Friday this week I attended the award ceremony for Gründerin des Jahres 2008 here in Styria, Austria. Gründerin des Jahres is an award for women who recently founded a successful company. Renate Willfort, the CEO of Dresscode21, the company where I work was nominated, hence my attendance.

During the ceremony some local politicians where interviewed about why this award is so important. They all repeated the mouldy mantra of how different men and women are and how important it is to have companies owned and run by women because they bring something different into business, something men aren’t capable of doing/thinking/bringing in. This is of course old stuff, which I hear a lot more often in Austria than in Sweden. (Even though the regional meeting for entrepreneurial women in Växjö, Sweden last Monday was embarrassingly close. Too much pink and self-pity is never particularly attractive or encouraging.)

No, what really made me react was something one of the local politicians said. She firmly believed that women have less pay because women have bad self-confidence. Saying this in front of any group of people is embarrassing. But saying this in front of a group of a hard working self-employed women waiting to accept an award is simply humiliating. I find it hard to believe that every one of the women in the room had worse self-confidence then the men sitting next to them. Saying this, the politician indirectly also implied that men have better pay because they all swell with self-confidence. I know this is not true.

The solution the politician offered for raising women’s salaries was an encouragement that we should quit the lowest paid ones and get other occupations. She meant we should stop being nurses, kindergarten teachers and taking care of elderly people. I don’t think she knew what she was saying. Will that ever happen? Or perhaps she’s encouraging revolution. When no women do this work – men has to do it. Interesting!

My point is: People are different. My experience is that two women, often turn out to be more different than a man and a women. There are so many layers of a person; ethnicity, class, experiences, memories, political and sexual preferences, movie taste etc. Stopping at the physical appearance and hormone level is plainly immature. What reproduces the pattern of men and women having different levels of pay is a glitch in the system. It’s a pattern from the 20th century, which we accept over and over again. It’s built on our belief that women and men are very different and therefore we should have different pay. This is not an individual problem, it’s a system problem, which is easy to solve by staying updated with reality and educated within gender equality issues. Having had up to 30 employees and lots of freelancers I know how easy it is to fall into patterns and give guys better pay then gals. Time to break the pattern! Make strategies and make them happen.