A report is about to be released by the Federal Government of Australia which confirms that women in Australia are paid 83% of what men are paid. The advance publicity suggests two components to the gender pay gap:
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women fill low-paid jobs while men fill high-paid jobs
- when a woman and a man are sitting next to each other at work doing the same job, the woman will often be paid less than the man.
Since the Sex Discrimination Act was passed in Australia in 1984, women have never earned the same amount as men, and 25 years later, they still don’t.
Yet the Act makes such discrimination illegal.
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The discounting of women in Australia — women’s existence, women’s value, women’s contribution — shows up in all areas of life.
As well as showing up in women’s pay-packets, it shows up in personal relationships, in levels of self-esteem, and in the minimal space occupied by women in all forums of power and influence: government, corporations and the media.
In fact, a few weeks ago, discouraged by opening yet another magazine and seeing so little space given to female writers as compared to male writers, I conducted my own analysis.
The magazine I chose to analyse is called The Monthly. It covers political, cultural and literary issues in Australia. The type of person who would read it would also read, say, The New Yorker. And its opinion-forming powers are developing nicely; the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, for example, has written a couple of its essays.
For my analysis I looked at 11 issues of the magazine, January 2009 to November 2009. I also analysed the contents according to the two types of articles:
- major articles: 3,000 words or more
- minor articles: 1,000 words or less.
This is what I found.
The following chart shows the percentage of articles written by a male author and those written by a female author, for ALL articles (major articles + minor articles) published in the 11 issues.
When I looked at major articles only — those articles of 3,000 words or more — I found the situation to be even more inequitable.
And here are the figures broken down by month (blue-shaded figures=male authors, yellow-shaded figures=female authors).
The point here is not to pick on The Monthly. Because you can find this same absence of female voices wherever you look in Australia. But really, is it any wonder women can’t get pay equity when women hardly even register in the national psyche?
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Interesting. I’ve not done the equivalent analysis in America, but anecdotally (ie, listening to NPR, reading the Atlantic etc) I would guess that there is no imbalance, or that women even outnumber men.
Next time you’re listening to NPR take note and let me know. I’d be very interested. SGx
I’ve just looked at the Atlantic Magazine website, and picked at random the printed issues for December, November, and October of 2009; and November and December of 2005.
73% of all articles were by men; 27% by women.
Amazingly, this is the same breakdown as the one you came up with for “Australia”.
Amazing. Thanks for doing that. I wish I could say I was surprised, yet I suspect you can find an absence of female thinkers/writers in publications all over the world. In my beloved London Review of Books I suspect it’s even worse (it’s one of those love affairs). Mmm … back to Excel to dial up their figures I think. SGx
Since you’d mentioned The New Yorker in your piece, I’ve done a breakdown of contributors by gender for the New Yorker’s five printed issues in November 2009.
It comes to men 70%; women 30%.
So this is quite in line with Australia’s “The Monthly”.
Wow. Can you email me the figures so I can post them? Sgx
[...] She found that only 27% of the articles in The Monthly, an Australian magazine, were written by women. Counting only “major” articles, defined as those longer than 3,000 words, 20% were written by women. [...]
[...] can read her two pieces if you click here, and [...]