The Iona Institute ~ for Religion and Society

The OECD’s latest ‘Better Life Index’ shows that Irish women have a better overall quality of life than men when a range of different factors is taken into account.

This tends to overturn the conventional wisdom that men overall have a better quality of life in Ireland than women.

The factors listed in the report include: life satisfaction; employment; health; education; social support; and work/life balance.

The report shows that men are more likely than women to be in paid employment (64 percent vs 58 percent respectively).

However, clearly this is not the only or even the main measure of well-being and quality of life.

What the report also finds is that women report slightly higher levels of life satisfaction than men, live longer, are better educated, less likely to be victims of violent crime, and are slightly more likely than men to report they have the right kind of social support in their lives.

A focus on the number of men and women in paid employment does not accurately capture the real differences between men and women.

A focus on paid employment and average pay levels assumes that as many women as men want to work full-time and ignores the fact that many women choose a different work/life balance than men.

The most recent Quarterly National Household Survey shows that 73 percent of women who work part-time are not seeking more hours of work. That is, they do not want to work part-time.

The fact that a third of women in paid employment work part-time versus only 12 percent of men is the main reason why there is a gap of 17 percent in average pay between men and women.

In other words, the gender pay gap arises mainly from the free choices woman make and not because of systemic sexism.

Our gender pay gap is in line with the EU average and the Swedish figure. The Swedish case is interesting because Sweden is often held up as the model in these things. For example, day-care is universal and state-subsidised but despite this many Swedish women still opt for part-time work and therefore they record a gender pay gap similar to our own.

The OECD study shows that when we widen out quality of life measures beyond paid employment we find that overall women have a better quality of life than men.

Despite a tendency to measure our worth or contentment by reference to whether we earn money and how much we earn, the truth is that our sense of well-being derives from many sources, of which paid employment is only one, but which also include good health, a sense of safety, participation in one’s community, education and work-life balance.

When all of these things are taken together, it emerges that Irish women have a slightly better quality of life than Irish men contrary to the popular impression.

Appendix.

The findings of the report vis a vis Irish men and women are as follows:

(Average employment gap in OECD is 13pc)

Work/life balance:           1pc of women work more than 50 hours per week versus 6pc of men.

Women spend 296 minutes per day cooking/cleaning/caring vs 129 minutes for men.

Safety: No hard figures are contained in the report, but it says Irish men more likely to be victims of violence, while women feel less safe than men.