Tommy Broughan (Dublin Bay North, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Okay. In Iceland, however, the figure is 25 so the legislation there applies to even smaller companies. I agree with the National Women’s Council of Ireland that this should be reduced further but at least it would cover far more companies than provided for in the original Government Bill.

The Bill includes a number of new provisions. The new section 32A(4) sets out the type of information to be published including the differences in mean hourly rates, median hourly rates, bonuses, etc. The new section 32A(5) provides for the status of employees to also be included in the breakdown referencing the ages of employees and whether they are full-time or part-time. This will be particularly interesting given the over-representation of women in part-time employment, and in the huge and growing precariat, and also given the increasing use of if-and-when contracts. The new section 32A(6) provides for the imposition of a class A fine on conviction if these provisions are contravened. The new section 32A(7) provides for the publication of the name of the employer of at least 100 staff who contravenes provisions but I am not sure why there is a difference here for employers with between 50 to 99 staff. Why are all eligible employers also not liable to be publicly named if they are not complying with law? Why make a difference between the size of the companies in this respect?

I recently spoke on the excellent Report on Gender Budgeting produced by the Committee on Budgetary Oversight, of which I am a member. That report was worked extensively on by the Parliamentary Budget Office. Examining gender and equality budgeting has been a big part of the committee’s remit. We have heard from many distinguished stakeholders on the topic, including the National Women’s Council of Ireland, Members of the Scottish parliament, IHREC, the Disability Federation of Ireland and the Irish Wheelchair Association. We had hoped that the Minister for Finance, Deputy Donohoe, would produce a gender budgeting report alongside budget 2019, which was one of the committee's fundamental recommendations. Hopefully, this will happen in future along with green budgeting. Six pilot projects on equality budgeting are being undertaken by the Departments of Business, Enterprise and Innovation, Transport, Tourism and Sport, Children and Youth Affairs, Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, Education and Skills and Health. Just under €2 million has been spent on these programmes, which include initiatives such as requiring more apprenticeships to be available to young women.

The Central Statistics Office produced research on historical earnings in the period 1938 to 2015. That research included an earnings by gender section. Between 1942 and 2007, female industrial workers earned less weekly than their male colleagues. The weekly difference in earnings was €79 in 1942 and this jumped to €215 in 2007 but the actual percentage gap reduced from 50% in 1942 to 31% in 2007. In 2014, the gap for industrial workers was 22.6%. Earlier this year, a marketing agency, Alternatives, released the results of a survey it carried out which showed that in the marketing and advertising sectors men are more likely to receive a higher wage and additional non-salary benefits. As Deputy Catherine Martin noted, that is the case in many professions across the public and private sectors.

In 2017, when Ireland was reviewed by the UN for compliance with the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, IHREC reported on the 14% gender pay gap, the 38% gender pension gap and the prevalence of women in lower paid jobs. We know from that report and our own evidence that it is working lone parents who are more likely to live in poverty or at risk of poverty and yet the Government has consistently introduced measures that would continue to harm this cohort of women. One of the characteristics of the policies of the austerity Governments since 2011 has been that the cohort of the most vulnerable women were damaged most. We still have not undertaken fundamental reforms for groups such as women returners, the women who have been out of the workforce for several years and who do not have access to programmes such as community employment. The latter is something in respect of which we did nothing year after year. There is a great deal of ground to be made up but this Bill is an important step. With this and hopefully with the Minister of State’s initiatives, we will achieve vast improvements in this area.

I mentioned Iceland earlier. Iceland introduced a gender equality law in mid-2017. It is now mandatory for companies with over 25 employees to obtain an equal pay certification. It is working to eradicate the gap by 2022. We have seen many reports on the pay gap. In the UK, we saw the outrageous differences in pay between men and women presenters at the BBC across a range of activities.

The legislation introduced by Senator Bacik and the Labour Party is a small step towards transparency and echoes the thrust of my own High Pay and Wealth Commission Bill, which I introduced in the previous Dáil. I warmly support Senator Bacik’s Bill and I commend her and the Labour Party on their work on it.

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