As Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton deferred her own ambitions and urged her supporters to rally behind her former sparring partner, Barack Obama, questions of whether she was compelled to do so owing to her gender sprung amok.
That her speech coincided with the 88th anniversary of the passing of the 19th Amendment, which extended suffrage to women, and thereby enabling them to vote, does not pass without a soupçon of irony.
The deeper quandary remains, however, not whether Clinton lost due her gender, but how great the professional gender gap currently is in the twenty-first century.
According to the recent Pew Research Center Social and Demographic Trends Survey, the preponderance of Americans believe women have the right stuff to be political leaders.
When it comes to honesty, intelligence and a handful of other character traits prized in leaders, the public rates women superior to men.
Contrastingly, just 6% of respondents in the survey of 2,250 adults concede that, overall, women make better political leaders than men.
Furthermore, 21% believe men make the better leaders, while the vast majority – 69% – say men and women make equally good leaders.
So far, so pseudo-emancipated – until that is, the glaring paradox between women holding the desired traits, and women actually occupying the upper echelons of the professional world, emerges.
The reasoning behind this, the respondents avered, is gender discrimination, resistance to change, and an “old boy’s club” posing as obstacles for women who have strived, and failed, to reach the top.
Looking towards the irksome chestnut of equal pay, Stateside the gender gap is closing, although the figures are certainly nothing to gurn about, since full-time female workers now earn 78% of what their male counterparts earn, up from 77% last year.
In California, women earn 84% of what men earn, slightly behind Vermont.
In Australia, meanwhile, women earn on average close to $200 a week less than men and are still under-represented in senior positions.
According to the European Industrial Relations Observatory, the situation in Britain is equally shameful, as women trail behind men in similar jobs on average by 18.9%, while in Europe the gap is more substantial: in Slovakia women earn 26.9% less than their male counterparts, followed by Portugal (25.4%) and Estonia (25.3%).
Placing these statistics in context, the difference indicates that should a man and women apply for the position of lecturer, on a pay scale of £30,000 per annum (U.S.$55,350), for conducting exactly the same amount of research and teaching an equal number of courses, the Professoressa would in reality accrue but £24,330 (U.S.$44,893) over the year.
As I type this, my mind is boggling as to whether this could actually be correct: is it possible that I could earn so much less? Does it indeed occur? Indubitably, that so many reports have lamented this pecuniary divide in a plethora of professions indicates so.
Indeed, an Italian colleague recently quipped that should I work for an Italian university, it would be a given that my wages would fall short of my male contemporaries – with little recourse.
With ample evidence that unequal pay emanating from a gender basis is a global issue, the subsequent question is how such discrimination can be remedied.
Perhaps the cue could be taken from the Australian Council of Trade Unions(ACTU), which has called for employers to be forced to report on how much they are paying their female employees.
As ACTU president Sharan Burrow states, all employers should be forced to report their gender pay data on an annual basis:
This data should be collected and monitored by a federal government agency with the power to investigate cases of inequality and assist businesses in setting up proper reporting systems. Women workers were badly hurt by Work Choices. For the first time in decades, the pay equity gap grew wider after many women were forced onto individual contracts that stripped their pay to the barest levels, in many cases illegally underpaying them, and removing their job security. Women have played an absolutely critical role in Australia’s economic growth. It’s our duty to make sure they are not left behind if the economy they have helped to build starts to hit uncertain times. It is essential that we see new IR laws introduced into parliament that scrap the rest of Work Choices and ensure all workers, especially women, get back their rights at work.
In the United States, meanwhile, efforts to pass a bill fully that would enable individuals to recover damages for gender-based pay discrimination failed to progress, and remains contested.
Equally qualified, and more than equally dedicated, women continue to be swindled in the employment stakes.
That the reasons behind the impediments to their progress to the upper echelons are cited as the “old boys” network amongst others, are simply no longer acceptable.
As Britain emits vague whimpers of empathy – to be followed by very little action – and the United States shirks from direct action, Australia is clearly the country to watch, and learn, from.
[Images via: MasterMind and David D. Muir.]
If you compare the enrollment rates of women Vs men into Engineering/Science as opposed to the Arts, that would account for part of the gap. Another example is medical specialization among med students. Women are much less likely to take the surgical specialties which pay much more but require a lot more hours. So many hours that the suicide rate among surgeon’s is higher than average!
When I went for my first job interview in Canada, my boss told me he almost didn’t call me because he thought from my name (Hani) that I was a woman. So yes discrimination is alive and well.
I don’t think one can scream discrimination in the political arena since universal suffrage though since you can’t really determine the criteria people will use to vote.
Personally if i were American I would vote for any democrat over any republican, and would vote for Obama over Hillary partly because I have no respect for someone who would let their husband humiliate her in public and not speak up for herself even if he is the POTUS.
Also during the campaign when she almost lost in one state, she started crying on camera. Not exactly what I’d call a leadership quality whether a man or woman did it.
There is definitely a big gap between the salaries of men and women. And as you said for the same profession, same education, same experience..etc women are paid less than men.
But, there is an even bigger gap due to female-dominant occupations getting paid less than male-dominant occupations, even when they require similar amount of education, experience..etc. For example a kindergarten teacher is paid less than a bus driver (regardless of sex). A mail boy paid more than a secretary and so on. It is like the jobs that are “feminine” are undervalued regardless who is doing the job.