Lady, what do you do all day?

Women earn less, according to Joe Hockey, because they choose to work in jobs that pay less. Essentially, it’s all our own fault. Nyer nyer nyer, boo sucks to you feminism, etc. But are these choices gendered at face value (because women make selfish choices which happen to lead to their own disadvantage), are or they gendered because women are making choices that advantage their families ahead of themselves?

Here are some established patterns for women and work:

Women work in casual jobs because they still retain the bulk of caring responsibilities and they assume (sometimes erroneously) that casual jobs will deliver better wage outcomes than permanent jobs

Women work part time to balance work and family – and increasingly women are now caring not only for their children but also for their parents

A major deficit of quality part time work in Australia means that many women are forced to choose between the job for which they are qualified/skilled and a lower-paying casual job which suits the “lifestyle” of raising a family

Girls who do not finish school are much more likely to suffer life-long career disadvantage than boys

Women are more likely than men to finish their working career with insufficient savings to retire independently

The main problem with Hockey’s argument (other than his breathtaking disregard for the labour market disadvantage experienced by women) is that it essentially argues that the work that women have historically done has no value when compared to male dominated industries.

Women are, as Hockey somewhat clumsily points out, over-represented in industries that tend to pay badly. Some of these industries pay badly because they are considered to be “low skill”* – for example cleaning, hospitality and retail. The history of women in these industries stretches back as far as the colonies, when women’s wages were regarded as a mere supplement to their husband’s wage – an argument which has kept women’s wages lower than men’s for OVER ONE HUNDRED YEARS**. Only now we call it choice, instead of systemic discrimination.

Other jobs where women are over-represented pay badly for, frankly, no good reason other than it suits those who are their employers to behave that way. Nursing is a classic example here. And while we’re talking of nursing, let’s add the other “caring professions” – aged care and childcare. All of these roles are agreed to be of critical importance in the community. When you ask people who are the most “under-rated” workers in our economy, these professions tend to top the list. Governments (at all levels) could have used their multi-million dollar surpluses to introduce some wage parity for the workers they employ (either directly or indirectly) themselves. Funnily enough they “chose” not to do that.

Meanwhile Government subsidies to women who leave the workforce to raise children – such as the Baby Bonus, childcare allowances, Family Tax Benefits etc – are not the mere result of a powerful feminist lobby, although you’ll hear no argument from me that such a lobby should exist. THIS ISN’T EXTRA MONEY. This money is being shifted – not created. In other words, while waving these incentives in the face of the community in a ham-fisted attempt to boost the birthrate, the government has also drastically changed its thinking about support for the most marginalized women in the community – single parents and single retirees.

The current government will tell you that there will be no way that future governments can afford the pension burden coming our way as a result of the looming baby-boom retirements***. So as a response, they’re funneling money into superannuation, and encouraging EVERYONE to stay in the workforce longer. What many baby-boom generation women are grappling with however, is the spectre of poverty. The divorce rate for women in this generation is significant, but their personal economic modeling was based on a double-income model. Many of these women divorced with no access to their partner’s super (which was earned with the expectation that it would be shared by two people), and were left to “start again”. Starting again for many women involved not only getting a job (any job) but also re-establishing a household and bearing the majority responsibility for the raising of children, a pattern which has only now started to shift in terms of its gender balance. These women have raised a generation of kids who are staying at home longer and are economically dependent on their families for much greater periods of time, despite their own (comparative) generational wealth.

So, I’ve made a choice too. I choose not to support a government that believes that women suffer no systemic discrimination…because making women’s interests “niche interests” and characterizing the needs of low-paid women workers as “choices” is one of the most offensive things I’ve heard in the campaign so far.

Oh, and I’m not a union official. But it’s moments like these that 70 per cent of me wishes I was.


* by economists, not by me.

** which is not to say that women haven't ALWAYS been poorly paid, but I'm talking about an era in which women's work outside the home exploded in both numbers and rates. You can't half tell I've been reading a bit of Marilyn Lake lately, can you?

*** this is the same government also tells us that they “can’t predict what will happen in the economy” next week, but also that they can control interest rates, so I guess you should take their statements with a grain of salt.