The great gender pay gap

by Fanny Bucheli

The gender pay gap is the amount of days a woman has to work into the next year in order to earn as much as her male counterpart has by the end of the previous year.

In some western countries, that day would more or less coincide with International Woman’s day in mid-March. In many more countries, this day would be anywhere between today and the end of the summer. Shocking. Even more so since ‘male counterpart’ means a man that has the same qualifications and works the same job, at the same company, for the same length of time and the same amount of hours as a woman.

The International Women’s Rights Treaty, also known as the Women’s Conventions, ratified by the Malaysian Government in 1995, states in Article 11 (Employment and Labour Rights) that a woman has a right to work and, more to the point, the right to equal pay for work of equal value. Obviously, this isn’t happening if she has to work well into the new year to catch up on wages.

As far as Malaysian women in the workplace are concerned, it is difficult to find hard facts and clear numbers. As Michelle Gyles-McDonnough, the United Nations Resident Coordinator for Malaysia points out, “In some cases data collection does not happen at gender level perhaps due to the lack of consciousness, while in other cases data collected is not readily accessible as it is scattered across different institutions.”

While Malaysia has shown fantastic accomplishments with the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) and achieved parity in education, literacy and universal primary education for boys and girls by the due date of 2015, this new generation of Malaysians who have benefitted from the MDG has yet to enter the workforce. On the ground today, it is potentially testing to compare men and women in an employment environment. Women often don’t apply for the same jobs as men. They frequently favour flexibility at the workplace over cash benefits, as they often care for children, and for elderly parents, too. Men value remuneration and advancement opportunities first and foremost, as they feel financially responsible for those in their care.

As men and women often do perform work of equal value, but value their employment for different attributes, a fair comparison is hard to achieve. In a world where labour has to be remunerated without prejudice however, a woman could be at liberty to crash through the proverbial glass ceiling while her male counterpart could easily choose to be his family’s caregiver and social custodian without suffering ridicule or discrimination.

May we hope that this aforementioned new generation of Malaysians will manage to understand how to achieve true equity among genders? Equity that doesn’t require turning the tables and giving one gender the opportunity to “make up for lost time”, but rather equality that offers everybody the liberty to choose their professional preferences.

Fanny Bucheli is an FMT columnist.

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