Women urged to sue to fix pay gap
By Kirsty Needham | smh.com.au | 02 September
Australian women need to sue if they want employers to take the widening gender pay gap seriously, international labour experts have told their Sydney sisters.
Men earn 17.5 per cent more than women, but a forum heard yesterday that a big stick – in the form of American anti-discrimination cases and payouts – could more quickly fix the problem than any awareness-raising.
"Why aren't we hearing of big cases coming up? It is only through those big cases that you are going to get this moving," said Jane Hodges, director of gender equality for the International Labour Organisation in Geneva.
Ms Hodges said she knew in 1980, when she was working as a lawyer in Australia, that she had to leave the country to get ahead.
She is exasperated that the gender pay gap has only widened. Canadian lawyer Mary Cornish, who chairs Canada's Equal Pay Coalition and has advised governments and the World Bank on gender equity, agreed women "have to have a litigation strategy".
She said one case could make a difference. "If you don't have a compliance approach, employers don't do it, and neither do governments ... You have to have some kind of stick." The Sex Discrimination Commissioner, Elizabeth Broderick, said that for women in the Australian workplace "it is career death to raise ... anything to do with sex discrimination".
Ms Broderick said she had the power to run a pay discrimination case under the Fair Work Act. "But to bring a case like that requires significant resources ... We are just not resourced to use that power."
The Federal Government is reviewing the Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace Act, and yesterday released an issues paper which questioned whether the enforcement powers of its agency – which relies on working co-operatively with employers and promotional programs – were adequate.
Mairi Steele, acting director of the Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace Agency, said she believed the Australian law was not working effectively enough. Wilma Liebman, chairwoman of the US National Labor Relations Board, said women in the US continue to experience the glass ceiling.
In Sydney as the keynote speaker for a labour law conference, Ms Liebman said big gender discrimination lawsuits – one involves 2 million women suing Walmart in a class action – have been levelled at companies that did not promote women in great numbers to management positions.
"We have become an extremely litigious society."
First published by Smh.com.au on September 02 2009
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