Icelandic women went on strike this week. Irish women should follow suit

Many years ago, when working in a large London bank, a few days around Christmas before we broke up for the holidays some alpha male fathers brought their children into work. The ritual struck me as odd. Was this to suggest that these men were human too? They might love their children while at the same time enjoy humiliating their juniors, screwing competitors on deals, self-importantly flying around the world and generally being big balls on the trading floor.

The mothers in the same bank never paraded their little ones around the place at Christmas time. Most of them never referred to their children. A powerful corporate man flaunting his kids around for one day a year was seen as a sign of strength. For a powerful corporate woman the same show of alfresco parenting would, they thought, be taken as a sign of weakness.

For some reason this disparity stayed with me. It returned when reading about Reykjavik this week.

On Tuesday people in Iceland woke up to an unusual and rather grating noise, male voices only on morning radio, reading the news and weather, male presenters interviewing male politicians, ads with only male voices. This on-air bloke-fest was the result of an all-out female strike across the island nation for gender pay equality.

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Schools closed, as did hospitals, and Iceland’s burgeoning hospitality and tourist industry ground to a halt. Hotels closed, as did cafés and bars. Work in major corporations and the public sector stalled, and the services sector – accountants, lawyers, marketing and sales departments – folded for 24 hours. The country’s prime minister Katrin Jakobsdottir and half of her cabinet took the day off. No national decisions were taken.

If Icelanders, in a country with the smallest gender pay gap in the world, didn’t appreciate just how much of their economy and society is run by women – who still are paid less than men – by Wednesday nobody could say they didn’t know.

Will we have the same here? Will Irish women go on strike, saying enough is enough? If Icelandic women have just cause so too do Irish women. Like Iceland, Ireland aspires, legally, to gender equality. In practice woman still take home less than men and this is despite the fact that Irish women are better educated than Irish men. When it comes to education 57 per cent of women in Ireland aged 25–64-years-old are educated to tertiary level, which is not only a great deal higher than the EU-27 average of 36 per cent but it is also higher than the rate in every other country in the EU-27.

Latest Eurostat figures, referenced by Taoiseach Leo Varadkar in the Dáil, show the total gender pay gap for Ireland is 11.3 per cent, just below an EU-wide average of 13 per cent. Even deep in government, in the Department of the Taoiseach, for example, the gender pay gap is 8.82 per cent in favour of male employees.

In some multinationals it’s worse. In JP Morgan the median gender pay gap was 15.47 per cent and, worse still, the mean hourly gender pay gap was 22.4 per cent, which is 11.1 per cent above the national average. A PwC analysis published earlier this year found Irish organisations that published gender pay gap reports in December 2022 had a mean gender pay gap of 12.6 per cent.*

What’s happening?

Earlier this month the Nobel Prize for economics was won by the American economist Claudia Golden for her work on gender pay inequality. Golden, the “economist as detective”, has sifted through reams of material to explore how pay gaps endure, irrespective of legislation.

The main factor that explains the persistence of inequality is parenting. Many working mothers might well guffaw at this: You get a Nobel Prize for figuring out that? Any mother juggling school runs, homework, clean football gear, the dinner and that five o clock conference call on the company’s latest sales projections, could’ve told you that!

The issue is that, despite all the emancipating legislation, mothers tend to remain the “on-call” parent. Mothers are much more likely than fathers to be asked to make the “choice” between children and work, shouldering the burden of the “trade-off”, whereas men just talk about it.

On a historical basis Goldin has also noted the idea of the U-shaped pattern of women in the workforce. We can see this pattern in Ireland. Some 100 years ago or so when work moved from the household, family farm and small business to the factories, women’s participation fell and women’s incomes relative to men’s collapsed. Then, from the 1950s, as work became available in the service sector, women started going back to work. Contraception has had a huge impact on women in the workplace as women had more control over the size of their family and the “trade-off” between children and work became, if not easier, somewhat more manageable. The link between the pill and women’s education is also strong.

But we still have a gap, and it comes down to this juggling act.

In America, for high-achieving women with MBAs, children and childcare remain the major impediment to equality. Mothers take more time off work than fathers. In the first 15 years following their MBA, women with children take off an average of eight months more than men. In general women with children typically work 24 per cent fewer weekly hours than the average male; women without children work only 3.3 per cent fewer hours. But we are only talking here about paid work. What about unpaid work, such as childcare or housework? And because of all the juggling almost one-third of women (28 per cent) work part-time compared to just 8 per cent of men but when both unpaid and paid work are considered, women work more hours per week than men.

In the EU, where social protection is more evolved than in the US, women are much more likely than men to take career breaks to accommodate family responsibilities. In 2018, a third of employed women in the EU had a work interruption for childcare reasons, compared to just 1.3 per cent of men.

Insidiously, it’s not just that women are not present as much in the workplace but when they are they are – incredibly – not always regarded as entirely dependable. There is a tendency in service industries like law, accountancy and consultancy, where outside clients pay the big bills, for the “more important” clients – who need lots of attention – to be given to male partners and senior management. This means men tend to become more senior more quickly, bill more hours, and advance up the corporate ladder quicker.

Although we have come some way since macho office dads showed off their progenies before visiting Santa, we still have some way to go. Maybe a national strike, if not quite the universal panacea, might at least shine a light on the anxieties suffered daily by working mothers who keep the whole show on the road.

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*This article was amended to correct an erroneous reference to PwC having a mean hourly gender pay gap of 12.6 per cent. When PwC published its Gender Pay gap report in December of last year, it said the mean gender pay gap at the firm was 0.9 per cent.