My first brush with women wage equality issues was while watching a Wimbledon match. I was in my teens, and I heard Martina Navratilova talk about how it’s unfair for All England club to pay a Men’s match winner more prize money than the women’s. The logic on the other side was they play 5 sets and you play 3. We will play 5 sets too.
The argument and counter arguments continued for many years. And then in 2007, Wimbledon announced an end to gender pay gap.
Back to 2015 and I heard Patricia Arquette at her Oscar Award acceptance speech. She said “It is our time to have wage equality once and for all and equal rights for women in the United States of America!”
That was big. The most developed nation grapples with gender wage inequality?
Did you know being a woman can impact your income?
Where do we Indians stand?
I researched and found out about its deep roots in India. It is a fact. On an average, women get paid lesser than men even when if they have started their jobs at the same time. And this wasn’t for the workmen category. This impacted corporate professionals too- You and me.
How does that realisation impact me?
Shock and disbelief ran over me. Which world was I living in all this while? While propagating fair performance reviews to managers, why didn’t I ever look at this discrimination with a microscope? Were they purposely giving a slighter lesser rise to a woman? Was the absence of complete fitment the real reason why she was being hired at a little lesser package than the male counterparts in the same team?
As I go deeper into the online reports, the statistics, and the reasons behind the gap I only keep wondering -was I also victim of this? A corporate employee for the last 10 years, have I also faced this?
What did I do wrong?
I may have and I can’t do anything about it now.
That’s the first problem why gender pay gap exists- Awareness! We are not even aware that we are being given lesser increments because of our marital status, motherhood, demand for flexible work timings, or even while being single and available for long hours at work.
Despite giving the best of performance levels, the best of my creative mind and the best of my execution skills, if I have not been paid fairly, then who is to be blamed?
What can we do?
As I said, I may or may not have been impacted by it till now. But I well could be. I am glad I am aware of this now because I can at least protect myself from getting unfairly targeted in future.
To all the female colleagues, who work, this is what you can do to protect yourself:
Read about it: Get aware. Just do gender wage gap in India on google, and you would get hundreds of articles on its existence. It is a reality-accept it.
It is about you: The thing with these reports is that we don’t think it’s for us. We assume it’s for some set of people we don’t know, haven’t seen. But accept the fact that even in established corporates, this could be a reality and hence you could /would be a victim.
Talk about it: When your next pay review happens, ask these questions directly to your manager or HR. No company will share compensation data with you, but you can always get answers to your queries. You may be part of an organization which doesn’t believe in gender pay gap and hence you could be safe. But the sad part is, the way pay reviews happen mostly, it’s not about an organization’s mind-set but of an individual manager’s.
So if you ask difficult questions to your manager, he would be extra careful/conscious while deciding increment percentages/hiring pay points for all women team members in future.
Participate and spread awareness: If you do come across some discrimination, don’t keep it to yourself, spread around the word so that other girls are aware of this. In this digital age, you know how best you can spread the word around, even without revealing your identity.
Venus Williams, an American is credited to have raised the point of gender pay equality to All England club Association in 2005 but the demands were rejected. However President of WTA tour, Larry Scott had commented that she left a very meaningful impression with her demands. In 2006, in an article in the Times, she accused Wimbledon to be on the wrong side of history.
Such was the impact of her essay, that British Prime Minister Tony Blair took note of it. And she herself became the first woman in 2007 to get the equal prize money when she lifted the coveted trophy.
I am inspired by her and Patricia for speaking up for gender pay gap and hence I wrote on this. I hope you would contribute to this issue in your own way.
Image courtesy: www.bizjournals.com
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