Professional women: Choice and challenge
Speech delivered by Pru Goward, Federal Sex Discrimination Commissioner at the Second National Conference on Women in Science, Technology and Engineering, Faculty of Nursing, Mallet Street Campus, University of Sydney, 29 November 2002
John Baistow, Chairman of Member Australia Credit Union, thank you for your sponsorship of the Malcolm MacIntosh Memorial Lectures and thank you for inviting me here today.
It gives me great pleasure to be able to address the Second National Conference on Women in Science, Technology and Engineering.
The movement of women into professions such as science and engineering has not just been about women entering 'new', dynamic professions.
It has and continues to be about women making inroads into traditionally male occupations.
As such, the history of women in the fields of science, technology and engineering is marked by the achievements of individual women - when Emily Dornwell graduated from the University of Adelaide with a science degree in 1885, for example, she was only the second female university graduate in Australia.
It is also marked by the establishment of women's organisations and events aimed at supporting professional women in these fields. Today's conference bears witness to this.
The entry of women into all professions has, in part, been facilitated by the admission of women into universities.
Since this occurred, women have embraced and achieved in the study of sciences.
The group of more than 60 women who graduated from the University of Melbourne before 1920 for example, amassed over 40 scholarships and prizes between them.
More recently, in 1998, over half of the university enrolments in science were women (53%) and 39 per cent of enrolments in mathematics and computing were women. [1]
For the women who go on to pursue professional as opposed to academic careers in these fields there are however, a plethora of challenges to be met.
They are the challenges experienced by the majority of women in the workforce today; the challenges experienced by the majority of professional women today; and also the challenges experienced by professional women working in male dominated areas.
In the time I have today, I would like to discuss those challenges experienced by professional women in employment generally and how they relate to the work I am currently undertaking as Federal Sex Discrimination Commissioner.
Essentially, these are the challenges associated with being the part of the population responsible for bearing children.
For women in paid work this challenge often translates into receiving less pay, less lifetime earnings and being subject to less income security over their lifetime.
Women still only earn 84 cents in the male dollar, when comparing average weekly ordinary full time earnings.
This gap occurs for a number of reasons as we know - basic discrimination; perhaps, women's career expectations; workforce gender segregation which is ongoing and high; and, of course, family responsibilities.
It is the gendered nature of family responsibilities that now form the greatest barrier to equal pay.
Women who negotiate with bosses for salaries - professional women being the group of women most likely to - quite often end up with less then their male counterparts doing the same job.
They arrive at the bargaining table feeling that they will have to forfeit a higher salary because they know one day they may need greater workplace flexibility or they may have to take days off due to commitments to their children. Men - many of whom will become or are fathers don't even consider factoring these things when they sit down to 'talk figures'.
It doesn't take long for this pattern to set in.
The 2002 graduate destination survey found that new male graduates earned $36,000, on average, while the average salary for female graduates was $34,000. [Part of this can be explained by men going into more high paid industries than women.] The survey did find however that this discrepancy existed even when men and women were graduates in the same field.
Second, that promotion often isn't available to women, nor are the extra hours, nor is the senior position available in the interstate office for three months because they need to get home to their kids.
The disparity in the earning ratio between women and men grows to 66 cents in the dollar when part time and casual workers are added into the equation.
It is not surprising then to find that it is women making up 73 per cent of all part time employees and 60 per cent of the casual workforce.
The challenges do not end at salary inequities.
As child bearing responsibilities result in women having more limited time in the workforce, pay inequities and discrimination in job access, women workers have substantially poorer retirement incomes than men.
One estimate is that an average superannuation balance for men in 2004 will be $74 000, while for women it will be $40 000. [2]
Projected to 2019 the figures for men and women were $121 000 and $77 000 respectively. [3]
Professional women in employment also face the challenges of being overlooked for promotions and being less likely to advance to higher positions within the workforce in general.
Australia's first census of women in leadership, released earlier this week, found that women held only 8.2 per cent of board seats and 8.4 per cent of senior executive positions in the country's top 150 listed companies.
