Women deserve fair pay for all their labour

A woman counting money

A woman counting dollar bills at desk in office.

Photo credit: Pool | Nation Media Group

What you need to know:

  • If there are any lessons from the ongoing pandemic, equal pay for equal work should be one of them.
  • The evidence of women’s labour has never been clearer than when the world woke up to the realisation that caregiving work is actual work.

It’s January and everyone is talking about money, though men and women’s relationship with money is totally different. Due to patriarchal social conditioning, men are positioned as primary providers, hence automatically deserving of money.

Any labour a man does is, as a result of this conditioning, monetarily valued and paid for. Men’s labour is quantified as payable while women’s labour is majorly viewed as secondary and not quantifiable, particularly so for the caregiving work that women do.

Women’s labour is, therefore, deemed free labour and is simplistically payable in platitudes, in kind or in gratitude and not actual money.

Our perception of women’s labour as something a woman ought to be thankful for having been granted an opportunity to offer amounts to wilful exploitation and manipulation. 

If there are any lessons from the ongoing pandemic, equal pay for equal work should be one of them. The evidence of women’s labour has never been clearer than when the world woke up to the realisation that caregiving work is actual work.

But of course this isn’t a new problem. Socio-cultural perception of men and women as different where work is concerned has existed for decades.

Many issues need to be demystified and made normal, starting with how we raise both women and men. Foremost, its time we put an end to the idea that teaching life skills like cooking, cleaning and caregiving is a gendered lesson set aside for women while men should learn about money and substantial provision. 

Malevolent murmurs

Secondly, we must start creating a societal environment that nurtures the idea of women and money without the fragility of masculinity. Financial autonomy for women is a key step in bridging the gender inequity gap most tangibly.

Thirdly, we must counter the negative narratives around financially free women being unruly. The fact that we still – in hushed tones and malevolent murmurs – disparage working women when data from the past year alone shows how much work women put in to support all existing systems should worry us.

Our misleading understanding of ambition and need for money as a man’s highest achievement and a woman’s shortfall should cease to exist.

We must move away from the biases we hold against women. The world is changing and so should our thinking.

Money should no longer be a commodity women are structurally denied either by not being paid equally, reducing them to support roles, making their labour invisible or not recognising or paying women for care work.

And while we are at it, we should drop the trite and maligned language used to label women as “wearing the pants” when it comes to being financially better off than a man.

We have so much to unlearn. The world is calling for new solutions and new thinking. While money remains an old medium of exchange and measure of value, the process of its exchange doesn’t have to be.

The writer is a policy analyst; [email protected]