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EEO Future Directions

Pru Goward Sex Discrimination Commissioner 17th Women, Management and Employment Relations Conference Hotel Intercontinental Corner Bridge & Phillip Streets, Sydney, Thursday 21 July 2005, 9.00am, 20 minutes

Acknowledgements.

It is as always a great pleasure to join you for the annual Women, Management and Employment Relations Conference.

In the process of carrying out the Commission's work on paid maternity leave in 2002 and as a result of the many submissions we received, it became clear that paid maternity leave, while a significant step in enabling women to better balance their paid work and family responsibilities, was not the whole answer.

Issues such as the role of men in family life and women's continuing greater responsibility for caring and household work needed considerable attention.

I launched our discussion paper - Striking the Balance: Women, Men, Work and Family '� late last month and from the interest that has been generated with the general public and in the media, it is clear that we are on the right track and have hit a nerve in the community.

Much of the commentary in the media and the community feedback has focused on the statistics around paid work and family care and the inequity of who does what in the home.

These statistics will probably be familiar to many of you, but are worth repeating because they so starkly illustrate what is going on in the homes of Australian families. Time use data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics1 and the Household Incomes Labour Dynamics in Australia survey2 tells us that:

Inevitably when I run through these statistics with women I see a room of nodding heads. No surprises here!

But to lots of men they are very confronting. I have had a lot of correspondence from men telling me that the statistics I use must be wrong, I obviously haven't taken into account the contribution men make in outdoor work and so on. I sometimes feel I need to break it to them gently that in fact the statistics are based on robust, objective, national survey data. Certainly not my data.

So what does it have to do with equality and isn't it really something that we should leave to families to decide for themselves within the confines of their own kitchens?

The fact is that the problems of balancing these unpaid family responsibilities are having significant impacts on women's paid work.

Unsurprisingly, since there are only 24 hours in a day and what we do with our unpaid responsibilities directly affects the hours left over to work. For men, the reverse is true. It's what they do at work that directly affects the hours left over for unpaid responsibilities.

Time, like almost everything else, is gendered.

What are these impacts?

On lots of levels, the picture of women in the paid workforce has never looked rosier. Young women are better educated than ever - girls on average outperform boys in secondary schooling and women now make up more than half of all university graduates.

The gap between men's and women's employment is closing rapidly with 45 per cent of all Australian women in the paid workforce compared to 55 per cent of men.

Women, particularly women with children, have surged into the paid workforce in recent decades and now more than 60 per cent of women with dependent children are employed. 40 per cent of mothers return to the paid workforce within a year of giving birth.

However, the way that most women currently manage to combine their paid work and family responsibilities is by working part time and often in casual employment. Almost three quarters of part time workers in Australia are women, and more than 80% of women working as casuals work part time.

Women account for slightly more than half of all casual workers, and a third of women work in casual jobs.

Mothers with small children are particularly likely to work part time '� of all Australian mothers in 2003, 35 per cent were employed part time, 25 per cent full time and 40 per cent not employed. When their youngest child is aged under 5, 15 per cent worked full time and 31 per cent part time and by the time children are aged 10 '� 14 years, 32 per cent are working full time.

And why should it be of concern that women work part time and in casual positions?

Well the first and probably most important reason is money.

In the most recent quarterly figures women earned 85 per cent of men's wages when we look at full time adult ordinary time earnings among non managerial employees. This is high because there aren't many women in full time work- they make up only 31% of the full time workforce. Inevitably they are likely to be either childless women or women whose children have grown up.

When all earnings are taken into account for full time workers the gap increases to full time 80.8 per cent and when part time wages are taken into account, women earn just 66.3 per cent of men's wages.7

There is no doubt that much of this gap is due to women taking work which will accommodate their family care responsibilities, instead of work which more fully rewards their skills and experience.

Recent independent research carried out for the Victorian Pay Equity Inquiry8 found the gender pay gap to be significantly smaller for part time employees - around 95% - but this is principally because the vast majority of part time workers are women.

However, more disturbingly, the report also found that part time wages have fallen as a proportion of both men's and women's full time wages in the six years between 1986 and 2002. For men this has been a fall of 4.7 percentage points and for women 6.7 percentage points.

Permanent part time employees receive an average of $20.10 per hour '� with women receiving $20. Men employed on a casual basis receive average hourly earnings of $20.40 compared to $18.40 for women.9

Taking time out of the workforce to have and care for children and increasingly to care for family members with an illness or disability also contributes to women's lower lifetime earnings and lower retirement incomes.

Women are already two and a half times more likely to live in poverty in old age then men and it is estimated that by 2019 men will have contributed double the superannuation of women. And this is in an environment where an ageing population is only increasing pressure on workers to financially provide for their own retirement by working longer and accumulating more superannuation.

