Campbell: Well-paid Gallagher hardly in position to be part of ‘Wetoo’ movement

Katy Gallagher was correct – on average women earn less, retire with less, have fewer assets, less wealth, and learn less in lower paying jobs – but does that count cabinet ministers? asks James Campbell.

The Finance Minister Katy Gallagher popped up on Insiders a couple of weeks back and said something that has been preying on my mind.

Gallagher was asked about whether soaring rents have left more women, particularly older women, at risk of becoming homeless.

Agreeing that this was indeed a problem many older women faced, Gallagher added “we earn less, we retire with less, we have less assets, less wealth, we earn less in lower-paid jobs” and “this is the reality of 2023 for Australia’s women”.

She was, of course, correct.

Though you can debate the causes, on average women do indeed earn less, retire with less, have fewer assets, less wealth, and learn less in lower paying jobs.

Finance Minister Katy Gallagher in her office at Parliament House, Canberra. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Martin Ollman

According to the Workplace Gender Equality Agency, the national gender pay gap is 13.3 per cent – the lowest on record – with men’s average weekly ordinary full-time earnings being $1,907 and women’s $1,653.

The agency says that for every dollar the average man earns, women earn 87 cents.

My problem with Gallagher’s statement was her use of the word ‘we’.

The Workplace Gender Equality Agency says for every dollar the average man earns, women earn 87 cents – unless you are a cabinet minister. Picture: iStock

What’s this ‘we’ she’s talking about?

As a cabinet minister, Gallagher is paid around $380,000 a year, on top of which her employer – you – pays 15 per cent of her salary into a super fund.

Not only that, because she was elected a member of the ACT’s parliament before 2004, she’s also entitled to be a member of that Territory’s now abolished defined-benefit super scheme, the pension of which will reflect the fact she was its chief minister for three years.

All up, aside from a – no doubt difficult – three-and-half month period between December 2014 and March 2015, the Gallagher has been on the public payroll for the past 22 years with the prospect of many more to come.

Katy Gallagher, as ACT chief minister in 2014, signs an asset recycling agreement with then prime minister Tony Abbot. Picture: AAP Image/Alan Porritt

I wouldn’t dream to speak on behalf of the women who were watching Insiders but that ‘we’ really grated with me.

Because, as astute readers will have noticed already, the $254 gap between average the weekly earnings of a man and a woman is a good deal less than the gap between both of them and the $7,307 a week the minister is pulling

In other words, while there are some things for which women might usefully be lumped together into an undifferentiated ‘we’ – their chances of having a heart attack or being murdered, for example – how much money they earn isn’t really one of them.

If there’s a real ‘we’ here, it’s not some mythical sisterhood of Gallagher’s imagination, but the 99 per cent of us – men and women – who earn less than she does.

By the way, you read that right, federal ministers are in the top one per cent of earners.

IN the United States, 40 per cent of women now earn more than the typical man, up from just 13 per cent in 1979. Picture: iStock

Gallagher’s rhetoric fail is an example of what the author Richard Reeves says is our tendency to want to divide things into distinct groups, which he says often leads to two errors of perception, a failure to see “how much overlap there is between them” and a failure to see “the bigger gaps that typically exist within groups, rather than between them”.

In his excellent recent book Of Boys and Men, a study of how badly things are going for them across the western world, Reeves points out that by focusing on the gap between men and women’s wages in toto, you would miss the fact that – in the US anyway – “the distribution of women’s wages looks strikingly similar to the distribution of men’s wages” and that 40 per cent of American women now earn more than the typical man, up from just 13 per cent in 1979.

That four out of 10 American women now earn more than half of all men, is, Reeves points out, something that even well-informed people have trouble estimating.

But it’s not really surprising given how much we are told women earn less, retire with less, have fewer assets, etc.

The evidence that boys and men are having a bad time of it is everywhere, or to put it in Gallagher-speak: we are more likely to drop out of school; we are less likely to go to university; we are likely to die younger; we are more likely to go to prison; we are more likely to commit suicide.

The undifferentiated we of the previous sentence is, of course, just as stupid as Gallagher’s on Insiders because it goes without saying not all men are in the same boat.

But that’s not the reason you’re unlikely to hear a male politician talking like that, of course, demanding a minister for men or an economic equality taskforce to tackle the inevitable flow-on effect of the fact 60.4 per of all completed undergraduate and postgraduate higher degree courses in Australia are now undertaken by women.

No, the reason we won’t be hearing this sort of talk from ministers is because we haven’t yet got used to the idea that, going forward, social problems are going to be framed as gendered male problems.

We will get there, I suspect, and quickly. In the meantime, let’s hear no more of that ‘we’ stuff from a woman with a fat parliamentary pension earning 380,000 bucks a year.