SEX EQUALITY

Manawatu Standard, Volume LV, Issue 42, 17 January 1935, Page 11

SEX EQUALITY

WARFARE IN WHITEHALL. WOMEN DEMAND THEIR “RIGHTS.” Whitehall’s many women Civil servants have again raised their war banners, and are determined, not to lower thorn until the Government concedes their right tA “equal pay for equal work.” As soon as the Christmas holidays are over they will make a vigorous effort to persuade Members of Parliament to march with them and beard the Chancellor of tho Exchequer in his den. The aim is to wage a grim fight for sex equality, and the removal of “annoying anomalies,” says the Sydney Morning Herald’s London correspondent. But the issue is not without its complications. Man, the enemy, is not only fortified by inborn prejudice, but by the certain knowledge that to give women what they want in the matter of salaries and wages would involve the country in huge additional expense at a time when every penny in the Treasury lia.s to be counted. The last Royal Commission which inquired into Civil Service conditions was divided on the question of sex equality, but the Treasury flatly refused to consider the slightest concession on the score that it would be involved financially to the tune of £3,000,000 a year. The women who are conducting the present campaign claim, however, that this estimate is a “gross exaggeration, lheno.wn figure is nearer one million than of the economic and financial situation,” said Miss Dorothy Evans (secretary of the National Association of Women Civil Servants) the other day, “this is really the first time we have been able to raise the question of equal pay in the present House of Commons. Men should remember that it is not only a question for women. To pay women less than men has repercussions for men. More and more women are being engaged in all forms of employment because they are cheaper. “In the Civil Service not only do women receive less pay than men but iu some cases less than the men whose work they supervise. A woman staff officer, for instance, receives £lls a year less than a man who is under her supervision. In the lower clerical grades women get 73 per cent, of the men’s rates of pay, and in certain technical grades 89 per cent, “One of the points we are putting before members of Parliament is that the new women examiners appointed by the Ministry of Transport to test motor drivers should definuitely not receive less than male examiners. They will be doing precisely the same kind of work and will have just as good qualifications.” A great deal will be made of the Government’s inconsistency in paying equal rate to men and girls in the junior clerical classes up to the age of 22. That, say the women of Whitehall, just goes to show that their claim is sound in principle—that what applies to girls and youths should apply with like force to women and men.