Taboo, p.13
Taboo, page 13
The gender pay gap stems from systemic cultural issues within capitalism. It mirrors the historic misconceptions and undervaluing of women’s contributions to the workforce, the lack of workplace flexibility to accommodate caring responsibilities in a society where women take on a greater share of the domestic and unpaid labour, the underrepresentation of women in leadership and management positions, and the historic discrepancy between the wages and value placed on male-dominated versus female-dominated industries.
Conscious and unconscious bias plays a significant role in hiring, remuneration and promotions. This is not limited to gender. This discrimination is only exacerbated when we consider other factors including race, disability, age and sexuality. It is vital that we understand and reflect on how these overlapping aspects of a person’s identity expose them to amplified and compounded forms of discrimination. Women’s earnings fall by 55 per cent in the first five years of parenthood, while men’s earnings remain unaffected, a Treasury analysis found in 2022. The penalty persists for at least a decade into parenthood. This only scratches the surface of the impacts of career interruptions, unpaid labour and caring responsibilities.
We must challenge the narrative that women invariably choose to work part-time or stay home and care for their families. We know that the cost of childcare and the stereotypical cultural expectations surrounding care and parenting roles means that women are presented with little choice but to step back from full-time work. The superannuation gap sees women retire with a third less superannuation than men do, according to the Super Members Council. The superannuation gap between men and women in some age groups is as high as 47.8 per cent.
The gender pay gap is rejected as an issue most often by those who are not only not impacted by it, but who benefit from it. Men tell themselves and others that the gap is due to choices women make, not a system that has forced them out of paid work and imposed the belief that their contributions lack economic value. The biggest myths around the gender pay gap and the central points of arguments against its existence often surround individual pay comparisons within specific workplaces and the view that women elect to stop working or aren’t capable of the hours men work. These arguments lack nuance, ignore social norms and cultural expectations and pass over how a causal chain of events continues to enforce a gender hierarchy. It is not about how many hours are put in, the quality of the work, our ‘natural qualities’ or industries women ‘gravitate towards’. This is a socially constructed and conditioned belief system. It is factually incorrect.
A KPMG study run over fifty years found that when the presence of women increases in a particular industry, the pay rate declines. Every industry in Australia has a gender pay gap that favours men, according to the Workplace Gender Equality Agency. Women’s work is seen as inferior. When we partner the expectation that women are meant to be in the home with a lack of workplace flexibility, we find another culminating factor that reduces our perceived viability for senior leadership and management positions. Men move upwards because of the women they rely on staying down to manage households and families – and having a family elevates their workplace and public reputation.
In her fiction work Motherhood, Sheila Heti subverts the commonly held belief that a woman is a through line to the next generation, not an independent being:
It seemed to me like all my worrying about not being a mother came down to this history – this implication that a woman is not an end in herself. She is a means to a man, who will grow up to be an end in himself, and do something in the world. While a woman is a passageway through which a man might come. I have always felt like an end in myself – does not everyone? – but perhaps my doubt that being an end-in-myself is enough comes from this deep lineage of women not being seen as ends, but as passageways through which a man might come. If you refuse to be a passageway, there is something wrong. You must at least try. But I do not want to be a passageway through which a man might come, then manifest himself in the world however he likes, without anyone doubting his right.
One of my constant battles is the feeling that, if women do not become mothers, they are expected to do something earth-shattering instead. There must be a business, a creative endeavour or extensive travel. If not motherhood, there must be something that occupies her every waking thought. What if we wanted the ability to choose to have our own time, our own space, our own independent lives free from caring? We know the data. Women with higher education have fewer children: this is because educated people have more opportunities for productive lives doing work other than childrearing. Globally, research shows that as education levels rise, fertility levels fall. But even the use of the word ‘productive’ strips us of our abilities to escape the capitalist machine. What if women don’t want to work all the time? What if we want to just live outside our titles?
Women can be the biggest critics of women who choose to be childfree. In my experience, the strongest bias applied to a woman who does not want children is the belief that she is criticising those who do. That one decision is evidence of a hatred for or a resentment of all children and all people who parent. Why is an individual’s choice a judgement of or a statement about another? Not wanting children does not mean one lacks maternal urges or is a hater of children. Why is the avoidance of this one act so tightly bound to the identity of childfree women? Why is something we are not more important and inherent to our identity, than what we choose not to be? This is an argument of division, one where we are unable to progress so long as we are at war with each other and ignoring the root of the problem. It is a particular kind of loneliness to not long for the things most others seem to. To walk an entirely different path is rewarding but isolating. I believe I want to have children. Yet if I do not have children, I know I will have more time, more opportunity to explore myself and the world, and more freedom to choose. Society is offended by those who walk a different path. I wonder how often that is because they feel they cannot express their own regret. I love and want children, but I want to be selfish with my life, too.
