Men still out-muscle women at the work place, new study reveals

In his book The Animal Farm, George Orwell said all animals are equal but some are more equal than others.

In a bid to ensure this does not happen in Kenya, a Constitution that empasised on gender equality was promulgated in 2010. But almost five years down the line, Kenya is yet to shake off her patriarchal culture, if a new study by ActionAid is anything to go by.

Women in Kenya earn almost a third less than their male counterparts doing the same job, a new analysis focused on income inequality has shown.

The UK organisation has found that women are deprived of income and job opportunities with evidence showing that developing countries including Kenya are most affected.

So bad is the situation that it could take 75 years to correct the anomaly, ActionAid said.

Lowest paid

“When women are paid for a job, they earn on average between 10 and 30 per cent less than men for work of equal value,” ActionAid says in its report released last week.

The reports also revealed that women make up the largest proportion of people in lowest paid jobs.

As an example, four in five people employed in garment-making industry in the world are women. In Kenya, about 70 per cent of people employed in garment factories within the Export Processing Zones are women.

The disparity in wage income was found to cost the womenfolk in poor countries $9 trillion (Sh800 trillion) a year — more than the combined gross domestic products of Britain, France and Germany.

Women, ActionAid said, have been exploited from the workplace through unequal opportunities to work and lower pay, to their homes where they do a multitude of household chores without pay.

Citing the World Development Report 2012, the agency reported that “women devote one to three hours more than men to housework, two to 10 times the amount of time to children, elderly, and the sick, and one to four hours less to market activities”.

 Education meant little in diminishing the exploitation of women, implying that a man of lesser qualifications could be considered for a job over a more qualified woman.

Most people would expect that significant progress in increasing the number of girls in schools over the past two decades would improve the life chances and opportunities for women, the agency said.

“However, the consistently low participation rates of young women in the job market proves that the knowledge and skills that they have acquired are systematically ignored,” the report said. Perminus Wainaina, the recruitment manager at Corporate Staffing Services agrees with the findings – especially within the low-cadre positions.

“We find the disparity to be very pronounced in the private sector,” said Mr Wainaina. However, this is less pronounced in the public sector where salaries and wages are harmonised where the only peg is job group.

He attributed the inequality to demands by employers for people perceived to have a higher level of flexibility, especially on working hours and travel – which happen to be men.

“Some positions are higher risk which allows more freedom when choosing from a big pool of candidates,” he adds.

A female job seeker told The Standard that her chances of getting recruited as a supermarket attendant significantly diminished because of her gender. She was told that the job was male dominated because it entailed moving heavy goods.

Employers would pay up to 20 per cent more as a premium to attract men but ‘this is an unwritten rule’, Wainaina said. 

He is, however, quick to point out that positions in the senior-most levels were unlikely to have significant inequality owing to the small number of suitable candidates.