On the Subject of Women, Rights, Earnings and Money

Sezane blouse (similar)
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Location: Osborne Village – Winnipeg, Manitoba

“Do I not exist?”

That’s how I opened the conversation with my mom when I called her last Thursday. I’d just opened our daily mail, which included a refund cheque from the provincial government for a portion of our annual property taxes. When we bought our Winnipeg home, we got the mortgage based solely on my income. My name comes first on the land title, and every other document associated with our home ownership, including the property tax bill.

…but the cheque was made out to Ian. My name didn’t appear anywhere on it.

It’s 2021. CNBC recently tweeted that millenial women are “worried,” “ashamed,” of out-earning boyfriends and husbands. On the planet where I live, which is the same one where CNBC broadcasts news, the opposite is true. Women, generally, are proud of their professional accomplishments because we have to fight so hard for them, still. We earn every cent of our wages, whether they are more than, equal to or less than those of our partners, because we have to work twice as hard as most men in the work place to get them. Not to mention that even if we out-earn our male partners, our battle for equitable pay rages on. According to the Canadian Women’s Foundation, women still earned only 75 cents for every dollar earned by men in 2016. I doubt we’ve come even close to closing that 25 cent gap in the past five years.

CNBC is not the only group of people who have somehow divorced themselves from reality on the subject of women, rights, earnings and money. The government of Manitoba is right there with them.

As a woman living in a patriarchal society, I experience varying forms of overt and obscure sexism regularly. All women do – this is our lot, despite more than fifty years of effort to change it. In many ways, I’m lucky; I work for women, mostly with women, and this is a major reason that I’ve stayed with the same company for almost a decade. Sexism permeates our collective existence. The only way to escape it is to remove ourselves from male-dominated environments.

The ability to remove oneself from male-dominated environments is a rare privilege that I do not take lightly, particularly because I recognise how rarely the option presents itself. Men continue to make up fifty percent of the population. They make up almost the entire government of Manitoba, which perhaps serves to explain why women who live with men did not see their names appear on recently sent property tax refund cheques. I verified this when I called my mom last week. The cheque she received was made out to my dad alone; the same was true for a close friend, whose cheque was made out only to her male partner.

Of course I exist. The question was rhetorical. But the fact is, this is not the first time I’ve run into this kind of institutional sexism in Manitoba. Or in the world. It’s insidious, pervasive and suggests, not very discreetly, that I am of so little value as a person by virtue of my gender that my existence is purposeless, irrelevant except in relation to the existence of the men around me.

In the summer of 2020, I had the audacity to attempt to upgrade my cell phone with our local telephone provider, BellMTS. This was impossible, they told me, without my husband’s physical presence in the store. We share both the account and the home address, but BellMTS allows only one individual to make changes to the account. I was presented with two choices: open my own account, thereby losing all of the benefits of shared services and phone plans, or bring my husband with me to the store so that BellMTS could confirm that I had his “permission” to get a new phone.

That I would be paying for the phone, and paying all of the ensuing bills, was apparently immaterial. BellMTS was less concerned with my ability to cover the cost their services than they were about potentially upsetting my male partner by allowing me to make changes to an account we share because they perceive it to be his alone. He fought for me as hard as I fought for myself – but sexism is enshrined in BellMTS’ business operations and they are apparently unwilling to bring their contract wording into the twenty-first century.

…and so, on his day off, my husband supervised me while I signed a new cell phone contract. The experience was an immense waste of time that neither one of us had to spare. And all for what? To make sure we are taking all necessary steps to protect other men’s fragile egos?

It’s important that the record should show that I do out-earn Ian, and by a substantial amount. Neither one of us is ashamed of that fact. We chose different career paths with different earning potential. I don’t love him because of his ability to provide for me – in a post-cave-dwelling era in North America, I seriously question why anyone of any gender would consider “ability to provide” as an important quality in a life partner. He does not love me because of my willingness to become invisible when its convenient for insecure men. I’m not willing to become invisible for anyone, ever, which is a fundamental part of my personality that, except in my most obnoxious moments, I know he appreciates.

We are equal partners. Neither our earnings nor our genders have anything to do with that. We believe in the essential humanity that we share, regardless of external genitalia. As two people doing life together, we are equals in every respect but one… the way that the provincial government of Manitoba, and BellMTS, and CNBC, and, at times, the world at large, perceives our value. To them, I have always been, and remain, worth less.

…exactly $333.04 less, in the case of our property tax refund.

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