Editorial | Closing the gender pay gap

The yawning wage gap between Jamaica’s men and women, highlighted last week by the Caribbean Policy Research Institute (CAPRI), is a profoundly moral, economic and, this newspaper believes, constitutional issue that requires urgent action by the Government to ensure that a right guaranteed by the state isn’t systemically abridged for half of its citizens.

According to data released by CAPRI from a recent study of the matter, women in Jamaica, on average, earn only 61 per cent of the income of males – a gap of 39 per cent. That this differential exists isn’t unusual. That men earn more, and as a rule are wealthier than women, is a global phenomenon.

What, however, is surprising is the breadth of the gap, which, compared with data from other reports, makes Jamaica among the worst for gender pay gaps in the Caribbean, as well as being a laggard with respect to other global partners.

In Barbados, for instance, women earn, some studies suggest, just shy of 87 per cent of their male counterparts. That 13 per cent differential is approximately the same as what obtains in the European Union as a whole, although there is a wide swing between individual EU members – ranging from a 22.3 per cent deficit in Latvia to almost full parity in Luxembourg and Ireland.

As elsewhere in the world, the reasons for the pay/income gap in Jamaica – where females account for 70 per cent of the enrolment in tertiary education institutions, and per capita, are more likely to hold managerial jobs than their global counterparts – are old and complex.

Socialisation is an important factor. Women are often acculturised to enter professions that pay less and to make job choices contingent on their family/caring obligations which impact their careers and earning potential. Indeed, in the CAPRI survey 57 per cent of women said they considered family duties when making job decisions. No male gave that as a constraint.

UNPAID WORK

Then there is the substantial amount of unpaid work performed by women in the home and elsewhere which, at four hours a day, is twice as much as men. On the other hand, men do 50 per cent more paid work than women.

There is also the workplace bias, conscious and unconscious, against female employees, which affects issues like promotions and, ultimately, salaries. Women are overlooked for a promotion because of bosses’ concerns that the time they spend running households and being carers will conflict with the time demands of their jobs.

So notwithstanding their education and dominance in mid-level management positions, women soon hit the glass ceiling, while men, as CAPRI puts it, get placed on the “glass escalator”, being fast-tracked to promotion.

And even when men and women do similar work and/or have similar responsibilities within the same organisation, in a not insignificant amount of cases females are paid less.

Overall, a quarter of the graduates in the CAPRI study felt that they were paid less than colleagues in the same enterprise who do comparable jobs. Significantly, though, 88 per cent of those who harboured this perception were women. Further, 40 per cent of the group knew someone who felt they were in a similar position. And in 90 per cent of the cases that someone was a female.

That this gender pay gap not only persists in Jamaica, but to the scale that it does is especially notable in two respects. First, the Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms, at Section 13(3) (j) (i) of the Jamaican Constitution guarantees all citizens “the right to freedom from discrimination on the ground of being male or female”.

The island’s courts have held that the rights and freedoms guaranteed by the charter are justiciable if infringed by private individuals and not only if the abrogation is by the state. Notwithstanding the argument that they may have other available remedies, female employees who believe they suffer systemic wage discrimination may wish to test the constitutional route to redress the matter.

HOLD GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTABLE

They may also contemplate asking the courts to hold the Government accountable for failing to fulfil its obligation, implied by the Constitution, of ensuring pay equity by not enforcing its own law on the matter.

The Employment (Equal Pay for Men and Women) Act of 1975 bars employers from discriminating “between male and female employees” by “failing to pay equal pay for equal work” done in the same establishment.

The punishment for breaching this law is a fine of J$200 or a jail term of up to a year. The court may order that the victimised employee be reimbursed the foregone pay.

Critics have complained that the penalties haven’t been updated in the near half century since the law was passed. That, however, isn’t the cause for ineffectiveness in significantly moving the needle on gender pay equity. Its main failing is a lack of enforcement – partly because aggrieved workers don’t usually complain against recalcitrant employers.

Indeed, 90 per cent of the employees in the CAPRI survey, who felt they were victims of pay discrimination, didn’t report the matter. Yet, the law requires an attempt at mediation before a case can go to court.

Workers don’t complain because they don’t feel empowered to do so. The issue of gender inequity, and legal prescriptions to it, isn’t heralded by the authorities. The diminution of the trade union movement in recent decades contributes to this failure. Educating workers on their rights, therefore, would be a start to dealing with the problem.

But the more effective solution will be transparency about pay regimes, such as the EU agreed in December to implement, and is already in place in some countries.

Under the proposed EU rules, companies with at least 100 employees will have to report their gender pay gap, and workers will have the right to request from their employers the average pay level, broken down by the sex, for categories of employees doing the same jobs, or jobs of equal value.

Even before the Government introduces such a law, the Jamaica Stock Exchange, as CAPRI proposed, should make it part of the governance requirement for listed companies.