Aussie Women continue to earn less than men

Last year in October I wrote about women earning less than men in Australia. I just came across an update at Women's Forum where Robert Tanton of the University of Canberra writes that women are catching up but the progress is slow.

I am amazed by the anecdotal evidence I see around me every day. Of all the women I know, almost none earn more than their men. That's a simple fact, and one that needs stating. There are plenty of reasons for this, and Robert Tanton touches on a number of these, but even not taking into account the times that women don't work full time (babies and the like), women's salaries start to lag behind men's in their early years, and generally lag far behind men's salaries in their later years.

I work with social entrepreneurs and small business people, and a great deal with people in the non-profit sector. And here the trend is emphasised. While some social entrepreneurs who are men tend to take on the social justice ethos, which in this country seems to involve not earning much, it is women that I see earning erratically and only for particular hours that they count as "really working". Robert Stanton makes the point that in salaried positions, and he is not distinguishing in which kinds of salaried positions, women tend to take unpaid hours to do child and family care and men mostly slot in those times to flexible paid hours. This is a difference in perception between the way men and women see their roles, in my opinion.

But back to those working in the social justice arena - I have heard, again and again in Australia, that people "should either work for love OR money". I don't get it. Why can't people work for love AND money? It makes sense to me. Love what you do, and earn while you do it. Why not?

One interviewee in a piece of social research I have just finished said: "you can just TELL who is doing it for love and who is doing it for money". For her, there was no way the two go together.

This is my challenge. Do your work for love AND money. Do what you love doing, and get paid for it. As I encourage my coaching clients to do, check how much of your time goes into each paid hour. And if you are anything like the people I coach, teach and facilitate, you will find that between two and four hours go into every hour that is an earning hour. So account for it. And if you are a woman, check if you are telling yourself that some hours are not worth being paid for (and some men need this check too).

Closing the gap between men and women's earnings is a lot to do with closing the gap between men and women's worth. And I include myself in the audience to this advice - since coming to Australia I have had to take my own advice and really put a stop to people wanting to use my ideas, my skills and my time free because I am doing "good work", and since putting a stop to that my work has grown and developed. However, it remains in that category that needs constant maintenance and a constant check that I am not putting in hours and hours before the first dollar comes back to me.

In my holistic coaching course I work with the participants to motivate their people and to free them to be the best they can be. For that they need to earn well. And to remove the word "just" as one of the participants reminds us as in "I am just a coach", "I am just a mother", "I was just thinking that it might be a good idea"....

It might just be a good idea to rethink the earning gap and be a bit more proactive in closing it.