Fight, Fight, Fight

I don’t know about you, but I’m just about ready to go to war.

The first three weeks of January have already been a hell of a year for women and it’s hard to imagine what the next 11 months are going to throw our way.

You may have seen the recent headlines from the US that said that women accounted for all American job losses in December. It was a statement that stopped me in my tracks. Woah, that can’t be right, can it? I scrolled through Twitter and saw some people explain that it’s not what you think, it’s when figures are adjusted, take time to read the actual facts. Grand, I thought, it’s some statistics thing that looks worse than it is. So, then I read the actual facts. It was as bad as I thought. Worse actually.

Women in the US, in fact, accounted for 111% of the jobs lost in December. A net total of 140,000 jobs were lost in the month leading up to Christmas but women actually lost 156,000 jobs while men gained 16,000 the National Women’s Law Centre said.

In 2020 women and men in America were on a pretty level playing field when it came to employment with women holding 50.03% of the jobs but by the end of the year, women were down 5.4 million jobs compared to the 4.4 million that men lost.

Why is that? Well, there’s a combination of depressing reasons. Women were more likely to work in industries that ground to a halt because of the pandemic. Things like tourism, domestic work, childcare and food service. Even when a woman’s job was not terminated, she was much more likely than her male partner to take leave or quit altogether so that somebody could be at home with their children while schools were operating remotely.

Well look, you might say, things are bad everywhere, it’s been a hell of a year and it’s no wonder that things are worse in the US, have you seen what’s been going on there.

Sure, things aren’t great in America (though as I write this President Biden is being inaugurated, woop), but it will come as no great shock, not even two weeks after the publication of the report into the Mother and Baby homes, that it’s not that great for women here either.

The CSO is a phenomenal online resource with searchable figures for almost anything you might be interested in when it comes to Ireland. There are whole reports on equality and women’s roles in the country and to be honest, a lot of them make sobering reading.

When it comes to employment just over one in four women, that’s 26%, held senior roles in large enterprises in Ireland. Women occupied only 11.5% of Chief Executive Officer (CEO) positions and 28.3% of Senior Executive roles. It gets worse when you look at company boards, women held just one in five positions on Boards of Directors (19.6%) and only 7.4% of Chairperson roles. Well, that’s private business, can we really influence who those companies promote? Maybe not, but wait until you see the figures for the Civil Service, surely that’s an area that must be more equal.

In 2018, women made up just under two out of three (63.8%) civil servants. But that majority doesn’t translate to the senior levels. Only 11.8% of Secretary Generals and 34% of Deputy Secretary and Assistant Secretary positions were held by women. In contrast, 73.1% of Clerical Officers and 66.3% of Executive Officers were female.

Why is this? There are, of course, myriad reasons but many women will tell you that if they didn’t leave work after having a family, they did look for flexible working, part-time or job-sharing roles or just couldn’t take on the responsibility of a more senior position when they had to be the parent that collected children or to stay at home when a child was ill.

It’s the same reasoning that we’ve seen in the pandemic – the higher-earning parent is the one that can’t be disturbed and the higher-earning parent is very often male because they’re promoted to more senior roles. And so, the circle continues.

It’s even worse for lone parents. More than five out of six of the 166,900 lone parents (85.7%) in 2018 were women.

We have seen a lot of men make decisions for the country over the last year. While we’re told that there are women on NPHET and in the room when cabinet makes choices that affect us all we very rarely see them at the podium and there may be a reason for that. In 2018, we had the tenth lowest female representation in parliament in the EU. The number of women TDs did increase from 16.3% to 22.2% after the 2016 general election because of new legislation on female quotas that was introduced. There are currently 36 female TDs in the Dail. There are 124 male ones. When we look at the amount of controversy that has surrounded Justice Minister Helen McEntee’s pregnancy and proposed maternity leave it’s easy to see why more women don’t enter politics.

These figures don’t make good reading. In fact, they’re depressing and infuriating. But there are some areas where things aren’t so bad.

In 2019 the Irish Sports Council awarded grants under the International Carding Scheme to 64 male and 46 female athletes. The average grant allocated was €16,421 to women and €17,695 to men. The average grant awarded to male athletes was between €10,000 and €19,999, while 52.2% of female athletes received a grant over €20,000. Much more equal, right?!

In the arts, things are also better. The Arts Council awarded 698 grants to artists in 2017. Women represented more than half (56%) of recipients. The average grant awarded to men by the Arts Council was €13,155 while the average awarded to women was €10,800. About 67% of the recipients of grants in the field of traditional arts were men while women received 83% of the grants relating to dance and 56% of the theatre grants.

We can only hope that as we move on from the events of the last year and things like the right to remote working become enshrined in employment law, things will become more equal. It may become more feasible for shared childcare responsibilities which may, in turn, make it easier for women to apply for more senior positions.

It’s only when we see these numbers written down that we realise how imbalanced we are as a country but if there’s one thing we know it’s the Irish women are strong, loud and ready for change. I’m here for the insurrection!

Jennifer Stevens, January 2021