Across the world today, women are clocking off for International Women’s Day.
Which they will mark by doing absolutely nothing.
In case you haven’t heard, a ‘Day Without Women’ is pushing for women across the globe to go on strike, partly in protest against President Trump, but also to highlight just how much women do and how far we still have to go. (This is interestingly the exact opposite of what ABC is doing today…Eyeroll.)
But we live in Australia, people might say. It’s great here!
Of course, while it’s marvellous for women to live in a country where abortion is still largely criminalised and where our elected officials suggest women are getting themselves pregnant for money, equality is still a far off notion.
Sure, things are better than they used to be for Aussie women. After all, we do have the vote and our husbands haven’t been allowed to rape us since 1975, but even in Australia, it’s still not a great time to have a vagina.
The gender pay gap is currently at 16.2% and will take an estimated 169 years to close. Or, to put it another way, there’s not a woman alive in Australia today who will see the gender pay gap close.
Women in Australia are still doing 2.3 more hours of unpaid work a day than men despite the fact that women’s participation in the labour force has been increasing since 1990, while men’s has been going down. And if you’re a mother, it’s likely you’ve experienced the difficulties that come with returning to the workforce while your partner is finding parenthood is lending itself to greater professional success.
Trump might not be our President, but women in Australia are still doing more – and they’re paid far less for the privilege.
Yet across the Pacific, Ivanka Trump is hard at work building a brand and preparing to launch a book about women who work – painting the picture of the working women in 2017 as someone who is successful, polished, maternal and as at ease with a child as she is in the boardroom.
A socialite in a previous lifetime, the new Ivanka is a woman who declares herself an advocate for women’s empowerment and appears on the surface to lobby for greater participation in the workforce. Yet for all the Twitter hashtags about #ClosingTheGenderGap, the Instagrammable quotes on the “wise words” section of her website and the glossy images of her with baby Theodore in one hand and a business proposal in the other, Ivanka’s very distinct brand of feminism is at odds with everything her own father seems to stand for.
Ivanka – the women widely regarded to be the new FLOTUS, or, at the very least, her father’s favourite child – claims she wants to see women advance, one of her father’s first orders as President was to reinstate a policy that would cut access to reproductive health services for women across the world.
While Ivanka purportedly advocates for women to have a seat at the boardroom table, her father is busy issuing directives to female staffers reminding them to “dress like women” and once told a reporter that “putting a wife to work is a very dangerous thing”.
And while she claims to celebrate working women, she ignores the women that make it possible for her to be a working woman and a mother.
Ivanka’s polished, idealised version of the working woman in 2017 is a dangerous one that ignores the reality of her very privileged existence and the truth that many working women know to be true: if you want to thrive professionally, someone else needs to be picking up the slack at home.
As Amy Larocca wrote in New York Magazine after her father’s November win, Ivanka should show us the women who work to make her life possible.
After all, “nowhere included in her #womenwhowork are the women who must work very hard to keep it all so clean, to keep it all running smoothly behind the gold-plated doors of Trump Tower, to help Ivanka portray this spotless ideal she is determined to protect”.
A ‘Day Without Women’ isn’t just for the Ivankas of the world. It’s not just for the women who, despite having the odds stacked against them, have risen to the top of their field but are still struggling to be paid on par with their male counterparts.
It’s also for the women who are responsible for the nitty gritty of everyday life. The women who, due to circumstance, won’t be striking because they can’t afford the day off.
Because without them, bills won’t be paid, dinner won’t be served and children won’t be bathed and dressed.
Unpaid work is not glamorous. It doesn’t come with industry accolades or the incentive of an annual bonus. But it’s essential to every one of our lives.
In her 2016 annual letter, Melinda Gates discussed how her children and their friends expect that in their lifetime, things will be different when it comes to unpaid work.
“Who packs your lunch? Who fishes the sweaty socks out of your gym bag? Who hassles the nursing home to make sure your grandparents are getting what they need?” Gates asks.
The answer? In every country in the world, it’s women. And that’s not likely to change for a long time.
Even in the workforce, women tend to bear the brunt of ‘office housework’. As Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant wrote in a 2015 op-ed, “someone has to take notes, serve on committees and lan meetings – and just as happens with housework at home, that someone is usually a woman.”
And if we’re going to have to wait another 169 years for the pay gap to close, who knows how long we’ll be waiting to see an equal division of domestic labour.
So today, if you’re lucky enough to do so, make a cup of tea, ignore your emails, leave the laundry and put your feet up. You really have earned it. But if you do have to go to work – whether that be in the office or in the home – remember there are millions of women across the globe who appreciate you and the very important work that you do.
