Bríd Smith
Question:1. Deputy Bríd Smith asked the Taoiseach if he will report on the gender pay gap report from his Department. [4421/23]
View answerWednesday, 8 February 2023
Questions (1, 2, 3, 4)
Mary Lou McDonald
Question:2. Deputy Mary Lou McDonald asked the Taoiseach if he will report on the gender pay gap report from his Department. [5645/23]
View answer
Mick Barry
Question:3. Deputy Mick Barry asked the Taoiseach if he will report on the gender pay gap report from his Department. [5795/23]
View answer
Gary Gannon
Question:4. Deputy Gary Gannon asked the Taoiseach to report on the gender pay gap report from his Department. [5889/23]
View answerOral answers (17 contributions)
I propose to take Questions Nos. 1 to 4, inclusive, together.
The Department of the Taoiseach, in line with the rest of the Civil Service, actively encourages equality, diversity and inclusion in the workplace. The Department is committed to a policy of equal opportunities for all staff and recognises that a diverse workforce helped by an inclusive culture can improve organisational capacity, boost creativity and innovation and lead to better decision-making.
The 2022 gender pay gap report for the Department of the Taoiseach was published on 23 December 2022. The report sets out the gender pay gap statistics, incorporating 240 staff employed during the reporting period which was from July 2021 to June 2022. The information in the report was calculated in accordance with the principles laid out in the Gender Pay Gap Information Act 2021, which required organisations to report on their gender pay gap, that is, the difference between the average hourly wage of men and women across the workforce. For 2022, the Department's gender pay gap was 8.82% in favour of male employees. This means that the average hourly rate of pay for male employees was 8.82% higher than the average hourly rate for female employees during the relevant pay period. The latest EUROSTAT figures show the latest gender pay gap for Ireland is 11.3% and an EU wide average of 13%. Ireland is doing better than the EU average and the Department of the Taoiseach is doing better than Ireland but there still is a gender pay gap we need to close.
The Department's current gender distribution is 60.2% female and 39.8% male. This includes a significant level of female staff in middle management positions and a balanced gender distribution at principal officer and management board level. All employees are aligned to published civil and public service pay scales. This ensures equal pay for the same work irrespective of gender, with incremental progression based on years of service and satisfactory performance. Publishing the Department's gender pay gap data helps the Department to bring a specific focus on gender diversity and to continue the alignment of our actions for improvement in gender equality as part of the broader work to enhance equality, diversity and inclusion across the Department.
The Department of the Taoiseach will also continue to review its actions to improve gender equality to smooth career progression and promotion of more women to senior positions. The Department also offers a range of flexible working arrangements to all staff, including shorter working weeks and blended working arrangements and offers additional assistance to all staff in career development and to pursue promotional opportunities throughout their employment journey.
Recruitment to the Department is mainly through the Public Appointments Service, PAS, which plays a central role in recruiting diverse talent in line with its own equality, diversity and inclusion, EDI, strategy. While equal pay and equal opportunity are cornerstones of employment in the Civil Service, there is clearly more work to do to eliminate gender inequality not just in the workplace but right across our society. Government is showing leadership in this area, building on the extensive programme of work initiated when I first took up the office of Taoiseach, including the gender pay gap legislation, which is now the law, funding additional parental leave, reducing the cost of childcare, ensuring better gender balance on company boards as well as State boards and increasing gender candidate quotas for Dáil elections, which take effect this year.
I am glad to see the Taoiseach's Department is bringing down the gender pay gap, which is good. However, an 11.2% average nationally is still not good enough.
Women earning less than men in comparable jobs is something that should be confined to the history books and should not be the current situation in the 21st century. It is also worth noting that there is a gender pension gap and that the Joint Committee on Social Protection heard that women retire earning 35% less than their male counterparts. The proposed auto-enrolment plan will do nothing to address this point. Here is an issue that has an impact into retirement and beyond working lives and about which the Government could do something by bringing in social protection measures to address this income gap.
