International Equal Pay Day: A Global Call to Action | Journée internationale de l’égalité de rémunération –: appel à l’action dans le monde

Hi, my name is Katie Ward and I'm the commissioner and CAO of Ontario's Pay Equity Commission. This is a podcast about economics, equity, women work and money. Welcome to level the paying field. We want to make the world a more equitable place where women can work, live and thrive. In this podcast, we take the equity conversation to new heights to impact change. Speaking with economists, policymakers, and global thought leaders, we wanted to talk about and investigate the impact the global pandemic has had on women and examine pay equity's resurgence as an imperative to economic recovery. Recently, we've coined the terms, "she session," "she recovery," with governments and agencies and businesses talking about a feminist post-COVID recovery. This series is intended to keep that conversation going, so policymakers, thought leaders, executives, and professionals in the equity and inclusion ecosystem continue creating legislation or programs that address women's economic justice, support closing the gender wage gap, and promote women's participation in the labor market. In this episode, we're going to introduce you to two of my colleagues at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or OECD, and the International Labor Organization, ILO. Both organizations were instrumental in inaugurating International Equal Pay Day. Together, in collaboration with United Nations Women, the OECD and the ILO make up the Equal Pay International Coalition, or EPIC. EPIC advocates and organizes for equal pay globally. My first guest is Monica Quesser. She's head of the Social Policy Division and Senior Counselor to the Director of the Employment, Labor, and Social Affairs Directorate at the OECD. OECD, as you know, leads the Equal Pay International Coalition together with United Nations Women and the Instructional Labor Organization. And we know that OECD members have seen progress in closing the gender wage gap, though the gap does persist across OEDC members. So I wanted to ask you, why does that gap persist from what you've learned through research and what needs to be done to continue to close the gap? So, the Equal Pay International Coalition is indeed a very interesting initiative that the OECD, the ILO, and the Women Together founded. We're so delighted to have many countries known for Canada as a big player in EPIC, as we call it. And there's companies, there's trade unions, there's countries, like I said, international organizations. So I'm really happy that this is taking off and that we're building a truly a coalition that is fighting this gender figure. I think we have to work on different areas. First of all, we have to understand it better. And unfortunately, despite the data, despite the best analysis, when you do the calculations and decompose, you look at here's the gap, you think that, and then you chop it up into little pieces, what we call decompose, and say, this part comes from the fact that girls are going into different occupations. This part comes from the fact that they have children. Then there's different sectors in which work, so it's not only the education, but even we looked at women who were going into STEM and who were trained to be scientists, oftentimes they ended up in schools teaching science, being in a lab, or being in an innovative company, doing science there. So it's not only what you study, but then where you go to private sector, you go to public, do your work for hours, or do you spend a lot of time working shorter hours because you're trying to combine it with school time of children. So these are all factors, but then there's a huge part of the standard wage gap, which is called unexplained, that means you don't really know where it comes from. And what is that? Those are the more nasty things, like discrimination. These are things we all know exists, but you can't really measure them. So there's other factors that come into play, which we really have to know more about. And we have to get a better handle on it, we have to continue to push hard and explore further how to do this. Can you tell us how the OECD's gender data portal helps policymakers and leaders better understand the gender gaps? Sure. The OECD gender play data portal is a collection, it's like a platform where we collect lots of different things. As the name says, data is, of course, a really important part of it, and data is with drives policy. So that's why we at the OECD really say so much emphasis on data. If we don't know what's really going on, it's going to be very hard to meet anybody to change anything. So it's not enough to say, oh, but women are disadvantaged in the labor market and they don't get nice jobs. And so no, we really have to document it and to say how much is the gender wage gap in what sectors is that happening, what ages is that happening, when does it kick in, where does it come from? Hence education. You mentioned that when we have the OECD education employment and entrepreneurship. And those are what we call the three E's. This is where 10 years ago we started another gender initiative because education is really where any quality foundations are laid. So we have all these data and we put them there and the data portal can enable everybody whether they're researchers, students, policy makers, anybody who visits this data portal to select indicators and to choose their comparative countries. So it's a very easy thing to do is, and I was told actually that journalists love it because if you want to go and write an article and find how does Canada compare, how does another country compare? And then you say, I don't really want to be compared to Japan, I'd rather be compared to the Americas. So you click on the countries you want to look at and you get it all. So it's a very easy and accessible way to get a very clear picture and a quantitative picture on what is going on. And not only that, beyond data, you also will find links to videos, to ongoing work, to events, to blogs and many other things. And in the last 10 years, the OECD has expanded beyond those three E's at the education development and entrepreneurship into many other areas, so you will find many other topics, digitalization in women, women in agriculture, women in trade, women in environment. So we have many other topics now that are also covered by all of them. Now I want to introduce you to Manuela Pozen. She's a senior specialist on gender equality with the International Labor Organization. Together, we're going to examine what data tells us about global trends in wage equity, women's employment, and how the care economy impacts both of these spheres. So September 18, 2020 marked the inaugural International Equal Pay Day. And this day of recognition was launched in the middle of a global pandemic that we know disproportionately affected women in the workplace. What was the impetus that made recognizing the state so compelling at