Mary Seery Kearney (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome this Bill and the fact the Minister has brought it forward so quickly in his tenure, despite everything else that was going on. It shows the priority he is giving it. I thank him also for acknowledging the great work of Deputy David Stanton as well.

What is extraordinary is that we have to legislate for gender equality where pay is concerned. We should have long since moved past the stage where women must prove their worth and that they are of equal value in the workplace. However, the finding by the EU that there is a 16% disparity in pay between men and women and that in Ireland that disparity stands at 14% demonstrates that we have deeply embedded gender norms with regard to influencing the rate of pay for women in the workplace and attitudes to women in the workplace. I value the commission reports and the words of Dr. Catherine Day in particular, in her open letter to the House of the Oireachtas arising out of the gender equality assembly. In it she says:

Gender equality is a matter of human rights, justice, and fairness. It must underpin all of our interactions as a society. The State has a special responsibility to treat all of its citizens equally, regardless of their gender identity, in compliance with article 40.1 of our Constitution (‘All citizens shall, as human persons, be held equal before the law’).

This is a big step in that direction. There is no doubt that a woman is much more likely to experience career disruption. As an employment lawyer, I have always found astonishing the attitude of employers towards women who might be of childbearing age. They have a discriminatory attitude that such women are likely to need time off for having babies, as though having babies was somehow irrelevant to our society and not really that important, which is the point I generally make to them about their unreasonable attitudes.

Women are more likely to carry a disproportionate responsibility in the aftermath of a relationship breakdown in that they are more likely to be the ones who are caring for children. They are also more likely to be the applicants in family court pursuing maintenance, trying to enforce agreements between partners over the care of children and they are more likely to be the lone parents who are the carers. All that being the case, we need to ensure that when women are in the workplace their hour there is of equal value to a man’s, given they have so many steps along the way that may disrupt that right and that ability. There is no excuse for it, so I do not accept the particular citing of the National Women’s Council of Ireland in that regard.

Older women, women from ethnic minorities and higher earning women are more likely to be victims of the gender pay gap. It is so bad that, as Senator Pauline O’Reilly said, from around 9November each year, women are effectively not being paid and are working for free. I acknowledge also the work of the WorkEqual campaign in highlighting that fact.

I welcome the provisions of the Bill. Transparency and publication are the way forward. The requirement to have transparency should also be a factor in any public tendering, to the effect that there must be a declaration regarding gender-equal pay. Large multinational companies tend to carry out ethical audits on their suppliers. I would like to see a category in such audits that deals with gender pay and that it becomes a factor of assessment for companies. I want companies to drive towards and show that gender equality in pay is important to them. They should boast about it and have it as a unique selling point.

This Bill sits nicely in the employment policy legislation. While the fact that it deals with discrimination against women leaves the way open for cases to be taken in the Circuit Court and High Court, it is much more likely that we will see this litigated at the Workplace Relations Commission. I had intended asking how the ruling of the Supreme Court that the commission must now be in public would factor into this. I welcome the Minister’s clarification in that regard. I welcome this change because public hearings are the best deterrent and means of keeping manners on employers because the reputational damage of a case is a very good negotiating factor, one I use personally, with errant employers.

I understand also that redress does not include compensation, as it often does not within employment law. However, I ask that there consideration be made for retrospective application and that redress goes back at least to the commencement of this Bill. That is not an unusual precedent in employment law. In the minimum wage area, I have been involved in cases where I secured awards for people going back 15 years where there has been a disparity or a failure to pay. We should be able to include a retrospective provision as that would be stronger. While we cannot provide for compensation, we can bring redress back to when the discrepancy arose and a date from which that could be calculated. That would hopefully stop the catastrophically arrogant decisions of some employers.

In addition, we have in employment equality a penalisation and victimisation aspect whereby someone who makes a complaint has an opportunity to go back into the WRC in the aftermath of an award. People need to have the additional protection of being able to take a penalisation claim because complainants may be given different shifts or be treated differently and employers may become awkward after a case. There is a long-standing precedent in the WRC that persons who successfully make victimisation claims after having taken cases get almost double what they got the first time around. That is a very good way to deter employers from being spiteful in the aftermath of cases. Of course, there are fantastic employers out there but unfortunately a small few end up in the WRC. A few come before the WRC all the time and clearly factor that in. All of this should be a very sobering warning to employers not to persist in discriminatory practices.

There are other matters that we need to address. As one of them is outside the remit of the Bill, I am not quite sure how we would go about it. In recent years, we have seen an interesting trend in the legal profession whereby the more lucrative areas of law, of which, notwithstanding public opinion, there are not many, are dominated by men. The less lucrative areas of law are dominated by women. That is an interesting pattern in behaviour. Outside of that, we see whole professions, for example, childcare, where women dominate the workforce and again these roles are the lower paid. A third level-type qualification is now needed to work in childcare.We have had that fantastic professionalisation in the sector. I appreciate we are in the middle of negotiations and I urge that employment regulation orders or similar provisions are hastened.

In summary, I greatly welcome this Bill. I thank the Minister for all the hard work on it and look forward to supporting it through the House.