There is little doubt that despite increasing levels of casualisation and part time work in recent decades, many Australian women find themselves relegated to the 'mummy track' once they return to work after having children.

Young women start out with high expectations of their future working lives, are well educated for anticipated careers and initially gain valuable skills in the workplace. But their careers are often sidelined once they have children or have other family care responsibilities thrust on them.

Australia is wasting our investment in women's education and skill development by offering them jobs not careers.

But it is not only a matter of improving the balance between paid work and family responsibilities to make individual women's lives easier, it is imperative for the nation that we properly harness the talents of working women.

The Treasurer has identified the three 'P's '� population, participation and productivity '� as the keys to increasing Australian prosperity. And each of these is closely tied up with questions of paid work and family balance.

Despite some small upwards movements in recent years from an all time low in 2000, fertility in Australia remains well below replacement level.

There are a number of reasons for our declining fertility rate - the widespread availability of contraception, and men and women partnering and marrying at a later age. But women's increased participation in the paid work force and limited access of mothers to family friendly work practices are critical.

Research also suggests that the unequal sharing of unpaid work in the home is also an important factor with a number of studies demonstrating that countries with higher birth rates are also those where there is more equal sharing of household labour following childbirth.10

In addition, the aging of our population presents significant challenges for Australia. As the recent Productivity Commission report highlighted, by 2044-45 one in four Australians will be aged over 65 '� more than double today's figures. Formal aged care needs alone are expected to increase by between 180 and 250 per cent of current expenditure in that time.

Ageing is a double edged sword for Australian families resulting in increased pressure to engage in both paid and unpaid work.

Much of this pressure is already falling on women '� many of whom are finding themselves in the sandwich generation providing simultaneous care to dependent children and elderly relatives. 71 per cent of all primary carers of older people and people with a disability are women and 91 per cent of parents requiring primary care in Australia are currently being cared for by their daughters.

In the context of similar patterns of demographic changes, countries across the OECD have identified that increasing participation in paid work is the key to maintaining national productivity. With unemployment at a 29 year low, there are limited directions that the labour market can expand.

Compared to other similar nations Australian women's participation in full time work is low. In 2000, only 43 per cent of Australian women with two or more children were in the paid workforce compared to 81 per cent in Sweden, 65 per cent in the US and 62 per cent in the UK.

Only the largely Catholic nations of Ireland, Italy and Spain have comparable figures for maternal employment.

Now that now that there are clear national imperatives to start looking at issues such as paid work and family responsibility, it is starting to be seen less as an issue of gender equity.

Let me make it quite clear that I am not backing away from this as an equality issue, but noting that it is now more widely recognised that gender equity impacts on a range of national interest outcomes, not just fairness.

Gender inequality affects workforce participation rates, economic growth and the taxation required to support welfare, especially for the rapidly growing aged population. Equal opportunity also has consequences for national fertility and demography.

Poverty levels, outcomes for children, post custodial arrangements and therefore the sustainability of family life post divorce, (especially for men) are also unintended consequences.

Perversely the long hours of work now associated with being the male breadwinner can affect life expectancy and early death rates for men. Altogether that is a significant bundle of national interest concerns that should make any group of public policy wonks sit up and take notice.

Australia will not have genuinely equal employment opportunities for men and women until we start addressing the inequity in our unpaid work responsibilities.

And women cannot do this alone. One of the things that the Commission is trying to do through the launch of our discussion paper and the national consultations we are currently undertaking, is to kickstart a national conversation around these issues.

And this must be a national conversation that includes men. I believe that it is critical that we involve men in this debate and include them as part of the solution we need to develop or we are wasting out time.

For a number of reasons. Firstly, the current situation exists, not because Australian men are inherently sexist and believe their wives and partners belong at home fetching their pipe and slippers.

In fact to the contrary, research suggests that Australian men and women show strong acceptance of flexible and egalitarian gender roles and research indicates that men and women believe that housework and parenting should be shared, not divided by gender.11

But the choices that men and women make about questions of paid work, unpaid work and family care are not made in a vacuum. The choices are made in the context of what supports our society has set up to allow us to make those choices.

Men and women are usually making very rational, economic decisions when they make the choice that once they have children, the mother will take time out of the paid workforce and work part time to care for the children. The fact that Australia still experiences a 15 per cent wage gap12 means that it is very likely that the family will lose less income if the mother rather than the father is out of paid work.

Our tax and welfare systems also support these arrangements through high effective marginal tax rates which discourage mothers of young children from working full time.

A recent study by NATSEM suggests that reductions in family assistance and increasing costs of childcare deter mothers with small children from working full time and for families with two or more children, mothers are likely to be far better off working part time13.

