Is there a general increase in talk among women about investing, retirement and the pursuit of financial freedom in wage disputes in female-dominated sectors, says Iltalehti’s columnist Merja Mähkä.
The female-dominated sectors have gone on strike in the spring and demanded big pay rises. Outi Järvinen
For 2.5 years now, I have been talking to women interested in finance on a daily basis on Instagram, a lot with private messages.
I always have the same message: start investing good ladies, money gives you the opportunity to make choices that make this one life look your own.
Then I get enthusiastic answers. This is a good thing!
Then I also get answers from where to make money.
That’s a damn good question.
Often, the performer says they are a caregiver, teacher, or early childhood educator.
I am not surprised that they are annoyed to hear how everyone can invest and in ten months you get started, while in ten months you don’t get very far. It takes more money.
There has been such a positive rhetoric about money in the wake of the investment boom. And of course, good. As a result, the number of women as investors has grown tremendously in recent years. Almost half of Nordnet’s new customers, favored by small investors, have recently been women. According to a survey commissioned by Nordnet this spring, there are also workers in the care sector.
The change is also reflected in the female channels favored by women. Where Instagram used to showcase homes, clothes, food, holidays and cosmetics, now it also presents life choices related to money and its accumulation. Money and investment-focused accounts can also be found kept by caregivers.
Based on my discussions, I suspect that awareness of money will increase rounds of wage anger in female-dominated public sector sectors. The reasons for this are, of course, much deeper in the mismatch between the workload and the reward for it, but the talk of money makes the pay gap more visible to women.
I have been wondering whether the pay gap between the female and male sectors was a smaller problem than it is today. I came up with at least two changes:
First, in ancient times, families were units that stayed together. If the father earned well in the paper mill and the mother poorly as a nurse, then at least in the homes of smart people, this mismatch was leveled within the family and the man paid more for the family.
It is realistic for those who marry today to prepare for the union to end in divorce.
In that case, it is important for women to take care of their own money and not to rely on pension insurance or savings for a man’s salary.
Second, the nature of work in traditional female-dominated and male-dominated sectors has changed. In the male-dominated industries, the work was before hot, heavy, dirty, and even dangerous in the midst of machines lurking in large body members and toxic odors all over the world.
Since then, occupational safety has been made a priority and clean factories have been largely automated.
In female-dominated sectors, the trend seems to be different. The workload has only increased. The machines do not take care of lifting or washing. Patients, the elderly and children are more challenging than before. Sometimes also dangerous.
Against this background, I am not at all surprised by the dissatisfaction of the female-dominated sectors with pay. I also guess we’ve only seen the prelude to wage struggles.