equality discourse can produce something of a collective eyeroll.
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From RTÉ News, firms with over 250 employees to report on gender pay gaps later in 2022
While there was broad support for gender pay gap initiatives in a recent survey by WorkEqual, younger men were less likely than older men to agree with gender equality. In another study by Safe Ireland , young people were found to hold more rigid views about gender roles than older cohorts. This suggests a culture shift even among those presumably yet to be impacted by the lived experience of parenthood. It also suggests the issue needs reframing.
We could start by asking why parenthood should come at a high financial cost and why that cost is borne only by women. We could ask why, when a similarly educated couple has a baby, it is the woman who is at greater risk of poverty if the relationship breaks down. We could talk about the fact that women’s working lives are impacted by their shouldering of the bulk of elder care in middle age, even if they don't have children, so whatever ambitions a young woman has for her career need to be achieved within a short window. The gender pay gap debate cannot afford to be tone deaf to class issues. Female CEOs are great, but divisions are recreated, not smashed if they need to pay their nanny below living wage to get there.
There are consequences attached to a lack of financial independence
We could ask if it is necessary for flexible jobs to come at a cost in terms of pay, job quality or opportunities for advancement. Should time out of the labour market to care for others be seen merely as a gap in a CV? Perhaps it is time to re-evaluate how we assess skills, experience, and performance so that this cost might be reduced. We could begin valuing care work as actually increasing, not reducing, competencies for both women and men.
The conversation also needs more honesty about why equal opportunities for women matter. The reality is that there are consequences attached to a lack of financial independence. The return of the "tradwife" is all well and good until the husband is controlling, abusive or the relationship ends. These might be more difficult conversations to have than stock-photo discourse about women on corporate boards, but they are the issues that really matter.
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
