Geisha Kow­lessar

A huge gen­der wage gap has been iden­ti­fied as one of the biggest chal­lenges fac­ing women in T&T to­day.

Mak­ing the state­ment was co-or­di­na­tor of the Net­work of Non-Gov­ern­men­tal Or­gan­i­sa­tions (NGOs) Hazel Brown at the procla­ma­tion of the month of March as In­ter­na­tion­al Women's Month held at City Hall, Port-of-Spain, on Mon­day.

"We say women and girls are stay­ing in school and do­ing bet­ter but that good work is not trans­lat­ed to wages," Brown said.

At the last eco­nom­ic fo­rum, she added, the dif­fer­ence be­tween the av­er­age wage of a woman and a man in T&T was still huge and un­ac­cept­able.

"In 2012, the av­er­age for a woman in T&T was $9,000 where­as the av­er­age for a man was $18,000. It was dou­ble.

"In 2014, while the av­er­age in­come for a woman in­creased from $9,000 to $12,000, the av­er­age for the men was close to $30,000. So even though the women's av­er­age was ris­ing, the gap be­tween men and women was fur­ther widen­ing," Brown said.

But she not­ed while there were some women earn­ing a de­cent in­come there were many at the low-wage spec­trum.

"And this is what brings the av­er­age right down. So in or­der to close the gap, the work that has to be done is to raise the lev­el of in­come of women at the bot­tom.

"And that is why the min­i­mum wage was im­por­tant be­cause the ma­jor­i­ty of peo­ple who are get­ting the min­i­mum wage are those women who are at the bot­tom," Brown added.

She said one of the ways to close the gap was to build greater aware­ness among peo­ple and to pro­vide women with the nec­es­sary skills train­ing.

"Even the women at the top we have found are earn­ing less than the men be­cause when it comes to ne­go­ti­at­ing their own wages they aren't net­work­ing and shar­ing among them­selves what the wages are," Brown said.

She said com­pared to oth­er parts of the world, women and girls con­tin­ued to make tremen­dous strides but there was still a lot of work to be done.

A re­cent state­ment is­sued from the Com­mon­wealth not­ed that T&T was the third best coun­try to grow up as a girl and the in­dices used were the num­ber of women in Par­lia­ment and lo­cal gov­ern­ment and the fact that there were many girls in school, Brown added. "There is al­ways more work to be done but we are not do­ing bad­ly. In fact we are do­ing fair­ly well," she said.

Brown said the me­dia played an im­por­tant role in how women and girls have been viewed by men.

Say­ing this was of­ten re­flect­ed in cer­tain ad­ver­tise­ments, she added, "The me­dia is con­tribut­ing in all kinds of ways to pro­ject­ing a neg­a­tive view of women which is played out in the vi­o­lence. It is not just one crazy man get up one morn­ing and kill his wife.

"It is the mes­sages he is get­ting that this woman is worth­less and so on."

MORE IN­FO

In­ter­na­tion­al Women's Day is ob­served an­nu­al­ly on March 8. Brown said two things in fo­cus this year are:

�2 Girls in the ju­ve­nile jus­tice sys­tem. She said there are 11 ju­ve­nile girls be­ing held at the Women's Prison at Gold­en Grove. "This in­jus­tice has arisen be­cause of a lack of ap­pro­pri­ate re­ha­bil­i­ta­tion fa­cil­i­ties for these girls. A stake­hold­er fo­rum has been es­tab­lished to de­vel­op a short- and medi­um-term plan to ad­dress this prob­lem."

�2 Women with dis­abil­i­ties

Brown said women with dis­abil­i­ties con­tin­ue to be un­able to ac­cess af­ford­able health­care ser­vices. A spe­cial one-day pro­gramme has been or­gan­ised to pro­vide much-need­ed health­care ser­vices and in­for­ma­tion.