Equal pay for equal work - still a global sick joke at the expense of women.
In Australia 40 years after the Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Commission established the principle that women should receive equal pay for equal work and 10 years after establishment of the Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace Act 1999 (EOWW Act) the following conditions still exist.
· Women working full-time, year-round in Australia are paid only about 83 cents for every dollar earned by men.
· Lower wages mean less lifetime earnings for women giving them a lifetime of fewer choices.
· Some women in CEO and finance positions earn less than half of their male equivalents.
· The pay gap for women key management personnel is on average 28.3%, 11% higher than the national average gender pay gap.
· The average superannuation payout to a woman is projected to be $150,000: that’s half of the average payout to a man in 2010-11.
· The 17.3% gender pay gap is a national average that opens up to over 30% in some industry sectors.
· Pay inequity reveals systemic discrimination and continued under-valuation of women’s work.
· Equal pay for women can raise family income which means more money to spend on food, housing and childcare. Single mothers and working families lose thousands of dollars annually to the wage gap.
[ taken from http://www.equalpayday.com.au/]
* If current earning patterns continue, the average 25 year old male would earn $2.4 million over the next 40 years while the average 25 year old female would earn $1.5 million (AMP NATSEM (2009), “She works hard for the money”, Income and Wealth Report, Issue 22, p. 34 available at http://www.amp.com.au/vgn-ext-templating/v/index.jsp?vgnextoid=bdb250665a6cc110VgnVCM1000002930410aRCRD
* Women are two and half times more likely to live in poverty in their old age than men — by 2019, on average, women will have half the amount of superannuation that men have (Queensland Government (2009), “Women and Superannuation”, Focus on Women, Office for Women, Information Paper 3) available at http://www.women.qld.gov.au/resources/focus-on-women/
* The pay gap starts from the moment women leave university, with female graduates earning on average $2,000 p/a less than male graduates ( GradStats 2008, Table 4, available at http://www.graduatecareers.com.au/content/view/full/24)
[taken from National Foundation for Australian Women]
"Many Australians believe women won equal pay in the 70s - but they are wrong," ACTU president Sharan Burrow.
Yes, you've come a long way but you still have a long way to go - and it's only taken an entire lifetime (from babe in arms to retirement) for women to achieve an average female wage rise from around 50 per cent of the average male wage to about 83 per cent of the average male wage. A mere 33 percentge points increase towards wage equality.
Cartoon from Google Images
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