By Ash Beks
As an unfortunate lead in to Equal Pay Day today, Former Prime Minister John Howard said a 50 – 50 gender representation in Parliament is unlikely because women are “the carers” and have “limited capacity” in politics.
His comments were met with backlash as Mr Howard conceded the public might think they were “a terrible thing to say”.
“It’s not a terrible thing to say, it just happens to be the truth, and occasionally you’ve just got to recognise that and say it,” he said.
It’s hard for Australian women to ignore their inequality in the workplace, as a new study published in March 2016 by the Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA), said the average full-time gender pay gap is 16.2 per cent.
This means the average full time weekly earnings difference between men and women is a staggering $260.10.
In some cases, women will need to work on average an extra 70 days a year to earn the same amount as men.
Today, childcare workers across Melbourne and Sydney have walked off the job in protest campaigning for better pay.
United Voice National Secretary Jo-Anne Schofield said the underpayment in this sector is due to the childcare industry’s gender make-up.
“Educators are among the lowest-paid professionals in Australia for one simple reason – this workforce is 95% female, and their profession is shamefully underpaid,” she said.
This morning the ABC aired a viral social media video featuring two young girls begging self-proclaimed feminist Malcolm Turnbull to fix the gender pay gap in the childcare sector.
In the video, two young girls explain the gender pay gap in their own terms using a male doll named Steve and a female doll named Jenny.
At the end of the video, the two girls call on the Prime Minister for action to help decrease the gender pay gap in childcare.
“Because it’s a woman’s job, it’s underpaid. Twenty dollars an hour to educate our next generation? Come on! Malcolm Turnbull if you really are a feminist, you will fix this!”
The strike staged on Equal Pay Day called for the government to do more to fight gender inequality in the workplace.
But former Prime Minster Howard’s speech at the National Press Club yesterday leads one to wonder how women’s work can be valued equally when those making the political decisions are making old-fashioned statements such as his.
Mr Howard mirrored earlier comments of the Opposition leader Bill Shorten, who claimed in June that men relied on women to organise childcare, and relegated them to having “the second job in the family.”
