Income inequality in New Zealand

In New Zealand, on average, women earn less than men.  We’ve known there was a problem with pay equity for as long as feminism has been a thing, and it doesn’t look like it’ll stop being a problem anytime soon.  The 2013 census reveals that on average New Zealand men have a median income 1.6 times that of women.  Most discussions I’ve seen about this pay gap tend to assume that women are paid less for doing the same work their male counterparts do, but in 21^st century New Zealand that isn’t entirely true.  In reality men and women don’t do the same work, and that is why we have a pay gap.

A lot of this income disparity occurs because women work less hours than men.  They’re more likely to be employed part time or not employed at all, because they’re more likely to spend their time taking care of kids.  As long as women are more likely to take time out of work to raise their families, women’s average income will be lower than that of men.  I  don’t presume to tell other people how to arrange their childcare, so I’m not going to discuss that aspect of the pay gap.  What I want to look at here is the type of work that men and women do.  Take a look at the following table, which comes from the 2013 census data available here:

Industry (ANZSIC06 division)	2013 Census
	Men	Women	Total
Agriculture, Forestry and Fishing	8.7%	4.6%	6.7%
Mining	0.5%	0.1%	0.3%
Manufacturing	13.3%	5.9%	9.8%
Electricity, Gas, Water and Waste Services	1.0%	0.4%	0.7%
Construction	13.1%	2.3%	8.0%
Wholesale Trade	6.2%	3.8%	5.0%
Retail Trade	8.3%	11.5%	9.8%
Accommodation and Food Services	4.6%	7.3%	5.8%
Transport, Postal and Warehousing	5.9%	2.5%	4.3%
Information Media and Telecommunications	1.9%	1.8%	1.8%
Financial and Insurance Services	3.2%	4.0%	3.6%
Rental, Hiring and Real Estate Services	2.6%	2.6%	2.6%
Professional, Scientific and Technical Services	9.0%	8.5%	8.7%
Administrative and Support Services	3.2%	3.6%	3.4%
Public Administration and Safety	5.2%	5.0%	5.1%
Education and Training	4.3%	12.8%	8.4%
Health Care and Social Assistance	3.5%	17.0%	10.0%
Arts and Recreation Services	1.8%	2.0%	1.9%
Other Services	3.9%	4.2%	4.0%

As you can see, the biggest employers for women are Retail Trade, Education and Training, and Healthcare and Social Assistance.  Women are much more likely than men to work in these areas.  Why?  Well, our culture considers these industries to be women’s work.  I think women often go into these industries because our culture tells them these are appropriate jobs for women, while men often avoid these industries because they aren’t considered appropriate work for men.  Compare this with the figures for the Manufacturing and Construction industries, which are the biggest employers for men and are widely perceived as “manly” industries. 

Unfortunately, the industries most likely to employ women are notorious for their low pay and lack of opportunities for career progression.  You may think Manufacturing and Construction aren’t overly lucrative either, but I’ve worked in Construction myself and can assure you it pays much better than teaching or working in a shop.

When my parents were leaving school, there was a pervasive social expectation that women who worked were only marking time until they got married and quit their jobs to raise a family.  Career progression and income potential were therefore not considered priorities for a girl choosing a career.  Boys were expected to think about such things though, because they were expected to earn enough to support a family.  The idealised nuclear family of the Baby Boomer-era sitcoms doesn’t really exist anymore (if it ever did), but I think these attitudes still get passed on to kids when the time comes to think about what they might like to do after they leave school.  That’s a problem.

Modern women expect to have careers, and most have to work anyway.  It’s a matter of financial necessity for most people regardless of gender.  So it’s just as important for women to think about pay and promotion opportunities as it is for men, and it’s important to encourage girls to consider these factors when they make career decisions.  If we really want to get serious about reducing gender based income disparity, we have to take a serious look at the messages we send kids about the kind of career they should aspire to.

Was Joan of Arc transgender?

Joan of Arc or John of Arc?  Let's take a look at the evidence.    Picture from Wikipedia.

This is a claim that pops up on the internet from time to time, but no one seems to give any evidence for it beyond the fact that she wore men's clothes.  That on its own doesn't prove Joan (or Jehanne, as she signed her name) was transgender.

