Raising the Floor

TUESDAY OF THIS WEEK WAS EQUAL PAY DAY – a date missed by millions.We have the four main kinds of wages: minimum, subsistence, living, and fair wages. But the most important one is missing from this list – equal wage. According to Statistics Canada, women over 15 make up 48% of our national workforce. Yet when you add it all up, women working full-time make 72 cents for every dollar made by men undertaking the same responsibilities. So, yes, efforts at improving wages are vital for those in low-income situations, but our ultimate efforts must seriously embrace an equal wage between the genders.It’s one thing to recognize gender equality and elevate women’s issues in public consciousness and in politics, but until equal pay for equal work is achieved our words will ring hollow.This emptiness has endured for decades – a reality acknowledged by the United Nations in 2015 when it recognized that out of 34 countries, Canada maintained the 7^th highest gender wage gap. That put us at 27^th on the list. The UN Human Rights Report concluded that “the persisting inequalities between women and men,” including this high level of pay gap, had a disproportionate effect on low-income women, visible minority women, and indigenous women.Okay, so this is a bit embarrassing, but the real discomfort we might be experiencing is that we have yet to make significant headway. As with the concept of a Living Wage, implementation will take time, especially due to all the complexities that will impact equal pay for equal work. It takes time for us to get our heads around the problem. We understand that. But the needle has moved so little in recent years, even as gender issues have take on increased prominence in the public, political, and policy arenas.Talk to most people in any coffee shop today and you’ll find near unanimous agreement with the idea of equal pay for equal work, yet we somehow never get around to it, either to study it or level the economic playing field. For sure, it will be a costly advancement, but so is defeating climate change, poverty, or unemployment – challenges upon which societies move ahead.Another excuse for inaction has been that what is going on right now is legal – no one’s breaking the law. As my friend Tim Carrie posted on Facebook yesterday:

• Apartheid was legal.
• The Holocaust we legal.
• Slavery as legal.
• Colonialism was legal.

There’s a lesson in this – namely that legality is primarily about power, not justice, and the longer we permit these legal paradigms to linger the harder it will be for the human race to make any effective advancement. Laws must be changed.  Or as author Farshad Asl plainly stated: “Leadership is the act of serving others and has no gender preference.” But we do have this preference and it infests so much of our collective life. It’s expensive. It’s hurtful. It’s inhumane. And if our aspirations mean anything, it’s unCanadian.Hillary Clinton has been fond of saying American’s primary season that it’s time to break through the glass ceiling in regards to women’s role in society and in leadership. Agreed. But as Sheryl Sandberg has written: “We must raise both the ceiling and the floor.”  That can't be done without equal pay.Tomorrow:  More about equal pay and how to take action