Rosemary McLeod: Work pay gap

It is a truth mutely acknowledged that if men bled from an extremity every four weeks, and had week-long cramps, they'd think they were dying.
Yet oddly enough, it's a condition they joke about.
Surely that was employers' boss Alasdair Thompson's intention last week when he blamed menstruation for the gender pay-gap.
Time-of-the-month quips are considered rather jolly by male sophisticates; a small token of worldliness like the lavish use of the term "PMT" to describe any emotional state.
He suggested that women took more days off than men and that biological necessity explained their blocked career paths.
I'd like to have witnessed Monday's meeting (that didn't happen) of the Employers and Manufacturers Association (Northern) executive that would have discussed Thompson's future. He would have had grounds for optimism.
Of the key managers in his region only one is a woman, former Minister of Cultural Affairs Marie Hasler.
There are 14 board members for his region, of whom just two are women.
And as for the Business New Zealand Council for 2011, their group portrait shows only men in suits.
This is fortunate, because they might all have been menstruating together, had they been women, and what with that then there could be no meeting ever, still less a photograph, because they'd be lolling about at home on chaises longues reading Mills and Boon romances.
Note that I use the word "menstruation", the grown-up term for this regular occurrence in the lives of women of child-bearing age.
Suffice to say the hilarity of it is lost on those who experience it, so Thompson's observation drew flak from every woman who was asked to comment.
We need to know more about Thompson's research on this intriguing issue.
Does he have a menstruation monitor who alerts him to the true causes of women's sick leave?
If so, let her step out from the shadows. She deserves recognition.
Or is it possible that Thompson himself keeps track of female absences as a private research project, complete with graphs?
Since covert filming in the workplace has just been officially sanctioned, menstrual tracking is probably OK too.
In fairness, women in Thompson's workplace - and others - should be able to keep an equivalent chart of male staff members' vagaries, like libido surges and hangovers.
This would be especially useful for tracking the male menopause, that scourge of the workplace that has grey-haired old codgers trying it on with women young enough to be their daughters, and driving natty cars in which they have no hope of looking anything but quietly tragic.
In the light of Thompson's observation - arguably rescinded in the face of outrage - it's worth remembering that no privileges in the workplace has ever been volunteered by employers.
They have been fought for, often bitterly, and lost with equal bitterness.
It's not so long since public servants were the only workers with equal pay and, even then, women didn't make it to top management, that unofficial menstruation-free zone.
Annual holidays, overtime pay and maternity leave were not dreamed up by employers for the delectation of their workers.
My mother, once a clerk at State Advances, could get no leave for looking after me in boarding school holidays; no special concessions were made for working solo mothers at all.
I remember once having to hide in the women's toilets in the old grey office building on a school break-up day.
There was a narrow, dingy divan there on which I read all afternoon until she finished work.
My mother would have been in trouble if she'd been caught but, fortunately, nobody told on her.
I agree; it's a mawkish and unpleasant memory best forgotten.
I'd like to be able to say the working world is a whole lot better now and there's no longer a huge pay gap between men and women, but Thompson enlightened us on that topic.
Give credit where it's due - at least he was candid.