In­ter­na­tion­al Women’s Day (IWD) is an op­por­tu­ni­ty to re­flect on the sta­tus of women and this year there were some pos­i­tive de­vel­op­ments to cel­e­brate, in­clud­ing the ap­point­ment of women to more key lead­er­ship po­si­tions.

Chris­tine Kan­ga­loo will be of­fi­cial­ly sworn in as Pres­i­dent at an in­au­gu­ra­tion cer­e­mo­ny on March 20. She is on­ly the sec­ond woman to as­cend to the coun­try’s high­est of­fice.

There was al­so the his­to­ry-mak­ing ap­point­ment of Er­la Hare­wood-Christo­pher, the first woman to be ap­point­ed Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er in T&T.

These ap­point­ments should be an in­di­ca­tor that bar­ri­ers to the pro­fes­sion­al ad­vance­ment of women here are com­ing down, but that goal has not yet been ful­ly re­alised.

In an in­ter­view for IWD, Labour Min­is­ter Stephen Mc Clashie high­light­ed some of the pos­i­tive de­vel­op­ments for T&T women in the work­place, in­clud­ing in­creas­ing num­bers of women in key ex­ec­u­tive po­si­tions.

The Min­is­ter shared the re­sults of an In­ter­Amer­i­can De­vel­op­ment Bank (IDB) sur­vey which shows T&T is well ahead of oth­er coun­tries in Latin Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean in terms of the num­ber of women in man­age­ment po­si­tions.

In ad­di­tion, T&T women now sur­pass men in ob­tain­ing ad­vanced de­grees. This is in keep­ing with a long­stand­ing trend of women and girls out­pac­ing males aca­d­e­m­i­cal­ly.

This year, a girls’ school got the largest num­ber of na­tion­al schol­ar­ships from the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion—a per­for­mance that is matched at oth­er lev­els in the school sys­tem.

Un­for­tu­nate­ly, this is not yet bring­ing about equal­i­ty of treat­ment in the labour mar­ket. Cast­ing a dark shad­ow over these re­mark­able ac­com­plish­ments by T&T’s women is the huge gen­der pay gap that still ex­ists.

Min­is­ter Mc­Clashie de­scribed the sit­u­a­tion as “far from eq­ui­table.” In too many work­places, he said, women don’t re­ceive eq­ui­table pay for do­ing the same job as men.

This in­equal­i­ty in re­mu­ner­a­tion for men and women for work of equal val­ue is not unique to this coun­try. In­ter­na­tion­al Labour Or­gan­i­sa­tion (ILO) da­ta shows that glob­al­ly, women earn on av­er­age just 68 per cent of what men are paid for the same work.

The ILO says if this cur­rent trend pre­vails, it will take more than 70 years for the gen­der wage gap to be closed com­plete­ly. The COVID-19 pan­dem­ic made the sit­u­a­tion worse, widen­ing the gap by five per cent.

All is not lost, how­ev­er. T&T can buck the glob­al trend and be­gin im­ple­ment­ing pro­grammes and poli­cies that pro­mote the prop­er val­u­a­tion of women’s work in the pub­lic and pri­vate sec­tors.

It should not be that dif­fi­cult to con­tin­ue the mo­men­tum cre­at­ed by the large num­bers of women who have nar­rowed the gap in terms of ed­u­ca­tion and ex­pe­ri­ence.

Fill­ing the re­mu­ner­a­tion gap will re­quire more en­light­ened ap­proach­es, with crit­i­cal roles to be played not on­ly by the state but em­ploy­ers and trade unions as well.

With so many women in lead­er­ship roles with­in com­pa­nies, there is an op­por­tu­ni­ty to in­flu­ence cor­po­rate cul­ture and de­ci­sion-mak­ing in a way that erad­i­cates salary dis­crep­an­cies based on gen­der.

Hope­ful­ly, by this time next year, T&T could be well on the way to root­ing out the dis­crim­i­na­to­ry em­ploy­ment prac­tices that place women at a dis­ad­van­tage.

Eras­ing the gen­der pay gap will yield pos­i­tive div­i­dends, not on­ly for women but for the wider T&T so­ci­ety.