Last Sunday, I had taken my daughter and a friend to visit the Teen Murti Bhavan. As I relived my history textbooks and walked her from hall to hall, I was blown away by the early strides in women?s rights movements, including universal suffrage in India from the 1920s right alongside much of the developed world. Today, undeniably, women voting percentages and representation at local, state, and national levels in India have improved significantly for us. We are ranked 43 out of 146 countries on political empowerment within the recently published WEF Global Gender Gap index.
Yet we slide backward on perhaps the most important one, women’s economic participation, and opportunity where we’re ranked an embarrassing 143 out of 146 countries. It is estimated this will take 267 years to close the gap vs men globally, as you can imagine the gap for us will take far longer to close at our current pace.
This index is driven by how many women work and how much they get paid.
In the past, I’ve written about our declining women?s workforce participation and brainstormed around how we could incentivise young women to join and employers to hire to stem the gap.
In this piece, I’m going to talk about the gender pay gap with some hypotheses around why it occurs with some tactical workarounds.
So what is the gender wage gap? Sometimes this gets confused with equal pay. Equal pay simply means that for an identical task performed, men and women should get paid the same. A gender wage gap is a simpler metric that studies the differential earnings of men and women. This could be attributed to multiple factors, here I list a few:
DIFFERENCES IN THE SECTORS AND JOBS CHOSEN
The top results of a Google search of “career choices for women in India” throws up several inane articles and with a great deal of consensus, the choices are teaching, human resource management, journalism, social media management, and even a nutritionist makes the cut!
The same search for men yields engineers, software developers, game designers, doctors, pilots, architects, and the likes.
The search results are just a reflection of the search engine optimized traffic and clicks and hence a good reflection of what choices young people are thinking through as they enter the workforce. This level of occupational segregation can be easily observed in the workplace too.
So what’s wrong with that you ask? Each and every choice that cropped up for women was on average a low-paying sector or job vs the choices offered to men.
A number of research studies have shown that women consistently ‘satisfice’ when it comes to choosing careers vs men who are likely to ‘optimise’. Men are likely to solve for the highest paying job given other contextual factors such as their grades or interests. Women will think through the implications of managing the home and family and self-select jobs that ‘satisfy’ and ‘suffice’ setting them up for a lifetime of diminished earnings potential.
Over time, the pay differential between a man and woman increases and post children, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy for the woman to drop out of the workforce as her loss of job has little to no impact on the household earnings.
It’s very important to have an authentic conversation about these choices. We need to talk about how much a journalist is going to earn vs a software developer. We need to stick to averages and not be swayed by outliers in our decision-making.
This brings me to my second point of difference. The subjects we choose as women in our secondary years.
DIFFERENCES IN THE SUBJECT CHOICES AT SCHOOL
A lot of your career choices are determined by the subjects you choose in the 11th and 12th grades. There is an opportunity to modify that somewhat in the first year you enter college. It’s amazing that 15-year-olds are expected to get this right. I have only two pieces of advice to give based on my first and second-hand triumphs and failures.
Choose math. No one is so bad at math that they should not study it till the 12th grade. There are several courses that you cannot take if you drop this subject. It is fascinating to me how many girls drop maths because they don’t like it. I can tell you what you will like even less, getting paid less consistently.
My 13-year-old niece wants to study design and she is so fabulous at it. However, if she excelled at a design course and dropped maths, there is a host of design jobs options that would close for her. For example, product design, industrial design, and even architecture. These also happen to be the higher-paying design jobs compared to multimedia or graphic design. She was not even aware of the implications of dropping maths. Sadly, even schools are happy to have what they consider average students drop maths to improve their overall scores.
Choose subjects that expand your career horizons widely. So subjects that for instance would allow you to switch to communication or design or economics or business studies. The last thing you want to do is ‘satisfice’ with college because you chose some subjects when you were 15 years old!
DIFFERENCES IN THE YEARS OF WORK EXPERIENCE
Women drop out of the workforce to raise children, look after elders and provide caregiving to the sick. Eventually, real progress will mean an equal sharing of a burden on these dimensions. That journey is complicated and ridden with years of conditioning.
But for women who have managed to get employed, do everything you can to stay employed. Every year of continuous employment improves not just your income levels but your future hiring prospect. Work out flexible working arrangements with your managers, there is even a likelihood of a flexible working arrangement bill being passed to protect your rights as a flexible worker. Employers by and large recognize the power of having more women at the workplace and authentic conversations around why you need flexibility, till when you need it and clearly defined outputs can lead to win-wins.
DIFFERENCES IN SALARIES DUE TO BIASES
Companies are not transparent about the salaries they pay to employees. However, in the organised sector, the entry-level salaries for the same roles are almost certainly equal for men and women. Yet, over the years, biases in the form of both perceiving the rise in the output of women and hence their salary growth as well as negotiations for salaries and promotions create and widen the gap. Another time, I’d love to list down my shared experiences in countering these biases. Several research studies have pointed out that as troublesome as this is, it is not a leading cause of the earnings gap.
There are a lot of feminists who believe that ‘choice’ and hence a woman’s agency to choose a career of her calling or study subjects of her preference or even to work is the hallmark of emancipation. In theory and in a perfect world, this may be true. Today when we stare at a situation where we are essentially disappearing from the workplace and earning salaries far less than men, it’s time to work and earn as equals.
Because money is power. And as women, we have less of both leaving us with no hope of independence, social or economic.
Simran Khara is the founder of Koparo Clean. She is an alumnus of ISB, Hyderabad, London School of Economics (UK) and Shri Ram College of Commerce, Delhi University. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the stand of this publication.
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