According to this report from Yahoo News, Australian men can potentially earn up to $1million dollars more than women over a lifetime. The gist of the article states that there is still a relatively large income gap between men and women.
AMP Financial Services managing director Craig Meller is quoted in the report stating, “There is still more work to be done to narrow the gender divide, particularly in the child rearing years.”
I’ve long been fascinated by these reports and their conclusions. Stats are only ever as good as the numbers you put into them – and I often think these sorts of stats miss some important observations.
Firstly, pay structures between men and women are generally egalitarian. So a female doctor with x number of years experience will be paid the same as a male doctor with the same experience. A male administrative assistant will be paid the same as a female administrative assistant doing the same level of work. Gone are the days when a woman would be paid less for the same work as a man.
Secondly, these stats always show a discrepancy primarily because the income figures of higher managers and CEOs are included. And the majority of higher end managers and CEOs, who are paid much higher salaries, tend to be male. Hence the perceived imbalance on the ‘average‘ income of men and women.
Does that mean there is still an imbalance? On the surface there appears to be. But there’s another untold victim in this story which these reports seem to often miss – motherhood.
Since the rise of the feminist movement over the last century we’ve seen an increasing push, by women, to be seen as equal to (or better) than men. That these comparative income reports keep coming out with the same conclusions shows that the push is not yet finished. However the victim in these reports aren’t the lower-income earning women, it’s motherhood.
Let me explain. The reason why most managerial positions are held by men is not because men are necessarily better, but because women tend to have children and spend ‘their better working years’ at home raising the children. Those years ‘lost’ to raising of children are often years lost working your way up the corporate ladder. This has forced many women between the two opposing choices – stay at home to raise a family, or forgo motherhood altogether in order to work your way to the top. Some women have attempted to harmonise both worlds by working whilst raising families – and we should honour the efforts of those women who balance work and raising children at the same time.
But the choices remain, and they remain in stark contrast to each other. For a woman to be seen to accomplish any great feat requires a sacrifice which is increasingly becoming less desirable. Miss the years to raise children in order to be seen as successful. It is little wonder that there is an increasing voice of discontent for women in high-end jobs.
I say all this to point out a few things:
1. Our church needs to be working hard to promote biblical complementarianism. We need to better support mothers and motherhood in our church and esteem the role of women in child bearing and raising. And our witness in this world will be better served if the world can see how much the men in our church love and support our women and promote their true femininity in Christ.
2. We need to keep discerning our world, culture and the information we receive from it. And we need to be weary of jumping onto bandwagons of the day.
3. And finally, feminism does not hurt men – it hurts women. It denies biblical reality that men and women are indeed created differently. It denies that men and women are created with purpose and dignity and strips women of their God-given femininity and replaces it with a masculine ideal of feminism.
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