To work more for less pay seems to be the womanly thing to do. To be paid at all for any work they do is what women are grateful for, rating peanuts higher than fresh air any day, as they toil, toil, toil through public holidays and second shifts. While all around them men get their salaries in time because they have facial hair and a hi-five from their bosses when they ask for a raise, most women find it hard to talk money.
When it comes to gender statistics, India is proud to stand out in the wrong way. If the average woman, globally speaking, works 39 days more than a man in a year, Indian women work 50 days more, so there.
The new Global Gender Gap report from the World Economic Forum (WEF) says women on average work 50 minutes more a day than men. It guesses it would take another 170 years for economic inequalities between the sexes to end. Obviously, this will take longer in India. By which time we would be dead women rather than working women.
There is one pay for men, and another pay for women; ‘his’ and ‘her’ salaries. Nearly a quarter of a billion women have entered the global workforce over the past decade, the report says, and yet the pay
gap between the sexes has only widened.
In the desi context, to be paid at all is the goal as unpaid work is the norm. The WEF report says it is the prevalence of unpaid work that burdens women and adds that the gap in economic opportunity is now larger than at any point since 2008.
While men don their work suits and leave every morning to do 34 per cent more paid work than women, the latter are literally left holding the baby, doing housework and looking after any stray elderly in their care. Which is how they come to be working more and longer and larger and further than their men-folk, with no bank balance to speak of.
Portugal and Estonia shake hands with India on this front; their women too clock around 50 work days more than their men on an annual basis. The half a dozen countries where men work longer than women are mostly Nordic; here parental leave is shared between the sexes, because, hey, they made those kids together.
In the UK, too, women work longer than men, but only 12 days more. But between the sexes, we always have to mind the gap. A recent survey of 1,600 employees by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development in England found that women here work about 34 hours a week on average, which is half a day longer than the 30.4 hours five years earlier. Men’s work hours at the same time dived from 45.5 hours weekly to 44.8 hours.
By and large in offices everywhere, it would seem Eve watches the same clock.
(Antony is a short-story writer)
shinie antony
@shinieantony