Gender gap fuels Occupy protests

Women have a special reason for joining the the Occupy movement, argues a veteran feminist.

For feminist Gloria Steinem, the international debate sparked by the Occupy Wall St protests is all about gender.

Start with the thousands of dollars in student loans that saddle the average American graduate. Women "are paid unequally - so they are going to have a harder time paying back that debt", says Steinem, the 77-year-old who helped start the women's rights movement in the US with the publication of Ms. magazine nearly 40 years ago. "It's outrageous because they are kind of indentured when they graduate."

Steinem's comments echo a common lament among young women in the Occupy movement, which began in September as a demonstration against an economic system that protesters say favours the rich.

The unemployment rate for college graduates aged 20-24 rose to 9.1 per cent last year from 8.7 per cent in 2009, the highest on record for that demographic, according to the Project on Student Debt, a non-profit research group. Add to that the burdens of student loans, and young Americans say they don't stand much chance.

"I have US$93,000 [$119,200] in debt and I don't make enough to pay it off," said Adah Gorton, 23, a graphic designer and graduate of Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, as she marched with protesters across the Brooklyn Bridge last month. "Have you ever had something hanging over your head, every day, 24 hours a day? That's what it's like."

Graduates owed an average US$25,250 last year, estimated the Project on Student Debt. Women entering the workforce with that liability are at a disadvantage: they earned US81c for every dollar their male counterparts did, on average, last year, according to the Bureau of Labour Statistics. Nan Terrie, a Florida native who at 18 is in her second year of law school at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, says she already owes US$10,000.

"I'm here fighting for equal pay for equal work," Terrie says. "I'm tired of women being the backbone of society."

She is near a sign calling for the return of bankruptcy protection for student loans, in Lower Manhattan's Zuccotti Park, the birthplace and physical symbol of the movement where protesters camped for about two months until police evicted them last month. The Occupy Wall St protests that began in New York have spread to cities including London, Sydney, Rome, Tokyo and Auckland. The demonstrators refer to themselves as "the 99 per cent", a reference to Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz's study showing the richest 1 per cent control 40 per cent of US wealth.

Steinem says the Occupy protests have inspired her, and have enjoyed more support than the US civil rights and anti-war movements in the 1960s. "It's much more immediately international," says Steinem.

The movement's success in bringing attention to income inequality may help narrow the gender-wage gap, says Mary Gatta, a senior scholar at the Washington-based non-profit Wider Opportunities for Women. The more people, and especially young women, talk about it, the more likely society is to reject the notion that it's irreversible, she says.

"Seeing the pay gap as part of this larger economic inequality that's being talked about by Occupy Wall St, I think, is very promising," Gatta says. Women made some progress between 2007 and last year, as the wage gap narrowed in 35 states, Bureau of Labour Statistics data show.

Among industries, the disparity is often greater in the finance sector, with female financial analysts making US70c on the male dollar, the census data show.

If trends continue, it will take 45 years for women's salaries to equal those of men, according to research by the Institute for Women's Policy Research.

Steinem says US women earn an average of US$2 million less over their lifetimes than men, and not because they stop working sooner: "It's because they are paid unequally."

The global economy would be in better shape if more women were in top positions in finance and government, she argues. "Not because we are smarter or better or different, but just because we do not have our masculinity to prove.

"And that is huge. Because that means that we don't necessarily think it's just great to earn endless amounts of money for the sake of counting numbers."

While polls indicate there is scant chance of a female headlining either major party in the run for the White House next year, Steinem says Americans are ready for a female president after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's bid for the Democratic nomination in 2008.

"Hillary's bravery and smarts under fire in the last campaign kind of changed the molecules in the air, so that people can now imagine a female chief of state."

Steinem said she wasn't surprised a black man achieved the US presidency before a woman. America is behind almost every democracy in terms of elevating women to positions of power. Europe, for instance, has seen Margaret Thatcher running Britain and Angela Merkel as chancellor of Germany. And corporate boards, she says, are more likely to include a man of colour before a woman of any race "because his masculinity is affirming for the guys".

"Most children, boys and girls, are still raised by women almost exclusively and that means we associate female power with childhood," Steinem says. "And so men, who don't have their own example to the contrary, associate female power with childhood and feel regressed by it. The last time they saw a powerful woman, they were 8."

Gender balance may be best achieved by reshaping traditional roles, beginning with mothers and fathers participating equally in child-rearing, Steinem says.

Businesses and governments can help by adopting family-friendly policies, such as offering day-care and maternity and paternity leave, which she says should be called "parental" leave.

"It's important that it be seen not just as 'maternity', because otherwise it will be seen as a cost of employing women.

"Sometimes people say to me, at my age, aren't you interested in something other than women's issues? And I say, 'show me one that isn't transformed by including both halves of the population'."

- BLOOMBERG