Courtesy of Dian Cohen
By Dian Cohen
Local Journalism Initiative
This little item appeared in the newspapers I submitted to back in 1973. Most women didn’t work outside the home, and with the average salary being around $10,000/year, this was pretty off-the-wall revolutionary.
And maybe subversive. After all, women weren’t meant to work in the real world — being a woman meant being passive, kind, nurturing, helpful and caring – everything required for rearing children, pacifying husbands and keeping a clean and welcoming home. The women’s lib referred to in that long ago piece was in its second wave in Canada, having benefitted from the women who transformed the idea of women as natural caregivers into women holding public office to care for and civilize society. That was happening just around the time I was born. Hail to the Persons Five.
Of course, the more masculine characteristics of problem-solving with brute force made women who went into the workforce acceptable — by 1944, more than a million women worked full-time in Canada’s paid labour force. Many women expressed the view that after the war, they should be trained or retrained for jobs on the same basis as men and that household workers should receive labor benefits like unemployment insurance. Not to be. Five years after the war ended, more than half a million women were back at home.
The same equity suggestions were raised decades later in the 1970 Royal Commission on the Status of Women. It was not as widely promoted as a stunningly bold advertising campaign that touted smoking as the key to female empowerment, independence, confidence and liberation. To this day, a lot more of us know the phrase “you’ve come a long way, baby” than what was accomplished by the Royal Commission. (Women couldn’t open a bank account, get a credit card or a mortgage without a male co-signer. The Royal Commission made this illegal.)
Women’s rights legislation has continued onward and upward – the Canadian Human Rights Charter, Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Employment Equity Act, Public Sector Equitable Compensation Act, Pay Equity Act. They undoubtedly helped — in the ‘70s, about 3 million women were in the workforce and the pay gap was close to 40 percent. Today, there are 10 million women in the paid workforce, still a participation rate that is less than men, and now earning, on average, 12 percent less than men.
To understand why the gap remains, we need go no further than Harvard professor Claudia Goldin. She’s now 77 and has spent her whole working life filling in the data gaps and misconceptions about women in the work force – for which she received the Nobel Prize in economics last year. Canadian data is not as detailed but supports Goldin’s conclusions. Here’s what we now know: back in the day, the wage gap can be explained through differences in education and occupational choices – since women were expected to stay at home, they didn’t get as much education, and those that did paid work did it in ‘domestic’ professions like looking after children or housecleaning, which were lower-paying jobs.
More recently, women in general are more educated than men. The pay differences between men and women in the same profession have more to do with lifestyle choices. The wage gap widens after the birth of the first child. Women still do most of the unpaid caregiving so they still take more time off from work. Their career path has gaps and they make less. Interestingly, while mothers make less than non-mothers because they work less, fathers make more than non-fathers over the course of their careers.
Couples make these choices together. Employers pay a premium now for people who will be on call 24/7. Many couples find it makes sense for fathers to respond to the needs of paid work and mothers to answer to the needs of kids. Goldin says, “Why can’t dual-career families share the joys and duties of parenting equally? They could, but if they did, they would be leaving money on the table, often quite a lot. The 50-50 couple might be happier but would be poorer.” (A small, aside: now that men get paternity leave, a study out of Spain provides evidence that while women take “maternity leave full-time and immediately after childbirth, men split their leave entitlement into several periods that are spread out during the first year of the child’s life, with a significant spike in the summer months… We find that a disproportionate number of men were on paternity leave during the exact dates of the 2022 soccer World Cup, relative to the surrounding dates.” Do men really do more caregiving?)
Were I to write the article today, I would note that the shape of paid work is changing – remote and online work play to women’s strengths. Otherwise, not much is different. Unpaid housewives still work about 15 hours a day – about 100 hours a week. Their tasks have expanded beyond what I could think of 50 years ago: Salary.com lists chief financial officer, chief operating officer, logistics analyst, housekeeper, laundry manager, van driver, public school teacher, facilities manager, event planner, kitchen manager, assistant athletics director, staff nurse, bookkeeper, physical therapy supervisor, nutrition director, consumer loan officer, fast food cook, server, conflicts manager, interior designer, fundraising coordinator. According to several different surveys, the value of this unpaid work has risen to around $190,000/year.