Our workplaces also drive families to make the decisions they do. Paid maternity leave, while available to only around 60 per cent of the female workforce compares extremely favourably to paid paternity leave. In 2002-03 only 7% of certified agreements featured access to paid paternity/secondary carer leave.14

Despite significant steps which have been taken in making flexible work practices more widely available in recent years, it is clear that the coverage is patchy at best.

Even where family friendly working conditions are notionally available, the evidence demonstrates that access to these conditions is highly dependent on an employee's type and size of workplace, their position and level of training, the industries and occupations they work in and the sector in which they are employed.15

One of my chief concerns in this debate is that the drivers of family flexibility seem to be pushing Australia to a point where well educated professionals are finding it easy to access workplace flexibility by taking home the laptop and the blackberry, but your average shop assistant or barman or factory worker has no capacity to make their paid work better mesh with family responsibilities. Their only tool is low-paid or part-time casual work.

On the other hand, well-educated professionals are expected to work crazy hours, even if it does include working from home, the car and at your child's Saturday morning basketball match.

Recent research carried out for the Department of Family and Community Services has found that there still remain significant barriers to fathers taking up family-friendly working provisions. 16 These included:

Employees, supervisors and even some senior managers thought that breaks or reductions in working hours could irreversibly damage men's careers. Without wishing to extrapolate inappropriately, I suspect that they might also think the same about women's careers if they were asked.

Men in the study reported a powerful link between earning income, having a career and their masculine identity. Loss of work'�or being passed over for promotion'�threatened their sense of manhood and most men tended to give priority to work over family.18

It is clear that our existing policies, institutions and the culture of our workplaces and our homes very much influence the choices we make. Which is why it is so critical that we all '� men and women '� work together to challenge the status quo.

I think this very much is a new direction in terms of thinking about EEO. We are familiar with the idea for example that we need to talk to all employees about issues such as sexual harassment in the workplace if we want to prevent it occurring, but I think that this current project involves working with men in a much more collaborative way.

Working with men is something that is being considered internationally as one of the important directions for achieving the advancement of women. The UN Commission on the Status of Women for the first time identified the role of men and boys in achieving gender equality as one of its two priority work areas during 2004. While this has been a new direction, the rationale is almost blindingly obvious '� "Equality is a relationship between people. Gender equality is not an issue that only concerns women. It requires active commitments by men, and partnerships between women and men."19

Clearly there are benefits to current arrangements in our contemporary society for men and as a result there is often resistance in trying to shift thinking about institutions, which let's face it, can serve men pretty well.

One of the things the Commission gave a lot of thought to were identifying strategies across the globe which have been successful in assisting men and boys to take an active part in achieving gender equality.

Perhaps not surprisingly, some of the strategies that were seen as being very successful were those that persuaded men that the benefits under the current system of gender relations in society are less valuable than many now think '� or that they come at too high a cost.

In relation to our current project, using such strategies of persuasion is integral to what we are trying to achieve.

Cultural change cannot be bought from the barrel of a gun or indeed from imposed legislation, such as the Spanish law which now makes it unlawful for men to shirk housework. Cultural change is very much about discussion, thinking, persuasion.

While I have certainly received some negative feedback from men who think that talking about unpaid work responsibilities constitutes some kind of personal attack on them, many of the men I have spoken to understand very clearly that there are real benefits for them as well as women in improving the status quo.

Men are currently very restricted in the choices they make about paid work. I spoke to a group of men '� long and short haul truck drivers - last week in South Australia about their thoughts about work and family and they strongly believed that their role was to provide financially for their families by working as many hours as possible.

This is not an uncommon belief.

Men are spending more and more time at work '� as are women '� but the hyper breadwinner model is certainly dominated by men. Full time male employees work an average of 42 hours a week. In 2004, more than a third of men worked more than 45 hours a week compared to only 12.5 per cent of women.20

Work is also intensifying. Many commentators have argued that employees across a range of sectors are carrying out more tasks and working harder and faster, reflected in the fact than over a third of employees who work overtime are not paid for it21.

While this can lead to personal satisfaction, it can also lead to high levels of stress, exhaustion, anxiety and work related depression.22

I should add that these truck drivers, also demonstrated another very important reason why the existing situation needs to change.

Among the group there were only three marriages still intact and a number of men that had experienced a number of failed relationships '� which they mostly attributed to the demands of work.

And again, these men are not alone. I am not suggesting that fighting over who does the dishes and who folds the laundry is solely responsible for our increasing divorce rate, but of the research that has been carried out, it has been shown that women who perceive their division of household labour as unfair are more likely to divorce and women are more likely than men to file for divorce23.

A Relationships Australia survey found that 89% of Australian agreed that relationships suffer because of work and family conflict.

There is no doubt that the drivers of this debate in terms of family breakdown and its consequences have strong emotional impact. It has been challenging for men and men's organisations to get involved in this debate which is so much about the private sphere of home and family. But there are such strong reasons for them to do so. Not the least of which concerns family breakdown.

