The pay gap

has widened again. Covid19 has seen women doing more for even less. It is largely women who have done the extra housework and the extra child care, including homeschooling, during lock downs. Women have lost more employment than men too. 

I was interested and more than a little disturbed to see a claim that the female employees of a certain politician in this state were being paid less in his electorate office than some of his male employees. I am disturbed because I would not be at all surprised to find that the same is true in the electorate offices of other MPs.

I once spent some time working for an MP. It was not something I planned to do. I did it as a favour to his secretary, someone I knew and liked very much. She was, like the secretary of many other MP's, a Justice of the Peace. I was involved in some very complex international negotiations to help get what became International Literacy Year off the ground. H...witnessed my signature on countless documents because of these negotiations. I owed her a lot. I went to work for the MP for some weeks. 

It was long enough. It taught me a lot about politics, political parties, the way parliament and government work...and I mean a lot. I didn't like a lot of what did learn. H....had warned me I wouldn't like it and I was grateful for the warning.

I remember one evening I still had not been able to leave the office because the MP still wanted me there at seven in the evening. ("That was early Cat. He sometimes keeps me much later than that!") I will admit he did apologise because he knew I had to pedal home. Thankfully it was going into summer and light enough to do that. 

I jokingly said to him, "I'll have to charge you extra." He laughed and it led to a conversation in which I told him how my parents had started their teaching careers two years apart. My mother started on 11/9s a week and the Senior Cat started on 13/6s. No there had not been a pay rise in between. Women were simply being paid less for doing the same job as men. What is more when women married they had to resign and then be re-employed. They lost any long service leave and sick leave they may have accrued and their chances of promotion were also severely reduced.  

At the time the Senior Cat accepted that state of affairs although he admits it did make him feel uncomfortable. It was the way things were then. And yes, when many women did not go back to work after marrying, perhaps the extra pay made a sort of sense for married men whose wives were not working... but what about everyone else?

S.... listened to all this in utter bewilderment. He knew nothing about the pay gap that existed when my parents started their careers. Several days later I told his mother, a feisty woman if ever there was one, how I had told him about this. She roared with laughter.

"So pleased you did that! He needs to know that sort of thing."

 S.... was the state's treasurer at the time. It made me wonder what they taught in economics at university.