Israel must fight its institutionalized sexism
Op-ed: The Likud is just another one workplace that discriminates against women; in general, women in the Israeli economy are worth less than men.
Women have become a hot topic in the run up to the elections. On paper, they have been slotted into significant roles and all the parties are bragging about them. Israel is not Italy, where the half the government is made up of women. Here, choosing a woman for a Knesset list remains a good reason for a press conference.
Tzipi Livni and Isaac Herzog's Zionist Camp offers a distinguished list of opinionated women; Moshe Kahlon, Avigdor Lieberman and Naftali Bennett are using every opportunity to highlight the talented women on their lists; and Miri Regev made it into the top five on the Likud list despite the prime minister's reservations.
And still, the ruling party is a prominent example of gender inequality, although one has to say that the Likud is just another one of those workplaces that discriminates against women.
A report prepared by the Knesset Information and Research Center reveals that Israel is way down the list in comparison to European countries when it comes to the percentage of women who fill senior roles in the academe. In general, as we all know, women in the economy are worth less than men.
The average wage gap between men and women in state-owned companies amounts to NIS 6,100 per month in favor of the men; and when it comes to the list of the Israeli economy's highest wage earners, just 12 out of the top 100 are women. Moreover, when it comes to men and women working in the same profession (teaching, for example), women are prominently represented in junior and middle-level positions, while men rule the roost in the senior and management positions.
For example, as is the case in the teaching profession, the police force, which is currently making the headlines thanks to another high-ranking officer who used his position to earn the title of duty Casanova, the status of policewomen is nothing to write home about, to say the least. Few women fill senior positions in the police force, with their wages reflecting this inequality too.
The wage issue aside, there is a need to examine how in an entity responsible for enforcing the law, women find themselves repeatedly exploited by their commanders. The incidents appear to be taken from military archives from the days in which army officers thought that female soldiers were enlisted for their entertainment.
It is well known in the army today that harassment of a woman soldier will not be swept under the rug; and if a commander "gets confused," there are many elements tasked with issuing warnings. It's time for the police as well to internalize the fact that policewomen are duty bound to stick to their tasks and not their commanders.
