Gender equality or inequality has been a topic of discussion since long, but the issue has been generating heat in the public domain in recent years.
Two major reasons have been cited for its re-emergence – the global financial crisis that brought to the fore many ills of companies, and recent reports, which indicate that companies with women (at least one) on the board of directors and on management boards tend to perform better than others.
It is indeed time to address this issue with greater thoroughness and greater sincerity. For many years, researchers and corporate consultants have been saying that New Zealand is among the countries with a poor record of gender equality and that in many cases, women are paid less than men for performing the same type of jobs, often within the same company.
It seems there are no valid reasons for this inequity and like many things in life, there is greater interest in preserving the status quo ante than in thinking afresh.
We are happy that the situation in the Indian business community is far better, compared to their counterparts elsewhere in the country.
We have women occupying positions of importance- as owners, directors, HR managers, chief financial officers and so on in companies that are owned, operated, managed and franchised by businesses of Indian origin. We have seen them participate in all management decisions, setting policies and strategies and steering their organisations towards higher levels of productivity and profitability.
Directors and Managers
The presence of women on the management boards of companies and as entrepreneurs encouraged us to include the ‘Best Businesswoman of the Year’ category in the annual Indian Newslink Indian Business Awards. According to our independent panel of judges, this category is among the most popular of the Awards, attracting people from various industries and highlighting the significant role played by our women in the decision-making process and management of companies.
Large companies are also beginning to value the contributions of women and accord them importance as directors and management committee members. It is pleasing to see our mothers, sisters, spouses, friends and colleagues occupying places of importance on the boards of companies that they do not own.
Women elsewhere in the world, including the Western countries and India, have proved that they bring greater value to boards and to the operation of the company in which they are employed. Apart from politics, India can be proud of its women corporate leaders who steer the destiny of multinationals.
Salary disparity
However, there is no doubt that much more needs to be done.
It is not the position alone- there are disparities in salaries as well. As Marianne Bertrand, Emir Kamenica (University of Chicago) and Jessica Pan (National University of Singapore) have said, of the many glass ceilings constraining women’s careers, one is particularly important yet often overlooked: the wage of the husband.
In a new paper, they have shown how thick this ceiling really is.
They said that in a country like America, in which men on average earn more than women, it follows almost naturally that the wife often earns less. However, the pattern of relative income of men and women at young(ish) ages in a marriage is striking: there are many young couples in which the wife earns slightly less than her husband, or just as much, but far fewer as relative income reverses, that is, when the wife earns more. And this pattern is not driven by older couples; the researcher only use couples around the time of first marriage (22-34) for this part of the study. Despite some progress in recent decades, the social norm “men should earn more than their wives” seems to be alive and well.
That is not only a curious fact; it has consequences, too.
The researchers show that women with the potential to earn more than their husbands quit their job altogether, more often than otherwise similar women in comparable families. If they do work, they use their earnings potential to a lower degree. That is bad news for the economy.
Economists may wonder why people with “rational expectations” enter such a marriage at all. The answer is: many do not. The marriage market, as economists bluntly call it, clears much less often in regions in which more women have the potential to surpass men.
