Dr. Dora Tuda:

In the literature we call it the child penalty if women take a pay cut once they have children. Senator Higgins nailed it there. If men are not really allowed to make a choice of working flexibly or working part time because they are not compensated as women would be when taking parental leave, it is very difficult to expect more equal outcomes after the fact. If replacement rates are made equal for men and women once they are making decisions about parental leave, that would yield more equal choices in the long run over the lifetime. The literature points to this.

When we talk about the unexplained gap, because of the data constraints there, we were not able to include sector or occupation in the analysis. It is true to say that women are normally not compensated as much as men because they work in sectors that are lower paid. That goes into that unexplained gap because of the data constraints when we were doing this analysis. In future I hope to get better data from the Central Statistics Office, CSO, and be able to say something more about sectors and occupational wage gaps.