It is a cliché to note that Irish society has changed much in the past three decades. Occasionally, however, a statistic from the past illuminates the gulf between how things are now and the way they used to be. Last Friday was the 30th anniversary of the introduction of equal pay legislation. In 1976 when the government finally accepted (under duress) that men and women who did the same work would henceforth be rewarded with the same pay, female teachers - employees of the State, it should be noted - were paid 25 per cent less than their male counterparts.
The government of the day, the Fine Gael/Labour coalition, fought tooth and nail against the measure, pleading with the European Commission, at whose behest gender pay parity was introduced, to be allowed off the hook. But the Commission was having none of it. And so for the past 30 years, people who do the same work are entitled to be paid the same, irrespective of their gender.
It would be good to think that the anniversary could be noted and the contrast remarked upon, content in the knowledge that equality and fairness were entrenched norms. But it is not so. As the Irish Congress of Trade Unions points out, the pay gap persists stubbornly. And not always for reasons that can be identified clearly and therefore dealt with easily.
At present, Irish women in the workforce are paid on average 16 per cent less than men. And according to an Economic and Social Research Institute study published last November, male graduates in the private sector are paid 11 per cent more per week than their female counterparts within three years of joining the workforce - although this is attributed largely to the shorter working week of women, even in full-time jobs. On an hourly basis in the private sector, women earn 8.2 per cent less than men. By contrast, there is no hourly pay gap in the public sector where graduates earn significantly more than those in the private sector.
Even as early as three years after graduation, however, the ESRI found that male graduates are more likely to have been promoted by their current employer and to have negotiated a salary increase due to their concentration in the private sector. The report also cited the marked persistence of occupational segregation by gender with over half of female graduates employed in predominantly female workplaces.
There are significant differences between men and women which often lead to different, or interrupted, career paths. But there are no defendable reasons why 30 years on, some people remain more equal than others.