International Women's Day
Today is International Women's Day. Happy International Women's Day.Eurostat have decided to celebrate by publishing a report with entitled 'How is the time of women and men distributed in Europe?'
Some of the findings are not so surprising: Women spend more time than men doing domestic work, and men spend more time than women learning or earning money. I think we all knew that gender equality is not a reality in Europe today.
Slightly surprisingly, there are more women than men with advanced education, so it's not due to lack of education that women spend such a proportion of their time cooking and cleaning. The study points out however that more women study subjects that are less likely to lead to employment (arts and humanities rather than technological qualifications).
The women of Europe are worse paid and have less leisure time. We are more likely to be unemployed or work longer hours if employed. It's not all doom and gloom though: we are better educated and we live longer.
posted by Becca @ 8:39 am
2 Comments:
The idea that gender inequality is natural is an interesting one. I don't think you can generalise with statements like 'women are better caregivers' because the variation is enormous. There will be certain men who are better caregivers than certain women.
Also, I think the inequality stems from perceptions rather than reality; attitudes rather than laws and policies.
Some recent EU report said that a higher proportion of women in the US have top positions than their counterparts in Europe and that despite better social support for working mothers in many European countries European attitudes are not yet in line with equal opportunities.
If we had got to the point where women really didn't have any fewer rights than men, I could agree with you that it's their choice, but unfotunately I don't think we're there yet. Not in Poland, not in places like Italy and Spain which fared badly in the report, not even in Germany with their female head (the one who made it to the top doesn't make up for the hundreds who cannot work due to insufficient childcare support)
Mussolini ended his life in an expression of gender equality - he hung from the same meat hook as his wife.
The problem with pay mostly affects women who have broken their careers to have children. Single women don't suffer from the same degree of lower pay to men.
So this is not sexist ideology etc, but the inability of societies to provide cheap and readily available child care facilities. If they did that simple and practical thing then pay differences between men and women would disappear.
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