It is not a mystery or unexplained why it is that women suffer lower pay than men. It is overwhelmingly because they are employed in professions and sectors that involve child-rearing duties or teaching, and this impacts on how and where they can work. With the general relegation of caring, nursing and teaching and in the sorts of professions in society, in hospitality and in retail that are often dominated by women, we find high levels of precarious work and low levels of pay. While we welcome the statutory rule that employers must report the gap, we need much more than reporting to address this issue.
I thank the Deputy. I call Deputy McDonald.
We can say we have formally legislation passed by the Dáil that has provided equal pay for equal work, but we need action. Really, the question we should be discussing here is how we can address it through union organisation and the right to join a union to fight for this equality.
The Taoiseach's response indicates the huge amount of work that is still to be done yet on the issue of equal pay for work of equal value. I wish to raise a related matter with the Taoiseach, if I can. It is the domestic violence leave reduced rate of pay provision that is contained within the Work Life Balance and Miscellaneous Provisions Bill 2022. The legislation, as the Taoiseach knows, enables the Minister to make regulations to prescribe "the daily rate of domestic violence leave pay". The Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth, Deputy O'Gorman, has indicated he is considering pay parity with sick pay as against full pay. Applying a reduced pay rate in this instance is just wrong. Women's Aid strongly believes domestic violence leave should instead be paid in full at a person's normal rate of pay, and I agree with that.
The Taoiseach himself has acknowledged we are experiencing an epidemic of domestic violence and violence against women in particular. Penalising victims of domestic violence with a cut of up to 30% in their pay will cause immense hardship and, worse again, will potentially be a safety risk because, where a victim's payslips or bank accounts are monitored, any change in pay will alert an abuser that she has not attended work as usual. This level of control is more prevalent than we might imagine and should not be dismissed by the Minister. I am asking, therefore, that we follow international best practice from places like New Zealand, Italy and Australia and have domestic violence pay leave be paid in full. Will the Taoiseach intervene on this matter?
I thank the Deputy. We are way over time. I call Deputy Barry, who will help me gain some time.
The progress being made on closing the gender pay gap globally is glacial. At the current rate, it will take 257 years to close this gap fully. In his contribution at the start, the Taoiseach said a gender pay gap in Ireland of 11.2% compared with an EU average of 13% showed this State was doing better. I put it to the Taoiseach that a better way to phrase that would be to say that in this country we are doing less badly than the EU. There should be no pats on the back here. There is a long way to go.
In this country, a key contributor to the gap is the State's grossly inadequate and expensive system of childcare, which forces many women to take a longer break from work than they would like. Whereas in Germany a household spends on average of 1% of its net household income on childcare, and 3% in Austria and 5% in Sweden, in Ireland the equivalent figure is a whopping 28%. The Government is currently putting more money into a childcare system that is run, in large measure, by the private sector.
Go raibh maith agat.
What we need here, and I will conclude on this, is a totally new approach. We need to treat childcare and early learning like primary and secondary education, being universal, public and free at the point of use.
I thank the Deputy. I call Deputy Boyd Barrett, who has up to one minute.
You learn something new every day and I learned something today from a meeting with representatives of housekeeping attendants or domestic attendants in hospitals. They represented people who previously might have been categorised as cleaners in hospitals and they came from University Hospital Limerick, Cork University Hospital and Letterkenny hospital. What I learned was very interesting. As one woman put it, when she first became a cleaner 18 years ago, she was given a cloth, a bucket and mop. Today, it is necessary for these people to do courses on fumigation and electronic stuff that I do not even know what it is called-----
There is some homework.
-----and on PPE, infection control and a whole range of things. It has become a seriously skilled job, particularly after Covid-19 and especially concerning the whole question of infection control. If we do not have people cleaning places properly and who know how to do it in a professional way, then we will not have safe hospitals. These people had an evaluation done of their jobs. Other grades were given a new categorisation and, as a result, pay increases because there was a recognition their jobs had changed and they should be valued more differently.
I thank the Deputy.
The application of this group of cleaners to have their job recategorised was not accepted and they have not seen the evaluation report. I know the Taoiseach will not know the answer to this question but I ask him to look into it on behalf of these workers. The point is the vast majority of them are women.
