Olivia Colman, the Oscar award-winning actress and noted fan of the c-word, made a point about the gender pay gap on the press tour of her latest movie this week.
“I’m very aware that if I was Oliver Colman, I’d be earning a f**k of a lot more than I am,” she told CNN.
“I know of one pay disparity which is a 12,000 per cent difference. Do the maths.”
It’s hard to know what’s more shocking. The use of the f-word on Christiane Amanpour’s network news show? Or was it the 12,000 per cent pay difference between a man and a woman?
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It might actually just be that she didn’t use the c-word, which she says is “the best one” in terms of swear words in her argument. Because we know women still get paid less than men. This is a depressing and unshocking reality. The pope is a Catholic. Bears defecate in the woods. No matter how many hair grips you purchase, you will never have any left. There is a gender pay gap and all kinds of rubbish excuses will be trotted out to justify why.
In Colman’s case it was “but male actors get paid more because they used to say they draw in the audiences”, she said.
“Actually, that hasn’t been true for decades. But they still like to use that as a reason to not pay women as much.”
Squawking about the gender pay gap myth from the usual corners of the internet soon piped up. It was the usual hodgepodge of half-read articles and quotes stolen from podcasts by men who have made the term “females” feel like a slur when they give their terrible takes through Amazon-bought microphones.
PwC’s analysis revealed the largest gaps exist in the legal profession, where men are paid on average 35.1 per cent more per hour than women
Women don’t want to work. Women have jobs not careers. Women stay home with the kids, that’s why they earn less. They tend to work part-time when they come back to juggle family life. They choose to work in lower paid industries. It’s still equal pay for equal work but women don’t do equal work. If they were willing to ruin their nails and get down to a construction site or a mine they wouldn’t have this problem.
But recent data says, actually they would.
Just 24 per cent of the workforce in the construction and engineering companies that reported on their pay gap was female, showed research conducted by PwC Ireland. PwC’s analysis revealed the largest gaps exist in the legal profession, where men are paid on average 35.1 per cent more per hour than women while a 33.5 per cent discrepancy exists in the aviation sector.
Consistent research using American data has shown how an industry wage stagnates or drops once women start to dominate it from teaching to graphic design.
Occupations that require care are particularly undervalued from nursing to social work to early childhood educators, potentially because looking after something or someone is deemed a feminine vocation.
Without affordable access to childcare, women face even more barriers returning to work full time as they become the default primary carer
There are two job ads. The childcare role involves a list of qualifications and criteria with 10 bullet points including garda vetting and holding a FETAC Level 5 in Early Years Education. The pay is listed at just €13 an hour.
Meanwhile, a bricklayer role pays €15-18 an hour. The job specifications are simply “must be reliable” and “experience preferred but not essential”.
There is no such thing as unskilled labour and no one is begrudging bricklayer’s labourers for making what they do. But is it right we regard their work more important, at least financially, than workers whose job it is to keep our children alive? Or is it because we deem it less serious and more just a natural thing women like doing so they should be paid less for it?
Without affordable access to childcare, women face even more barriers returning to work full-time as they become the default primary carer. Women after they have children see their earnings slashed in half according to research from Columbia and they stay down for years. The support to stay in the labour force from employers, government policy and even spouses at home isn’t enough to keep women on equal footing.
In short, we earn less in the same industries as men. We earn less in industries dominated by women. We pay a motherhood penalty both at home and at work. Then we get blamed for the barriers that stop us returning to the workplace and maintain earnings even though we didn’t put them there?
No wonder Olivia Colman likes the “f” and “c” words so much. It’s any wonder women aren’t all screaming them into the void over the situation.