this time? International Equal Pay Day, last year, and this year as well, is a reminder of the inequalities that persist in the world of work, but it's also a call to action. It's a moment to celebrate and to call all actors in the labor market or anyone that can do something to address the issues of gender equality in the world of work, and to address the issue of equal pay for work of equal value. So we, the APIC, the International Coalition, we're very proud that you to be part of celebrating International Equal Pay Day. And we look forward to the next one, which will be on the 18th of September. In 2019, your team did some really exceptional research on women at work called the Quantum League for Gender Equality, which highlighted some persisted barriers for women. What barriers were identified related to the gender wage gap? Thanks for this question. And you see, when we look at the gender pay gap, we are confronted with a very uncomfortable data, because gender wage gap remains 18.8% throughout the world, from 12.6% in low income countries to 29% in upper middle income countries. So it is an issue that is widespread. It's in pretty much everywhere, every country, and it's something that calls for clearly some clear answers. But you're asking me about the reasons and the barriers. And the gender wage gap is the result of compounded inequalities that have accumulated over women's time, over life's time. And these inequalities that accumulate are also exacerbated by multiple grounds of discrimination, such as ethnicity, color, race, migration, status, age, and more. And so here we need a compass. You know, to navigate all of this, because these are just some of the reasons. As I said, it's a very complex-- the gender-wage gap is the result of many, many different factors. And so the compass is the international treaty, the international convention of the international labor organization, command the 100, which is on equal remuneration. This is very important, because it is essential to address the conscious and unconscious biases in the determination of the value of the work that is performed by women, relatively to the work performed by men. And here I would just like to underline that when we talk about the rights to receive equal pay, this is not confined to equal or similar work. So we're not talking just of the two people doing the same or similar job and being paid equally. But here we're also talking about extending about the work that may be of an entirely different nature. So two people doing different jobs. But when you actually evaluate these jobs, their value might be very similar. Another thing that-- or compounding factor, I should say, is unpaid care work. And in the ILO care report, the magnitude of unpaid work globally was highlighted. And in many ways, we've already said this coverage on the light on the ways in which unpaid labor actually underpins our economy. And you've said in an early interview that I love this quote, "The heart of change in care work is a change in the power relationship between men and women and unpaid work, so women can present in the workforce." So how is that power relationship between gender and unpaid work different across developed and developing countries? You paid on this a little bit. And in what way, if any, shifts, are you seeing the division of unpaid labor? This is a very important question because you're touching on one of the key issues that need to address when we want to advance this course on gender equality, which is the heavy amount of unpaid care work that women and men, but women in particular, do on daily basis for no reinineration. And that is work that is necessary essential for any progression of the society, because it's an extremely important part of the normal functioning of societies. And so here we have quite disturbing data in reality, because across the world, and there is no exception, women perform three quarters of unpaid care work. So 22% of the total amount of hours dedicated to unpaid care work, which goes from taking care of yourself taking care of your children, of your family members, et cetera, is provided by women. And in no country in the world, do men and women provide an equal share of unpaid care work? So this is not happening anywhere, not even in those countries that have advanced tremendously on trying to redistribute unpaid work. So women globally every day perform 4.25 to 4 hours and 25 minutes of unpaid care work compared to one hour and 23 minutes for men. And if we were to do some-- if we were to play around with this numbers, we would be talking of 2 billion people working 8 hours per day for free with no remuneration. And if we were to give a value to these hours, we would be talking of approximately 11 trillion US dollars per cent of the GDP. So we're talking of an important share of-- Revegant. That goes completely invisible, and that is not remunerated. And that is distributed in a very unfair way. Now, you were asking me about the differences. There are certainly differences in countries. But in reality, the differences are very little. We can say, for instance, that women spend more time in unpaid care work than men in every region, ranging from 1.7 times more in the Americas to 4.7 times in the United States. So here, the question is, what shifts are we seeing in terms of division of unpaid care work? And we can say that there is certainly more attention to the issue on a global scale and also at country levels. Because there is an understanding of the fact that being productive also means to be able to take care of where we need to take care without too much stress and to be able to dedicate more time to be productive. But in the current organization of societies, there's quite a lot of work that needs to be done to redistribute unpaid care work. But reconciling the world of work with the world of care is one of the key challenges that we really need to actively attack and try to work on it. And to do that, we need reliable gender desegregated data that's certainly an aspect. But what we need the most is well designed care infrastructures, care services, care-lived policies, and combined flexible working arrangements. And I think COVID has advanced a little bit this course. We hope you enjoyed this episode of Level the Paying Field. This is such an important discussion. And this series is intended to keep the conversation going. So policymakers, thought leaders, executives and professionals in the equity and inclusion ecosystem continue creating legislation or programs that address women's economic justice, support closing the gender wage gap, and promote women's participation in the labor market. We'd be thrilled if you shared this podcast on social media so we can elevate the equity conversation. This conversation is part of a series published by the Pay Equity Commission of Ontario to examine economics, equity, women, work, and money. You can learn more at levelthepangfield.ca. I'm Katie Ward, and thank you for listening to Level the Paying Field.