If we don’t get paid the same, why should we pay the same?

This morning, on #IWD2024, I was greeted by an email offering a $20 discount on a hair serum for ‘Women’s Day’. I felt somewhat offended. Since when did the fight for equality become a sales tactic? ?

Not only did the brand fail to name the day correctly #internationalwomensday they also failed on this year’s theme to #InspireInclusion.

Offering a 12% discount to recognise the average gender pay gap across OECD countries would have been far savvier. But shouldn’t women be offered that discount every day? ?

In Australia, for every dollar on average that men earn, women earn 88 cents. That's $238 less than men each week which adds up to $12,376 over a year. Yet men pay the same for goods and services as women which effectively means men are getting a discount. ?

What if men were charged 12% more for everything they consumed?

Or companies were taxed more for paying women less?

I would imagine swift and loud aversion.

Yet, women have to accept less money for the same work as their male colleagues while paying the same price for goods and services.? For this reason (and many others) the gender pay gap must be be closed swiftly. The fact that it continues to exist in the year 2024, in any of the OECD countries, is shameful.?

In Australia last week, the Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA) published, for the first time, measures of pay disparity between men and women. It has found that 50% of all 5000 private sector companies surveyed have a gender pay gap of more than 9.1%. ?

But it doesn’t stop at the salary. Bonuses, overtime, superannuation and commissions are more common and larger in male-dominated industries. They also tend to benefit employees in the highest-paid roles, who are more likely to be men. The value of these payments contributes more than a third (37.4%) to the WGEA median total remuneration gender pay gap. ?

The good news is that the WGEA average gender pay gap is the lowest it has ever been at 21.7%.

This is a decrease of 1.1 percentage points from the previous year, showing that the gender pay gap is again on a downward trend after stalling between 2020-21 and 2021-22. But still!

Also good news, although not before time, was the announcement that the Australian Government will pay superannuation on Paid Parental Leave.? The Minister for Women, Senator Katy Gallagher said:

“The data is clear - that when women take time out of the workforce to raise children it impacts their retirement incomes with women retiring, on average, with about 25 per cent less super than men.”?

And this is a fact. Women retire with smaller pensions and are more likely to live in poverty than men. ?They have less access to capital to start a business, greater scrutiny when taking a loan, are less likely to be selected to lead companies and earn less every step of the way. And yet...

Women pay the same as men for a coffee, a flight, the doctor, a car, a house and our education.

The International Labour Organisation estimates that every day women and girls work 12.5 billion hours for free. ?As Melinda Gates wrote in The Economist recently:

“Countries must remove barriers that constrain productivity. This unpaid work subsidises the global economy while keeping hundreds of millions of women from achieving their economic goals."

Imagine if those women were being paid? Imagine the increase in economic prosperity for their communities and their own household? One of the most significant barriers to unleashing this is caregiving. ?

As long as women are the primary caregivers in society, of children and or our elderly, there will never be economic parity for women. This is my strong, personal view.

Working at the NGO OneSky , I saw first-hand the economic impact increased child care capacity can have on low-income communities.?In Vietnam, where OneSky is training government child caregivers to increase the quality and capacity of care throughout the country. The Vietnamese government understands that with more and better care for children the number of women working will grow, along with the GDP. ?This is good for economic rankings and good for multilateral funding. Working women are good for the economy.

But this won’t happen when women are required to be the primary caregivers.

Together, we need to get to a place where men are comfortable taking time out from their career to help raise their own children and look after their own ageing parents – without fear of penalty – such as that which women experience.

In my view, this is gender equality.

It is about creating a better society together, where men and women are equal. It is about not penalising women for being women. Not paying them less, not promoting them less, not expecting them to be primary caregivers and not expecting them to pay more for goods and services, relative to men.

When I was six years old, my father opened a bank account for me. He reinforced early on that financial independence was critical. “Work hard, save, invest, rely on nobody”. ?Money was never a primary motivator so it took me a while to grasp the significance of his mantra. But these days I do. Being financially independent has given me the ability to make choices that have served my wellbeing.

While I still have to pay more for a coffee than a man, I acknowledge that I am living in the right place at the right time and that momentum is behind us. While we still have a long way to go, everyday there is a reminder of those who are really suffering. Say a prayer for the 287 school children, many of them girls, kidnapped yesterday in Nigeria by armed gunmen . It puts equality issues in perspective but our fight remains worthy.