For men one the greatest impacts of divorce is on their ongoing relationship with their children. The traditional pattern of unequal unpaid work responsibilities is reinforced in post separation arrangements.

Where there is disputed custody, the Family Court, driven by the interests of the child, is likely to award residence to the parent with demonstrably stronger bonds with the child. Which in most cases is the mother, who has been responsible for primary day to day care, and with whom the child is more familiar. There is no doubt that this is a devastating consequence for many fathers.

I believe we are making progress in explaining the benefits for both men and women in changing the status quo.

What remains is for Governments, workplaces and managers to step up and help provide the supports that make it possible for men and women make changes that will benefit them personally, their families and our community.

Our project will be bringing out a final paper following our consultations later in the year with a range of recommendations about how this might be done. But it is clear that a very large part of it will involve cultural change.

Managers, human resources professional, business owners and union leaders all have very important roles to play in helping the culture of our organisations adapt.

I urge you to talk to your employees, your colleagues, your members about these issues. And send the Commission your ideas.

We will be receiving submissions on the discussion paper until the end of September and the paper and details of how to make a submission have been included in your conference materials.

If we want to really advance the mission of equal opportunity in our workplaces, both men and women need to get with the programme - we must work together.

Endnotes

  1. ABS How Australians Use Their Time 1997 Cat No 4153.0
  2. HILDA data Wave 1 analysis has been carried out by Janeen Baxter, Belinda Hewitt and Mark Western for a forthcoming article "Post familial families and the domestic division of labour" (2005) 36 Journal of Comparative Family Studies 4
  3. Michael Bittman and Jocelyn Pixley The Double Life Of The Family Allen and Unwin St Leonards 1997
  4. Lyn Craig The Time Cost of Parenthood: An Analysis of Daily Workload SPRC Discussion Paper No 117 UNSW Sydney 2002
  5. Lyn Craig The Time Cost of Parenthood: An Analysis of Daily Workload SPRC Discussion Paper No 117 UNSW Sydney 2002
  6. ABS Disability, Ageing and Carers: Summary of findings 2004 Cat No 4430.0
  7. Australian Bureau of Statistics Cat No. 6302.0 Average Weekly Earnings, May 2005
  8. Pay Equity: How to Address the Gender Pay Gap A research report by URCOT for Industrial Relations Victoria, February 2005
  9. ABS Employee Earnings and Hours, Australia Cat No 6306.0 March 2005
  10. Lyn Craig A Cross-National Comparison of the Impact of Children on Adult Time Discussion Paper No 137 Social Policy Research Centre Sydney 2005, p 16. See also Berna Miller Torr and Susan E Short "Second Births and the Second Shift: A research note on gender equity and fertility" (2001) 30 Population and Development Review 1, pp 109-130 at p 113
  11. Michael Bittman and Jocelyn Pixley The Double Life of the Family Allen and Unwin St Leonards 1997, p 145.
  12. Australian Bureau of Statistics Cat No. 6302.0 Average Weekly Earnings, May 2005
  13. Matthew Toohey "The Effectiveness of Child Care Benefit at Improving Returns to Work for Women" Paper presented at the Families Matter: 9th Australian Institute of Family Studies Conference Melbourne 9 February 2005, pp 7-14.
  14. Department of Employment and Workplace Relations and Office of the Employment Advocate Agreement Making in Australia under the Workplace Relations Act 2002 and 2003 DEWR and OEA Canberra 2004
  15. Matthew Gray and Jacqueline Tudball "Access to Family-Friendly Work Practices: Differences within and between Australian workplaces" (2002) 61 Family Matters
  16. Michael Bittman, Sonia Hoffmann and Denise Thompson Men's Uptake Of Family Friendly Employment Provisions Policy Research Paper No 22 Department of Family and Community Services Canberra 2004.
  17. ibid
  18. ibid
  19. United Nations Division for the Advancement of Women The Role of Men and Boys in Achieving Gender Equality Report of the Expert Group Meeting Brasilia, Brazil 21 to 24 October 2003 New York 2004 p 11
  20. ABS Forms of Employment 2005 Cat No 6359.0
  21. ABS Year Book Australia 2003
  22. Barbara Pocock The Work/Life Collision The Federation Press Sydney 2003. Ines Wincert "Job Insecurity and Work Intensification" in Brendan Burchell, David Ladipo and Frank Wilkinson (eds) Job Security and Work Intensification Routledge Florence 2001, p 97.
  23. Michelle L Frisco and Kristi Williams "Perceived Housework Equity, Marital Happiness, and Divorce in Dual-Earner Households" (2003) 24 Journal of Family Issues 1, pp 51-73 at p 68.
Last updated 19 September 2002