🖋️Feature: Don't empower me. Pay me.
Thanking and celebrating women is tokenism. We need concrete action and systemic change >>> Close the Gender Pay Gap!
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My tech career has spanned 24 years. I have often been the only woman in a room and I have seen, heard and experienced it all. From harassment to discrimination, from being spoken down to (before there was a name for it like “mansplaining”) to simply being ignored. For the first few years, I did not even know I was being segregated, I did not know the word inequality and that my skills were being undervalued because of my sex. I was smart, successful, getting to travel extensively and one of the few women in man’s world, so I thought that I was the exception and successful.
“Come on Ro, the tech sector is innovative, you are blessed to be part of it”
However, I remember distinctly finding out in a tech project in the naughties, that a male colleague was being paid more than me, for the same work. The sense of injustice was intense and overwhelming. Furthermore, the person in question did not have the qualifications I had. The MSc degree, I had borrowed a large amount of money to complete, didn’t matter. The hours of studying to “pull myself up” the career ladder, was irrelevant.
So there I was, on a dynamic tech project realising I was overqualified, undervalued, the wrong sex and totally underpaid. That’s when the anger began to hit me and swell inside me. Suddenly, working in the progressive tech sector was not so exciting and sexy. Fundamentally, I realised that if you don’t pay me my worth, the same as men, this concrete disparity was too much for me and my self-worth and self-respect. For me, it was a true illustration of gender bias, inequality and discrimination, and yes I was taking it personally and feeling it in every cell in my body.
Note: the Gender Pay Gap has not changed much over the last 20 years, according to the Pew Research Center.
This situation was not unique, for most of my career, when I asked and investigated, I found out the same thing. Men generally were paid, got bonuses and often were promoted more than me. I even over heard once “She has a boyfriend, so watch-this-space, she will be on maternity leave before we know it”. That assumption that validated (for men), that women should not be taken seriously, as they are only really working part-time, biding their time before having children.
To be honest, there are many more “stories” from my time in tech, but many of them upset me and are not for general writing or consumption yet. Let’s see if during my writing journey, in the future, I will be ready to share them.
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So maybe with this context, you can understand, why International Women’s Day is simply a “Hallmark Day” for me i.e. it is full of tokenism and fluff. Women don’t need to be celebrated, thanked, acknowledged or cheered. This image says it all below:
We are women, already living in world rife with inequality, gender based violence and fear. Surviving years of oppression and suffering. I believe that women need to be supported with real action, not tokenism. So IWD, for me, stirs up a-lot of mixed emotions, as so many brands have hijacked the day for their own benefit, rewards and pink-washing.
Real Gender Pay Gap Data: During 2021, I started also to track and follow the Gender Pay Gap App activity on their Twitter Account, which is a clear illustration of the real action needed, rather than platitudes. Kudos to Francesca Lawson.
First, we deserve to be safe in our homes and our streets, having the same access to medical, education and social services. In the developing world, we deserve fundamental access to human rights, shelter and safety.
Then, in the corporate world, we deserve to be hired into positions of influence, onto company boards - hence why I am in the midst of completing the European Women on Boards training - to walk the talk for myself. Furthermore, we deserve pay parity, equal opportunities and equal access to all training and education opportunities.
I dream of a world where an all women will be paid equally and that a corporate board full of women will be the norm, and so common that no-one bats an eyelid!
I really hope my daughter see’s that in her lifetime.
Until the next #DigitalNomadStory,
take care, love n light - 💚 Ro
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