From: Family Responsibilities
Sent: Friday, 7 April 2006 4:30 PM
To: Family Responsibilities
Subject: FW: Submission on Striking the Balance - by a male, married 3 children, age 45, lives Canberra, professional
Attachments: image002.gif; image003.gif
From: Brett [mailto:goyneb@tpg.com.au]
Sent: Tuesday, 27 September 2005 10:35 PM
To: Family Responsibilities
Subject: Submission on Striking the Balance - by a male, married 3 children, age 45, lives Canberra, professional
Please reply and acknowledge receipt as I have no receipt function on this version of Outlook
I am motivated to make a submission by my general disgust with the persistently bad press and image that men receive in the Australian mass media. There is a paucity of cover on men’s issues and a paucity of social research on what men feel, believe and want out of modern Australian life.
As to confidentiality, I am happy for you to publish my views, but I would be disappointed to be misrepresented and cast as a misogynist, which I am not. I would describe my views as humanist.
My professional background is as a nurse, both general and mental health, and as an advocate.
Response to Discussion Paper – ‘Striking the Balance’
- I would describe your paper as femino-centric. The dialogue is consistently from a woman’s perspective. Given the strong thread of a professional woman’s perspective, I am not at all surprised to turn to the facing page, page number ii, to see that ALL OF THE AUTHORS ARE WOMEN! What! If this paper was prepared about gender issues and prepared exclusively by men we would NEVER hear the end of it in the mass media, the bias would be exposed as a scandal. I strongly suggest that you consider a gender balance in the HREOC.
- Further to that point, I was surprised to find that the Sex Discrimination Act is not equal in its application to both women and men. Thank you for that point and your honesty, I was unaware of it, Pg 86 Discussion Paper. If I was a reformer I would be seeking to establish equality of access to the legal process.
- The debate in the media has focused on the second shift and the double load, highly pejorative terms and we keep hearing that men aren’t pulling their weight. I do. I am a great believer in equality and am constantly offended by the media portrayal of men. I was NOT surprised to read that; “On average, men and women spend a similar amount of time each day on paid and unpaid work combined, 7.08 and 7.2 hours per day respectively”, Page 26. When is that EVER reported in the media? The difference on average is .12 hours, is that 8 minutes greater leisure time that men have over women, - on average? It’s a pretty short second shift, eh?
- As to bias, you define unpaid work, housework and child care - but where do you define paid work? Does paid work time include: worked hours, unpaid overtime, transport time, union membership activity? What about self education or conference time related to your trade or profession? What about worry time, or down time, or wake-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night-time due to work related stress? What about time related to stress or sickness related to work and the necessary time for unwinding?
The whole debate on time worked paid and unpaid tends to ignore the effect that some paid employment has on people. There is a naive assumption that time is neatly compartmentalized into paid and unpaid.
For example; I was a mental health community unit team-leader with responsibility for about 16 staff and 3 psychiatrists to work with. The unit was grossly under-resourced, not enough beds to admit acutely ill patients as needed and I used to support the staff in a complex environment where they felt greatly stressed. At the same time we had three children under nine at home, and I used to do a very fair share of house work. My wife worked part time about 15 – 26 hours per fortnight as a waitress.
I would mind the children, give them dinner etc on weekends and evenings when my wife worked. I was studying Uni, 1-3 units per year as I desperately wanted to get out of my profession due to the combined pressures of chronic under-resourcing and complaints. I ended up not sleeping very well at all and life became a grind.
My point is, - there may be inequalities in the stress and responsibility burden of paid work between partners in a relationship, and work doesn’t end easily when the factory whistle blows. What about police or ambulance workers or hospital nurses, or miners on shift work? I tell you that as the paid hours build up so does the level of expected commitment and the stress. However this is rarely captured in the gender work balance debate. We do hear about how having non-sleeping young babies is a grind, as it is, but employment can be just such a grind.
- Thank you for the information contained on page 14. “However, relative to comparable countries Australian women have a low level of workforce involvement. In 2000, Australian women with two or more children, ONLY (my emphasis) 43.2% were in the workforce, compared with 81.8 % in Sweden, 64.7% in the United States etc.” Geez, I have never heard that in the media. Maybe Australian men aren’t so bad? Maybe they and their partners are doing some sort of deal to enable women to do child-care whilst men do the bread-winner, work roles?
The sad fact is that our economic and social structures encourage and socialize men to work. See Steve Biddulph, Manhood. This distribution of labour and social roles seems to be mightily persistent. I don’t think it is necessarily a good thing, and I would like it to change, - but it may be something that both men and women encourage as it enables men to catch a mate and women to have a support, bread-winner whilst they nest and have babies. But I generalize. (Please do not quote this comment alone, it is embedded in all of the above comments.
- I refer you to the ABS graph that you publish on page 16, - of 100% of parents; both parents are employed full-time in only 20% of cases; one parent is full-time and the other part-time, or not employed, in 67.8% of cases. Again the genders seem to be accommodating some form of division of labour. A division that in my view disadvantages BOTH women and men.
What irks me -(enormously as you can see, if you are still reading!) - is that men seem to get all of the bad press about this. Your paper repeats this in chief by constructing the argument in how men can increase their share of unpaid work. A much more equal and reasonable debate would be about how the genders share; paid work, the bread-winner role, unpaid work and child-care. Until the debate is fairer and informed by a men’s perspective, it will continue to limp along, with incremental change; women will complain and men will be silent. Feminism has encouraged women to be always cast as the unwitting, and unfortunate victims. It is a terribly disempowering discourse.
Men are silent. Some believe that they are superior, some believe that they will lose an undeserved advantage, and many are silent as they believe they will be cast as misogynist or chauvinist. We are in a Western world where the dominant discourse is feminist, like your discussion –it is cast in a women’s perspective. No man can be a true feminist, as feminism is by definition a women’s view.
Me, I refuse to be silent, and I risk abuse, and risk being miscast. I believe and practice in the world as a humanist, - respecting equality in all human beings.
27 September 2005