Childcare and early years education are very important for the development of young children. It is also, though, very important for mothers and fathers to have access to work and income. The sector has been in crisis for many years. Under the stewardship of the Minister, Deputy O'Gorman, there has been welcome investment in recent times which has helped to reduce the costs to parents somewhat. Much damage has been done, however, especially to the early childhoold care and education, ECCE, sector, and this has seen hundreds of businesses close, especially in small towns, making it more difficult for mothers and fathers to find places for their children.
Information I received today indicates there are many workers in the childcare services sector, especially those services that receive core funding, who are not qualified. I understand this is against the law. I also understand it is against the provisions of insurance coverage. I understand it is the job of Tusla and the Minister, Deputy O'Gorman, to make sure this is not happening. Will the Taoiseach talk to the Minister and see why he is funding services that are employing staff who are not qualified in terms of childcare and to ensure this does not happen in future?
As I mentioned, Ireland's pay gap is 11.3%, which is a narrower pay gap than the EU average. I am happy to say this is less bad and not better than, if Deputies prefer. It would be in line with some of the Nordic countries, which are often held up as examples for us to follow in terms of gender pay. My view is there should be no gender pay gap at all. The objective, therefore, must be 0%, or at least as close to statistical 0% as can be achieved. This will take some time. Very often, many factors are at play. Among these is not enough women being in senior positions. It is only as these vacancies arise that more women can be promoted into these senior positions. There is also a whole issue around increments. Men may be in employment for longer and have built up increments over time that give them higher pay for the same work. I do not think anyone in this House would propose that we remove increments to achieve gender equality, however.
In terms of the gender pay gap, there is a difference between the State pension and occupational pensions. I do not know what the gender pay gap is for the State pension, but I think it is much smaller than is the case for occupational pensions. Occupational pensions are related to the number of years people work and the amount they pay in. As more women enter the workforce and get better paid jobs and as we introduce auto-enrolment, I believe we will see this situation improve. It is fundamentally linked to the amounts people pay in. This is how that pension system works and that is fair.
Childcare is very expensive in Ireland. It is the objective of the Government to reduce the cost of childcare and early education for parents and to improve the quality of it. We have taken a big step forward in recent weeks by reducing the cost of childcare by 20% to 25%, which I think is significant. We want to reduce it further in 2024, subject to the public finances allowing this.
That can make a big difference in both reducing the cost of living for families and making it easier for parents, usually but not always women, to re-enter the workforce sooner than they otherwise would, if that is their choice. However, it is never as simple as just childcare. I think I remember reading of one of the Nordic countries - it might have been Denmark, Sweden or Norway - which has a public model of childcare and has very inexpensive childcare, and it actually has the same gender pay gap as we do or possibly a bigger one. We need to bear in mind that many factors are at play.
The Minister, Deputy O'Gorman, is introducing plans for paid leave for victims of domestic violence. This is a new form of leave and a significant step forward. We need to take into account that it will be an additional cost on employers, including very small businesses that might only have one or two staff and businesses along the Border which we always need to bear in mind because successive administrations north of the Border have failed to keep up with us in terms of workers' rights. That in turn holds us back because we need to have regard to the failure successive administrations in Northern Ireland to keep up with those when it comes to workers' rights and the impact that then has on small businesses on our side of the Border, for example. Deputies will be aware of many proposals for new forms of leave, which we need to consider in the round.
Childcare staff not being properly qualified is a matter for Tusla, but I will certainly inform the Minister, Deputy O'Gorman, that Deputy Tóibín raised it in the Dáil today.
I broadly agree with Deputy Boyd Barrett's analysis of cleaners. Being a cleaner is increasingly a skilled job, more so than it was in the past and increasingly so in a healthcare setting where there are blood spills, personal protective equipment, PPE, and a need for infection control. There is an employment regulation order for contract cleaners. I am not sure if that applies to the group the Deputy is talking about. I have not seen the evaluation report but I will make some further inquiries about it.