Gender pay gap not so insidious
Response by Claire Braund to Michael Stuchbury’s comments in ‘Gender pay gap not so insidious’ (The Australian, 15 March 2011)
In his remarkable justification of the gender pay gap in Australia, Mr Stuchbury wove in a few selective statistics, a broadside against boardroom gender quotas, criticism of the Federal Government’s recent move to align itself with the ASX Corporate Governance Council and finished it off with an anecdote about young women (sensibly) seeing directorships as something they could do part-time or while they had children. What, may one ask, are young men supposed to aspire to?
Mr Stuchbury’s sweeping assertion that many women make their own ‘choices’ about balancing family preferences with being an executive, implied that men have nothing do with parenting and don’t have to make such choices, because of course they can have a career AND children.
The reality is that many men are struggling just as hard with parenting, the availability of childcare and inflexible work practices as their female partners. Men will also tell you privately that there pressure to conform to a 24/7 corporate work culture and a lack of executive male role models who take parental leave and equally value their work and family responsibilities.
In his article, Mr Stuchbury has also ignored the major contribution women make to our economy and their increasing value in a tightening jobs market. Women make up more than 50 per cent of university graduates and 45 per cent of the workforce in Australia and account for more than 50 per cent of retail and non-retail spending (Natsem and CBA 2011). Yet they are paid 82 cents in every dollar compared with their male counterparts and are under-represented in leadership roles in all sectors of society, in particular the ASX200 where they make up less than 10 per cent of senior managers and 11 per cent of directors.
The gender pay gap is well documented in reports by many reputable organisations, including KPMG, Goldman Sachs, CBA, NATSEM, the Australian Bureau of Statistics and FINSIA, but not well accepted by men in business. In this sense, Mr Stuchbury is playing to his audience in writing off the gender pay gap and more importantly, its ‘insidious‘ impact on the take home pay and retirement income of women. Again, it is well documented that women have less than two-thirds of the superannuation balances of men on retirement and are far more reliant on Government support in old age.
Instead of ranting against the existence of the gender pay gap and using it to somehow justify his opposition to boardroom quotas, perhaps Mr Struchbury would better serve the readers of The Australian to find new paradigms for the way we do business so that the two great contributions we make to our country – working and having children – become mutually inclusive, not mutually exclusive. Only when we do this and change many of the workforce cultures and behaviours will the education and talent that are equally distributed among men and women in Australia become equally visible, utilised and remunerated.