Joan claimed that the saints who appeared to her in visions told her to wear male clothing, and it is possible she simply did it because the voices told her to - or at least because she believed it was what God wanted her to do.  Joan was not mentally unbalanced, but she was very religious, and it's clear from the letters she wrote and the testimony she gave at her trial that she genuinely believed she was a divine emissary sent to do God's work.

We also need to consider how Joan herself might have understood the concept of gender identity.  Medieval Christians believed everything happened according to God's plan.  If God made you a peasant, then He meant you to be a peasant.  You couldn't decide you didn't like being a peasant and wanted to become a duke.  God had made you a peasant and wanting to be anything else was rejecting God's plan.  It was heresy.  Cross-dressing was actually a crime and was ultimately the reason Joan got executed. In her letters (you can find them online here) Joan consistently called herself "Jeanne la Pucelle" - Joan the Maiden, which strikes me as a really odd thing for a transman to call himself.  In my view it's highly unlikely that Joan thought of herself as someone who'd been issued the wrong set of trouser furniture and was really a man.  I think she would have considered herself to be a woman on the basis of her anatomy, which she thought was mandated by God.  But that doesn't necessarily mean she identified as a woman, or was comfortable with being a woman.

Consider this quote from my good friend and fellow FYTQ blogger Nicole: "I thought I was a boy but I was a very uncomfortable boy."  Perhaps Joan experienced something similar.

Identifying as a man would have been a sin, but Joan could have rationalised such feelings by believing that God had called her to dress and behave as a man for His own special purposes.  This would have allowed Joan to accept feelings of gender identity that were against church doctrine.  Ultimately though, we just don't know.  The letters and testimony that survive don't give us any information about Joan's gender identity, or whether she felt comfortable living as a woman.

Menswear would have been a practical option for Joan, both on the battlefield and in terms of deterring sexual assault.  (Men's clothes at the time consisted of trousers attached to a jacket with laces, and getting them off would have been a task and a half.)  But Joan was clear that she didn't just wear male clothes for practical reasons, she wore them because she believed God wanted her to.  She felt compelled to present herself as a male, even though she clearly saw herself as a woman.  It wasn't just clothes either, Joan also wore a male haircut.

In the end, we'll never know if Joan of Arc was transgender.  There just isn't enough evidence.  But it is possible, and it opens up some even more interesting questions what it might have been like to be transgender in the Middle Ages.

Gender and the pill

How people understand the concept of gender is a topic that fascinates me, and today I'm going to talk about how contraception has influenced our understanding of what gender means.

In the pre-scientific western world, and for many people today, gender was all about procreation and was essentially the same thing as physical sex (that's a whole 'nother post, and we'll get to that later.)  Men fathered babies, and women had babies.  Easy.  And like all simplistic explanations, it's incomplete and doesn't hold true in all circumstances.  But for most people biology was destiny and the world really did work that way.

The reason the world worked like that in so many cases was that people couldn't reliably control their fertility, but in 1960 the first contraceptive pills were approved for use and that began to change.

If you think about it for a while, you'll see that effective, readily available, relatively safe contraception is one of the most important inventions in human history.  In terms of the effect it has on how we live our lives, it's comparable to agriculture, antibiotics, and the internet.  Contraception allows us to fit procreation around all the other things we want to do in life, rather than having to fit our lives around any pregnancy we or our significant others happen to have.  It should be obvious that contraception has revolutionized women's lives in particular, and allowed us all a level of freedom our great-grandparents simply didn't have.

This is not just sexual freedom, it's also the freedom to define what gender means in ways that have nothing to do with reproduction.  Caring for children is no longer an inevitable part of womanhood, so we are free to explore definitions of womanhood that don't relate to childrearing at all.  We can also start to explore the idea that gender identity sometimes has nothing to do with our reproductive organs, and there are many different ways we can identify.  We aren't automatically stuck with one of two roles in life according to whether we have indoor or outdoor plumbing.

Yes, I know it's a silly pun, but it's better than a stock photo of some contraceptive pills, isn't it?

As far as most western societies are concerned, this is a new development.  It's so new that we've only just begun to explore it as a society, which is why many people today still see gender as a question of indoor versus outdoor plumbing.  To me, this is really exciting.  I can't wait to see how our understanding of what gender is evolves over the next 50 years.