Women have been sold a lie that we are born to mother, to clean, to organise, to maintain homes. There has been a careful and strategic categorisation by patriarchy of particular traits as being either masculine or feminine. Not only is this untrue, but it teaches women that it is in our nature to be more empathetic, to take on caring roles, and that we are intensely more emotional than men. The flow-on effect of this is men having permission to lack emotional intelligence, and it teaches women who do not want to do the unpaid work of caregiving and emotional labour that they are somehow lesser women. If society continues to impose the view that we have no control over these characteristics, and that they are inherent from birth, it reinforces the gender divide and narrows the scope of what we as humans can be. Katie Jgln writes:
Insisting that women are more ‘delicate’ or are naturally more predisposed to be ‘kind and caring’ can seem harmless or even positive, but it is actually a form of sexism, too – benevolent sexism … And while hostile sexism might be easier to spot, it is the benevolent sexism that’s far more insidious. After all, it perpetuates reductive gender stereotypes that ultimately justify women’s subordinate position in society, all under the pretence that it is ‘for our own good.’
This sentiment is extended in Gina Rushton’s book The Most Important Job in the World, as she explores the cognitive dissonance between the way the ruling class claims to uphold motherhood while politically degrading women’s rights. She writes about reporting on parliamentary debates in which ‘physical sovereignty was debated by men who fetishised motherhood, the most important job in the world, while supporting policies that made life harder for mothers.’ Government policies, media, financial institutions and large corporations convey the need to ‘increase women’s labour force participation’, but that language is repeatedly failing to reflect women’s experience of labour. Mothers are contributing to the workforce; this work is just not seen or defined as such. This intersects and compounds with both race and class issues.Women who must work to provide for their children are either deemed ‘bad mothers’ or even criminalised for leaving their children in order to earn a wage to feed them. The experience of poverty or not being white means the lens applied to your work is not that of a ‘girl boss’ but of a failure. Society not only fails but actively oppresses these women, and then punishes them for any subsequent choice they make in the pursuit of survival.
Women’s domestic work ensures that men are able to participate in the paid workforce at higher rates, and are then considered harder working, more successful and more capable than women. The reality is it isn’t women’s productivity or participation that needs to be transformed or uplifted: it is men’s. Men need to do more unpaid labour in order for that labour to be considered valuable to society. Women’s wider participation depends on men’s capacity to support us by doing the work our culture deems to be ‘caretaking’ and therefore inferior. Bri Lee made the comparison perfectly in an interview with Camilla + Marc: ‘We’re not going to get the ideal future for women until we have mandatory, use-it-or-lose-it paid parental leave for all genders. Until we make employers as terrified that a man will become a father as they currently are of women becoming mothers, you will never stop discrimination in the workplace.’
This is one of the most straightforward, practical solutions possible to the problem of inequality in the workforce and of the need for unpaid labour. We need a cultural shift, led by policy, that forces men into primary caregiving roles. Men need to be expected to be parents to the extent that women are. The gender pay gap is not a ‘choice’ women are making: it is an expectation imposed on women since the moment we are handed a Baby Born at the age of two. Care is learned, and it’s expected that joy and fulfilment will come from performing it.
Our capitalist society relies on free labour. It relies on cheap labour. It relies on those performing this labour to be told they are being demanding, and causing inflation, when they ask for that labour to be paid fairly and to accompany a set of working rights that protects their humanity. It relies on a tiered valuation of labour that ensures the bulk of hard, domestic work is separated from productivity and from economic valuation. It relies on women and minorities quietly trying to stay afloat, believing they deserve no more.
I’ve often seen rhetoric proposing that being a stay-at-home parent is somehow antifeminist, the central argument being that these individuals lack financial independence, and can become vulnerable in circumstances of violence, abuse and the decrease in stability and career prospects they experience after time away from the workforce. The issue is in the concealment of privilege. When it comes to wealth, resources and help, the issue is always the innate belief of those with privilege that it is possible for anyone to do what they do. In a piece for The Guardian, columnist Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett articulates this distinction:
Stay-at-home mums are often left out of these discussions because their existence is inconvenient to both sides. Women who actively want to be stay-at-home mums are uncomfortable for some feminists to contemplate because they have traditionally been so lionise. And the stay-at-home mum is threatening to the other side of the debate because capitalism relies on free domestic labour. She can be encouraged and deified as long as she doesn’t consider what she is doing as work worthy of financial recompense. The minute she does that, she becomes dangerous.
The focus for feminism should not be on getting stay-at-home mothers to enter the workforce they prop up. It should be on paying them for their contributions and getting men to take on the role in turn. In The Most Important Job in the World, Gina Rushton also examines this with acute skill:
You only have to look at the wages of childcare workers, teachers and aged care workers to see how this lingering presumption complements a ‘do what you love’ ethos to devalue work that is traditionally gendered female. Care work in the home has been denigrated for so long that it still fails to be compensated fairly outside of it. Looking back, I see clearly how equating my paid labour with my own value in society was not just foolish but in direct opposition with how I value other people. It does not square with how I value the time and effort of my brother, an unemployed person living in social housing, nor how I value my mother’s domestic care on the days she was not teaching. Any progress, particularly for women, that confines itself to the workplace feels to me now not just incomplete but exclusionary. In overvaluing paid employment, we devalue what is underpaid or unpaid and allow the state to continue shafting the burdens of social reproduction on to families.
