Fintan Warfield (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister to the House and I welcome the Bill. The gender pay gap is not the same as equal pay for equal work. Paying men and women differently for the same role is illegal, and gender is one of the nine grounds provided for in the Employment Equality Acts 1998 to 2015 that protect women's entitlement to be treated equally in regard to work and jobs.

There are several causes of the gender pay gap. When the lower-paid jobs are taken up by women and few are in management roles, a gender pay gap can emerge. However, the issues that do not get as much notice or attention in public discourse or in mainstream media relate to the time women take out of the labour market due to caring responsibilities and how the impact this has on their career progression, earnings and pension entitlements negatively affects women. The gender pay gap reporting mechanism will collect these data for future policy formation. Women predominantly take on more unpaid work than men, such as caring and household work. Women reduce their hours at a higher rate than men and spend nearly 60% longer than men on unpaid work per week, according to an EU study.Implementing gender pay gap reporting will raise awareness among employers, employees, policymakers and the wider public. The role gender pay gap reporting will play in raising awareness of long-standing inequality in the labour market and sectors adversely affected will benefit future policy decisions to bring about a fair and more equitable system. I suppose one of the problems - it has been mentioned in this debate - in assessing the wage gap is getting accurate data and that is one of the important aspects of this Bill. Closing the gender pay gap requires a whole-of-government approach, affordable childcare, the introduction of a living wage, collective bargaining rights, equality proofing, departmental budgets, and enhanced educational and income supports for lone parents.

Senator Mullen mentioned that this Bill passed without much debate in the Dáil. I would argue that Sinn Féin sought to improve the Bill. We support the introduction of the Gender Pay Gap Information Bill 2019 and we constructively contributed to the Joint Committee on Justice's pre-legislative scrutiny on the Bill. We submitted several amendments that were not included at that stage. They were submitted again in the Dáil. We acknowledge that reporting itself will not eliminate the gender pay gap but will bring mainstream awareness to the issue and incentivise employers to play their role in closing the gap. We were disappointed that the Government did not take on board the amendments put forward by my colleague, Deputy Donnchadh Ó Laoghaire, on Committee Stage around strengthening the Bill in relation to the roll-out period, the class of employer that regulation is applied to and the inclusion of employees who are on flexible working-hour contracts. These were debated by Deputy Funchion in the Dáil.

We also believe that the Bill should provide for the inclusion of an amendment for the National Minimum Wage (Low Pay Commission) Act 2015. We do not agree with the length of time given for the reporting mechanism to kick in, depending on the size of the organisation. We propose that reporting start sooner, at 50 plus employees. Reporting must be extended to organisations with fewer than 50 employees. The vast majority of SMEs employ 50 or fewer people. We believe that 20 plus employees would be a much more worthwhile figure for the purposes of collecting this important data.

We also want the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission to play a bigger role in the monitoring and enforcement of the regulations and that where an employer fails to publish the required information on one or more occasion within a five-year period the Minister would make a request to that company and that the title of the company be published by the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission.

On Second Stage, I welcome the Bill. Wage discrimination for women and also people at the intersections of race, sexual orientation and gender identity, must end.