Jamila Rizvi's New Book on Gender Inequality 'Not So Lucky'

How often do we hear the gender pay gap blamed on women’s failure to negotiate their salaries, or women taking the ‘mummy track’ and never recovering ground?

Jamila Rizvi has written a new book, Not So Lucky, which offers a modern feminist’s perspective on gender inequality in the workplace. Rizvi lays the blame for the gender pay gap not at the feet of individual women, but rather frames it as a societal problem that has many contributing causes which she says can only be solved by collective action from women, and men.

For example, Rizvi argues that our culture brings up girls to be ‘nice’ and to ‘work hard’, but discourages competition and gloating. Boys have no such expectations. Successful women then feel they need to explain their success as ‘luck’ rather than ‘achievement’, to make sure they’re still viewed as likeable by their peers.

Culture is just one problem. In this interview with WA Fabian Keryn Anderson, Rizvi explains that the gender pay gap, which has sat around 17-23% for over 20 years and accumulates to almost a million-dollar deficit by the end of a career, is a complex systematic problem of workforce inequality that can be described using the analogy of a house.

The roof and the ceiling represent the dominance of men in decision making positions, including corporate management and in parliament. The walls represent silos between industries, where women are segregated into lower paid industries (teaching, nursing, child care, aged care) which have a high component of emotional labour. This work is less valued than the work of men. The floor represents the low paid jobs that women dominate, including entry level, casual, award dependent and minimum wage jobs.

It is this type of practical explanation, mixed with relatable personal anecdotes and clear, simple advice about how to tackle gender inequality in the workplace, which makes Rizvi’s book such an enjoyable, and valuable, read.