(STATS) Why Women Still Need To Get Paid More
When I entered the workforce as a young woman, I was under the impression equality was here. Boy was I wrong.
It’s 2020 and women are still not getting paid enough.
I’ve prepared some statistics for you - that really surprised me when I first read them. I think they will surprise you too.
(want me to read ‘em to ya? just hit play :)
The gender pay gap is STILL a thing - and it’s probably worse than you thought.
Maclean's magazine released an issue of their magazine two years ago, which indicated that the pay gap in Canada (and when I say pay Gap what I mean is the exact same job or the exact same work - and what women get paid for it and what men get paid for it) and in Maclean's magazine, they showed that in Canada the wage gap is still around the 20 percent. Globally it's around 30 percent. So what that means is that basically
https://www.macleans.ca/society/why-macleans-is-asking-men-to-pay-26-more-for-our-latest-issue/
For the exact same work and exact same hours, women get paid between 20 and 30 percent less than their male counterparts.
Now this statistic sucks. It really sucks and I want to share as well that research has indicated that when we are looking at these numbers. We are accounting for things like maternity leave. We are accounting for things like time off for maternity leave. We are levelling out all these other additional factors because a lot of people when they are looking at the gender pay Gap, they're like, oh it's because women take maternity leave or because they don't ask for raises or whatever the case is.
Actually…there's a ton of research that has been done by organizations as prestigious as Harvard which indicate that women actually do act the same in offices.
Women do ask for raises as often as men, but the data shows there's bias, so women tend not to get the first promotion.
There is the glass ceiling of course. So in the workplace, we have the this gender pay gap. So this is what's driving a lot of women to become self-employed because you just can't get the same leadership roles. You can't get the same pay now.
I want to just mention as well that the statistics of record around the twenty to thirty percent wage gap here in Canada and in the States It gets much much worse if you are a woman of colour, if you are an Aboriginal woman or if you are a woman with disabilities. The pay Gap can then drop to as low as 60 percent. So that means that you're getting paid forty percent of what a white male makes.
This is the primary reason why women need to get paid more because they've been getting paid less, historically, for ages. This is actually - these stats have gotten better. This is an improvement! So that is the first set of statistics I wanted to share with you.
I was under the impression that equality was here and we didn't need to have these conversations anymore.
I wasn't aware of the fact that gender inequality, in terms of pay, still existed and I'm here to tell you that these statistics that I'm sharing with you there within three years old.
They are very, very, very up-to-date - click the links to view the sources of the data.
These statistics will shock you
“The numbers show that we need to work an extra one to six months out of the year in order to make the same amount of money that somebody with the same qualifications, in the same role, doing the same work would make - simply just because we are women”
The pay gap is actually worse for self-employed women.
A lot of women go into self-employment for these reasons thinking that they're going to have the ability to direct their own destiny, to ask for money, etc, etc. But actually for Freelancers and for self-employed women the wage Gap goes from about twenty to seventy nine percent down to 58. So that means self-employed women are making less money than self-employed men. There's a number of reasons for that. But I just want to share with you that if you’re a woman and don't feel like you're getting paid all that much it's because you're not - it's actually real. That's the actual cash money situation.
Unpaid labour is still predominantly done by women- even if they are the breadwinner
With respect to unpaid work, this is still another issue… globally women do 4 times the amount of unpaid work that men do.
What that means is: taking care of the home, taking care of the kids, elder care, if that's the case. There was just a study released here in Canada and one in the States as well in the last year or so which indicates that “Yes" women are still doing the bulk of domestic labor, even if they are the breadwinner.”
So this is called the “second shift” and it looks like unpaid labor. Basically taking care of the house, taking care of the kids, taking care of any aging elders, making sure there's food the fridge, remembered birthdays, you know, I don't need to explain it to you, you know very well with the second shift looks like but what I'm saying is that it can take away from paid labor and that it is still work, even though it's not paid.
The cost of being professionally pretty is … pretty freaking high.
This brings me to the third shift. The cost of being and looking professional as a woman again, some of these statistics really surprised me. So I wanted to share them with you -
The an average urban professional woman will spend $250,000 on her appearance in her entire life.
So that's a lot of money, right? That's like a Harvard degree and she will spend about an hour a day getting ready which adds up to two weeks of her entire life.
And these women are indicating that this is actually considered to be something they perceive to be mandatory, something that they HAVE to do in order to participate in the workforce. Source: The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf P.52 )
The aggregate of all this data is that there's a lot of pressure on increased time requirements: the second shift with caregiving responsibilities and taking care of the home and less resources on the other side in terms of getting paid in the workplaces and getting paid as a freelancer or self-employed person and then more going out in terms of money being spent on beauty etcetera.
Getting access to loans is still harder than it should be
Being able to grow and scale businesses by is getting access to funding, loans and investment is necessary to reinvest in, and scale businesses.
In 1988 - up until that point, so it's not that long ago guys - you actually needed to have your husband co-sign for you in order to get a business loan!
Yeah, so that really points to a lack of ability to find your own your own Ventures because up to a hundred years ago women were considered to be property of their husbands.
So, of course if you were property, you can't have property, you can't have savings. You can't have loans. You can't have anything in your name. There is that history and that legacy of not being able to build credit or to build wealth.
As a result, women don't show up on the Fortune 500 list very often. We are not in the list of world's wealthiest people very often because of this legacy and again, the reason I'm sharing this information is because, when I first entered the workforce as a young professional woman, when I first became self-employed, I had no idea that these biases still existed.
I didn't realize that this disparity still existed but it does and it impacts women and this is these are some of the reasons why we need to be earning more money - because historically we have not been able to.
Venture capitalists allocate 97%-90% of their investment to male-led firms.
The last point I just want to share is with respect to venture capital, investment money: between three and ten percent of investment money goes to women-led firms - despite the fact that they tend to perform better than male led firms.
So 3 and 10 percent that means that 97 to 90% of the funding goes towards male created firms and this is problematic for a number reasons - because based on the interview, I just did with Robin, a mental health professional last week, that the workplace is constructed mostly by the male gender so where there is power, there is power disparity.
If women don't have access to wealth, we don't have much in the way of savings or access to credit, we don't have access to financing, we're being stretched thin with extra workloads in the second and third shift, PLUS extra expenses to be considered professional what this does is it creates a very dangerous sort of situation around too many outgoing flows for energy and for money and not enough coming in.
This is one of the reasons that I think it's extremely important for us to support each other, to help each other make more money to start to close that gender wage gap - to be able to create jobs, to create innovation in the world so we can create the kind of world that women want to see so that way we can close the gap with unpaid labor and actually paid labor.
This is all super depressing, so, now what?
Surprise! This takes a toll on a woman’s mental health. Join us in the free support group here.
If you are having issues with asking for money if you are not sure how to position your offer, if you are not sure how to sell or market yourself. It is one of my gifts. It's what I've been doing for a living for a super long time and I encourage you to reach out to me.
There are a ton of free resources on my website in terms of items that you can use to help yourself and any sort of sales and marketing or business capacity, there are a lot of free resources.
There's some paid stuff and of course you can work with me one on one as well or in a group setting if you need assistance with this, but these statistics really surprised me when I read them. I wanted to share them.
If you are hesitant asking for money, I want you to think about these statistics and think about how we really do have a lot of work that we're doing for free. We have a lot of pressure on us and we don't have a lot of resources. So please do ask for more money.
If you found this valuable, please share it with friends and family. Thank you.