While the girl-boss corner of the feminist movement has often shamed women for opting to stay at home, the point has been missed entirely. What if instead of shaming a woman for wanting to be at home, society valued and paid for her work? What would the outcomes be for children, women and men if caring responsibilities and domestic labour were paid work? Women who wish they could stay at home are not necessarily wanting to be tradwives, who act as subservient slaves, believing they are inferior to men. Tradwives are extremist opponents of feminism – fuelled by religion and conservatism – and they are the minority. Most women performing the impossible juggle of ‘having it all’ are just fighting to raise children above the poverty line. They want to contribute, retain their identities but also have a family of this nature. Not wanting ‘it all’ is not antifeminist; in fact, the pursuit of a well-balanced, joyful life without judgement is at the centre of what feminism fights for. In her 1974 book on the social consequences of domestic labour, Wages Against Housework, Silvia Federici wrote:
The difference lies in the fact that not only has housework been imposed on women, but it has been transformed into a natural attribute of our female physique and personality, an internal need, an aspiration, supposedly coming from the depth of our female character. Housework had to be transformed into a natural attribute rather than be recognized as a social contract because from the beginning of capital’s scheme for women this work was destined to be unwaged. Capital had to convince us that it is a natural, unavoidable and even fulfilling activity to make us accept our unwaged work. In its turn, the unwaged condition of housework has been the most powerful weapon in reinforcing the common assumption that housework is not work, thus preventing women from struggling against it, except in the privatized kitchen–bedroom quarrel that all society agrees to ridicule, thereby further reducing the protagonist of a struggle. We are seen as nagging bitches, not workers in struggle.
Wanting to be a mother and not wanting to work yourself to death in the process is not antifeminist. It’s antipatriarchy and anticapitalist. We need to stop shaming each other and start dismantling a system that expects us to work for our own families. Men outsourcing work is considered efficient – time saved that frees up their capacity to provide. Women are shamed for their inability to cook and clean – how many times have you heard a woman exclaim that she must ‘clean before the cleaner’ or that it would be far too expensive and embarrassing to pay for help at all? Women’s desire to earn money and to be supported is a stain on our femininity, but men’s outsourcing of household duties is strategic and effective – it’s just business, really. I often think about this. Two of my close friends, Annabel Phelan and Rory McGahan, founded a business, Dara, to reduce women’s invisible labour. The first time I met them, I learned more about the mental load and the research behind gendered labour than I would have in an entire university course. One of the most significant points they made is how the outsourcing of work considered ‘men’s labour’ is more acceptable than that of socially perceived ‘women’s work’. To get your car professionally washed, have your yard maintained by a gardener or have a tradie fix a pipe, a fridge or your toilet is far more acceptable than it is for women to hire cleaners or carers or to outsource home management. Men’s ‘jobs’ are also occasional and finite; they have a clear and defined ending. Mowing the lawn is more visible and defined than the endlessness of washing, feeding and tidying. Fundamentally, spending money on work that women are expected to do for free is positioned as more shameful than the professionalised industries of male-dominated work.
The gender pay gap enables the gender shame gap. Women stay home to manage the home because it seems ludicrous to pay for services that would empower a woman to re-enter the workforce. The cost of childcare is considered too much for women to return to a job that doesn’t see their value anyway. These calculations are generally made against the salary of the mother, not proportionally from the couple as a unit in circumstances in which both parents are present. Childcare is a mother’s deduction, not a benefit that serves both parents equally. As women fight to earn more while continuing to manage the labour of our homes, we must ask ourselves less about how to keep women in work and instead how to get men to value women’s work, primarily by getting them into the home. The valuation of women’s work going up depends on men being expected to do it.
When Annabel Crabb wrote The Wife Drought in 2014, she published the bible on the work–life balance that has failed modern women and, if anything, regressed:
Have a look at the results when Australians are asked if they agree or disagree with the statement: ‘It is better for the family if the husband is the principal breadwinner outside the home and the wife has primary responsibility for the home and children.’ In 1986, just over 55 per cent of men agreed with that proposition. That proportion swan-dived down to about 30 per cent by 2001, but by 2005, it had gone up again, to 41.4 per cent. Women subscribe to that view less enthusiastically than men on the whole, but they too have waxed and waned over the last thirty years. In 1986, 33 per cent of them thought it was better for men to work and women to keep house. By 2001, that had dipped to 19 per cent. But by 2005, it had bobbed back up to 36.4 per cent.
