International Women’s Day: women are still underpaid

Myagdi (Rashtriya Samachar Samiti): “I have been teaching English at the basic level (grades 1-8) for seven years, but my salary is less than half that of a male teacher at the same level.” A teacher at a private and institutional school in Myagdi said, “Equality is only in slogans, but not yet in practice.”

“I do all the work of making spices, carrying rods and bricks, fetching sand,” said Tila Kisan, a 37-year-old laborer working at a construction site in Beni, the district headquarter of Myagdi district. If they get a thousand rupees a day, I have to settle for 600 rupees for the same work. ‘

“We have to do more work than men, but we get less wages,” said Chandra BK, who was going to the field carrying fertilizer on her head to plant maize in Beni Municipality-2 Bagarphant.

Today is March 8, the 111 th International Women’s Day. While the International Women’s Day is being celebrated under the slogan ‘Women’s Security, Respect and Employment are the basis of Prosperous Nepal’, the situation of women in rural areas is the same as it was decades ago.

Not only in the field of agriculture, industry and development, but also in the field of education, women have been cheated in their wages. According to these women, they are only representatives. Thousands of women in Myagdi are deprived of equal pay for equal work.

Women who work for wages all day long in farms, rivers, buildings or places where physical construction is taking place are cheated in wages even if they work harder than men. Women workers who work all day with male workers and work more than men are forced to pay half as much as men.

Many women workers in Myagdi claim to work harder than men. “Male co-workers smoke cigarettes, spend a lot of time talking on mobile phones and talk when they see someone,” said Sabina Pariyar, who was carrying stones to fill a gabion net on the banks of the Myagdi River. We pay full attention to the work done, but we are cheated on the salary. ‘

Myagdi, known as the district of Lahure (Millitary), has been dominated by women in agriculture, industry, infrastructure construction and education. According to Jamuna Acharya, a women’s rights activist, most of the men here are in foreign employment but they have been cheated for years. According to the Agriculture Knowledge Center Myagdi, 75 percent of the work in the agricultural sector is done by women, but the same women are working for half the wages of men.

Women’s rights activists in the district also agree with the statement of women workers who were cheated in wages even though they worked harder than male workers. The working women of the district have said that they have not been able to do much about the rights of working women even though they have spoken about women’s rights and labor programs from time to time.

The women’s rights activists and human rights activists of Myagdi said that the equal pay for equal work should be given in the joint initiative.

According to Hira Poudel, a women’s rights activist, the law provides for ‘equal pay for equal work’.

Bimala Gauchan, a women’s rights activist and president of the Nepal Women’s Association, Myagdi, said that there was no change in the mindset of both men and women and that there was no uniformity in wages as women were physically and naturally weaker than men and could not work equally with men.

According to construction businessmen, more than 42 percent of the total workers are involved in the construction of physical infrastructure in Myagdi. Although 42 percent of women workers inside and outside Myagdi are working for less than half the wages of men, the body that raises their voices about them is silent.