From today until the New Year, women will effectively be 'working for free'. 46 years after the Equal Pay Act of 1970 was passed, women still earn on average 80 pence for every pound earned by men. And yet some people will tell you that the gender pay gap no longer exists.
Legislation, they'll say, has solved the problem and any remaining differences are due to the fact that equality of opportunity need not mean equality of outcome. They'll tell you it's all a matter of choice; that women gravitate towards lower-paid careers; that women just don't ask for pay rises; that the gap only really kicks in once a woman has children, hence "it's not a pay gap, it's a maternity gap." Because of these people, when I type 'gender pay gap' into Google, the first auto-complete suggestion is 'myth'. Women might earn less than men, but people still think the gender pay gap is a myth. They are wrong.
We should not be surprised that our current legislation has not granted women economic parity with men. It is based on a view of inequality that sees women's disadvantage relative to men as accidental, not systematic. It assumes that while women face the greatest degree of discrimination it could just as easily have been men. It takes the rules of the male-dominated status quo as natural and decides that the only change needed is for hypothetical employers to stop thinking "I will pay this person less because she is a woman and women are useless." But that is not how things work. Patriarchy might be wrong, but it is not random.
Put simply, patriarchy enables men to extract labour from women. It enables them to appropriate what ought to be shared resources. It allows them to steal our stuff. The gender pay gap needs to be seen in this context. It is not just some niche concern for wealthy women trying to lean their way into the boardroom. The exploitation and underpayment of women is systemic. It happens on a global level, when big businesses go in search of countries where female labourers can be paid a pittance, and it happens in the private sphere, when caring responsibilities and domestic tasks are allotted to mothers and daughters. We talk about choice, but choice is meaningless when you are up against a system that benefits from your work being downgraded due to your place at the bottom of a social hierarchy.
Women do not gravitate towards lower-paid careers; the relative value of work is adjusted according to whether it is men or women doing it. Women may be wise not to ask for pay rises; those who do often end up worse off than before. Above all, the impact of having children on a woman's wealth in no way proves that the gender pay gap is not 'real'. It merely shows that our current division between public and private - between paid and unpaid work - ends up taking from women to give to men.
As Katrine Marcal points out, "in the same way that there is a 'second sex', there is a 'second economy'":
The work that is traditionally carried out by men is what counts. It defines the economic world view. Women's work is the 'other'. Everything that he doesn't do but that he is dependent on so he can do what he does.
This 'other' work is only valued when it is withdrawn, such as when the women of Iceland went on strike in 1975. The rest of the time we talk about 'work-life balance', casually dismissing the contribution millions of women make as merely 'life', whatever happens when you're not in the office - rather than an active, vital part of the economy.
As women we need to place a high enough value on our work to get angry about the pay gap. We need to recognise the contribution women make as a class - not just in the formalised workplace, but in the home and wider community - and demand the social change necessary to make it count. Women will 'work for free' for 50 days this year. This cannot continue. Almost half a century after the right to equal pay was enshrined in law, it's time we turned the principles into practice.