According to Dress for Success Dublin, the charity behind the #WorkEqual campaign, ‘Equal Pay Day’ in Ireland is today (11 November 2019), which means that due to the gender pay gap, which is currently at 13.9%, women in Ireland are effectively working for free from now until the end of the year.
According to the European Institute for Gender Equality's 2019 Gender Equality Index, women’s mean monthly earnings are €2,808 in Ireland, compared to €3,423 for men.
Equal Pay Day differs all around the world, depending on the country, but also due to racial and ethnic factors. However, the message is still the same. Women essentially ‘work for free’ for a portion of the year compared to their male counterparts.
To make matters worse, new research from IrishJobs.ie showed that male graduates in Ireland expect to earn up to 10% more than their female peers. Almost 11,000 graduates from 25 education institutes were interviewed for the research, and shows that the gap has grown since 2018, when there was an 8% disparity.
Of course, there have been massive global movements in the right direction to combat the gender pay gap. In 2018, Iceland made gender pay gaps illegal by making it a requirement for companies to prove they are not discriminating against women in the wage department. Additionally, gender pay gap reporting has already come into effect in the UK and is imminent in Ireland, with legislation expected in 2020. But there is still a long way to go and unfortunately it is not enough for companies to simply look at their pay structures to ensure they are paying their employees equally – although that does need to be done.
While the gender wage gap is directly related to salaries, there is more to it than just base wages. For example, the European Gender Equality Index also showed that almost 89% of women are doing cooking/housework every day, compared with 48% of men. This means that not only are women being paid less for their full-time work than their male counterparts, but they’re also doing more work at home. This means that women end up working a ‘double shift’.
There is also a lot of research around the topic of volunteering for unpaid or unrecognised tasks in work and how often those tasks fall to women at work. These tasks can be considered ‘office housework’, and can take the form of organising social events, taking notes in meetings or filling in for a colleague.
Studies have shown that women spend relatively more time than men on non-promotable tasks and less time on promotable ones. Harvard Business Review conducted several experiments around this topic, which proved that there “was a shared understanding or expectation that women would volunteer more than men”.
Furthermore, a study conducted by New York University psychologist Madeline Heilman found that men were rated 14% more favourably than women when they stayed late to help a co-worker and when both parties declined to help, women were rated 12% lower than men. So not only are women expected to pick up more of the invisible labour in general, but they’re actually judged more harshly than their male counterparts for it.
Equal Pay Day is a symbolic day that aims to highlight the gender pay gap that is still extremely prevalent in Ireland and around the world. But it’s important for companies to remember that, while their salaries need to be examined and wage gaps need to be closed, there are other gender disparities that also need to be reviewed.
Written with contributions from the RECRUITERS team
Gender photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash
