Unequal Work, Unequal Pay Realities

Men's work and women's work may be diverse and weigh differentiately, given that nature and nurture wire males and females differently.

Wherever patriarchal norms dominate, women's work may include informal unpaid care work within households and formal paid work within corporates. 

Both powerful male and their female counterparts may likely supply greater productive hours to community work over the course of a lifetime, in contrast to their perceived and socially-adjudged powerless comparators. My concept of power being the ability to make game-changing decisions that impact on wide-ranging outcomes.

Even though macroeconomists always point to policy coverage alternatives, with more household finance options, empowered households may also create incentives that narrow the gaps in unequal work.

Effective research queries in equal work and pay considerations may include:

■ Who pays for the necessary extra care work burdens that women tend to bear?

■ What sort of cultural paradigms are necessary to break the gender entitlement bias in human communities? 

■ How may households' output of well-adjusted offspring, that are educated for intergenerational equity, global relevance, and premium productivity be processed?

■How can affirmative action and family-friendly policies bridge the unequal pay gap across developing countries? 

■ What roles are flexibility-inspired global value chains playing in the game of rational choice by households?

As the gender gaps in education narrow and opportunities widen for female participation in households, corporates, and society, a pervasive culture of family-friendliness would become necessary.

Where a hope for change is few and far between, a spatial shift may win the temporal turn. In recent years, IOM reports affirm that international movement of skilled migrants from developing countries, with unfavourable local economic environment and inadequate social security, are directed towards many of the world's most family-friendly countries in the Global North.

The promise of remittance flows from international migrants may count as potentially sustainable finance to their home countries. Such steady remittance flows proved resilient even to a global pandemic like COVID-19. However, in the short to medium term, human capital losses to the originating countries may be retrogressive for local development.

As we prime local culture pumps, we can think, invest and grow to equate balance-edge practices, enabling and connective infrastructure in order to stimulate balanced development across borders, and we should.

...