- cross-posted to:
- europe@feddit.de
- cross-posted to:
- europe@feddit.de
Organisers hope the women’s strike – whose confirmed participants include fishing industry workers, teachers, nurses and the PM, Katrín Jakobsdóttir – will bring society to a standstill to draw attention to the country’s ongoing gender pay gap and widespread gender-based and sexual violence.
In most of Europe, it is illegal to pay differently for equal work, so a female cashier would be paid the same as a male cashier.
The gap arises where men are able to take more hours, obtain more qualifications, develop more experience, enter more lucrative industries, get more promotions & they are far less likely to leave paid employment to raise children.
Some of that is due to personal choice, which is fine, but most of it is down to societal hurdles outside of work which determine how women approach the workplace.
Men are able to, or they are practically forced to? Because when I took paternity leave, I heard managers describe it as a “vacation”, which is a term I’ve never seen used to describe maternity leave. And when I left my job to take care of my second child, my co-workers described it as “career suicide”, which again I’ve never seen used to describe a woman’s decision to raise her child.
So I have to wonder: how many fathers out there would rather be raising their kids but don’t get a real chance to do so because they know their careers would suffer disproportionately to their female coworkers?
Still amounts to more time in the workplace, forced or otherwise.
It isn’t a comment on whether that is what men want or are ok with. Ditto employees generally.
Certainly a major strand of reducing the gender pay gap will be about fixing rights, practices & attitudes surrounding paternity leave.