Just over half of those companies have no women in executive positions, and only two of them have a woman as CEO.
This situation does not arise because women are less competent.
It arises because despite being as qualified, and achieving as much professionally as their male counterparts, assumptions continue to be made about women by those around them concerning their career aspirations.
And all of this occurs before most women have even contemplated having a baby!
Which brings us to another challenge experienced by professional women in the paid workforce today - the challenge of combining work and family.
This challenge is not unique to professional women.
The workforce has been failed to accommodate all women as they work and mother.
This needs to change.
With the demographic squeeze now upon us, with Western countries like ours expecting long term labour shortages, and unemployment predicted to fall to four per cent form today's six per cent by the end of next year, we have no choice even if we hate women's rights, but to make sure women can work and have children.
We need to take positive steps to make the workforce a female friendly and therefore family friendly place.
Paid maternity leave - income replacement for women when they take time out of the paid workforce at the time of the birth of their child - is part of the suite of measures that will facilitate this change.
It is both the starting point and centrepiece and it is what I have focussed on in my first year as Federal Sex Discrimination Commissioner.
In two weeks time I will be launching my final paper on options for a national scheme of paid maternity leave.
The paper is the result of a series of nation wide consultations on the issue with employer groups, unions and women's groups and communities.
It reflects the views expressed in the submissions we received to our interim paper on options for paid maternity leave and responds to public debate on this issue.
A public debate that has centred around the need of the vast majority of women working in the paid workforce today - across all industries and professions - to balance work and family, to combine having children with paid work, to perform a dual role as mothers and workers.
Because this is the reality for women and their families today.
However this need is currently not being met.
The result?
Women are forced to make a cruel and often personally difficult either/or choice - work or family.
Although, social, economic and physiological factors are fast combining to make this a 'lack of choice' choice.
This is the experience of women in science, as highlighted in the submission made by the CSIRO in response to the interim paper outlining options for a national scheme of paid maternity leave.
Most of the CSIRO members who took maternity leave did not have their first babies until they were in their thirties - mostly mid thirties and some into their forties.
These women able to successfully delay childbirth, did so for a number of reasons:
Increased time spent in higher education gaining qualifications and then time establishing themselves in their professional field.
Keeping in mind that the time required to get a career started is even greater for research scientists who pursue post graduate qualifications and then have to be mobile to gain postdoctoral experience interstate or internationally.
Financial stability for these women and/or their partners was also an important consideration.
They found that achieving this stability may take a few years in view of the limited term employment that most women have to take up to start their careers.
It will take even longer for those women who are the primary income earners in their household.
Combining this with the high cost of living today, a household in 2002 relies on two incomes to meet mortgage repayments, car repayments and the daily cost of living - and forfeiting an income, for even a short period of time becomes an impossibility.
This is the reality today for all women in all professions. This is the reality to which paid maternity leave offers an effective response because paid maternity leaves means that women do not have to forego this income when they take time out of the workforce to give birth, recover from the birth and bond and care for the child.
It is one element - a crucial element - of the suite of measures that will make having children a choice for women in paid work.
Because this is about choice.
When university opened its doors to women in the 19th century choice was opened to women.
Women could enter professions that had previously been the domain of men only.
As a result today women are crucial, important and necessary professionals.
They face a unique set of challenges - but then so does the rest of society.
The nature of our challenge is nothing new. It is about women and choice.
It is the challenge of making the working and mothering a viable choice for women.
1.
P.10 of Wisenet science journal.
2. Ross Clare Women and Superannuation paper presented
to the Ninth Annual Colloquium of Superannuation Researchers UNSW School
of Economic and Actuarial Studies, Association of Superannuation Funds
Australia 2001, 22.
3. Ross Clare Women and Superannuation paper presented
to the Ninth Annual Colloquium of Superannuation Researchers UNSW School
of Economic and Actuarial Studies, Association of Superannuation Funds
Australia 2001, 22.
