The assumption now is that we dealt with discrimination against women a long time ago and that anyone going on about it is an embittered crank, writes Fintan O'Toole
LAST FRIDAY morning, on RTÉ Radio's business news, there was a discussion between the presenter, John Murray, and Patrick Burke, of the Irish Association of Pension Funds, about the gaps in pension provision in Ireland. Of all the words spoken in a fluent, knowledgeable dialogue, one was conspicuous by its absence. The word was "women".
Pensions in Ireland are a gender issue. Far more women than men don't have them. The Pensions Board is currently running TV ads on the subject, so this is hardly a secret. But talking about gender equality isn't really respectable any more. The operating assumption now is that we dealt with discrimination against women a long time ago and that anyone going on about it is an embittered crank.
Pensions mark the frontier in what is still a very real divide. Women tend to live longer than men, so they should have better pensions. But they don't. About 60 per cent of men in the workforce have a private pension. Just half of women, who tend to work in more unstable, lower-paid jobs, have one. And the underlying gap is much larger than this because so many women never got into the paid workforce in the first place. Or, indeed, were forced to leave it.
Until 1973, women working in the public and civil service had to resign as soon as they married. Many of these women lost their cover under the social welfare system when they left work, and they either did not qualify for a State pension when they retired or they only qualified for a smaller pension. These women are still paying for the naked discrimination they suffered.
There's no doubt that women in Ireland have made huge progress. Feminism has worked. In legal terms, at least, the system of gender-based inequality has been dismantled. Women have moved into the workforce in huge numbers. The proportion of married women who are in the workforce has gone from just 8 per cent in 1971 to 53 per cent. Girls are doing better than boys in school and are becoming a significant majority among university graduates in fields such as law and medicine.
But these changes actually highlight the persistence of inequality. Women have entered the workforce in very large numbers. Women in the workforce are generally better educated than men. Yet, across a whole range of jobs, they still earn much less than men. The pay gap is generally put at 11 per cent. Though high in itself, this is certainly a stark underestimate. The figures exclude part-time work, where low-paid women are concentrated. But even in areas with a predominantly female workforce - health, education, financial services - the gap is between 20 and 30 per cent.
These gaps persist because management is still a male ghetto. Across a whole range of leadership positions - chief executive officers, TDs, county and city managers, judges, consultants, departmental secretaries - women hold about 10 per cent of the jobs. And this in turn reflects one unchanging reality - women still do most of the caring and family work. They've become paid workers, but they're also doing most of the unpaid work. Every child has two parents, but 84 per cent of "lone parents" are female. Of those in receipt of the carer's allowance, 79 per cent are women, 21 per cent are men.
At weekends, Irish women spend an average of five hours on caring and housework. Men spend less than an hour and a half on such activities. And State policy has failed to support working women. Chaotic and inadequate provision for childcare, health services, parental leave and care of the elderly has a disproportionate effect on women.
In a new study, Where Are We Now?,edited by Ursula Barry and commissioned by the National Women's Council and the think-tank Tasc (to declare an interest, I chair Tasc's advisory council, though I've had no involvement with the book), Kathleen Lynch and Maureen Lyons point to what they call the "double bind" - the lack of public investment in care services and the "moral imperative" that women feel to care for both their children and the elderly. Pauline Conroy and Helen O'Leary relate this bind to the hard economics of debt. Not only do women left holding the baby get sucked into poverty and debt, but women bear the brunt of debts incurred by other family members. Unsurprisingly, three-quarters of the clients of moneylenders are female.
The reality is not that gender inequality has gone away, but that it is much less amenable to simple, one-off legislative changes than it used to be. Getting the right to equal pay is much easier than getting paid equally. Further progress for women can't be made without addressing so-called "trivial" areas like housework and so-called "boring" issues like pensions and public services. The feminist slogan that "the personal is political" may still have force, but it also needs to be reversed. The political is now personal: the way the State and the economy are organised fundamentally shapes the opportunities for women to be equal citizens.