Speech by Pru Goward, Federal Sex Discrimination Commissioner and Commissioner responsible for Age Discrimination at the Australian Institute of Banking and Finance, Sydney, Friday 8 April, 2005
Thank you so much for inviting me to speak to the Australian Institute of Banking and Finance today.
Your industry is one of the power-houses of the Australian economy and it is vital that women are willing and able to contribute to it.
Yet yours is a curious beast- it has slightly more female than male workers, and a younger profile than other industries. But so many of the women in this industry are employed part time, or in junior positions, it also has one of the biggest male- female pay gaps in Australia.
Even comparing men and women full time workers, women earn only 64 cents in the male dollar. This is despite the growth of women in the management stream.
Westpac, for example, reports that 40% of its managers are women, but only a quarter of its senior managers and fewer again in the executive.
This should not surprise us.
The senior management and executive group tend to be drawn from the full time work force. It would be nice if it were different, if permanent part timers could be considered for part time management, and for reasons I will get to later, this may well change.
In the mean time, it is still the case that only three out of ten women in the Australian work force are working full time. They are more likely to be unmarried and young, not quite the managerial age profile.
Why would you expect to see equal numbers of women in senior management so long as so few women are able to work full time?
Significantly, this is a number which hasn"t changed much since 1980, when a mere 27% of women only worked full time.
If you look at women in their thirties and forties- the prime years for management promotion- you"ll see a significant drop in the numbers working full time. The reason? That is when professional women are having their families.
Because the finance and insurance sector is so internationally competitive and likely to become more so, it is especially important that the sector address this problem.
Uncompetitiveness is reflected in factors like poor gender balances and work force turn over; the two are often connected.
As you would know, the higher your turn-over the more your staff are costing you. Many banks found they could cut their drop out rate significantly when they introduced paid maternity leave.
It also improved their gender balance and was certainly a good start.
But unless this sector becomes even more creative about its work-life balance policies, attrition will continue to be a cost problem.
I understand Westpac"s turnover rate is 17% and other companies are similar. Forgive me for quoting Westpac but they have an excellent 2004 report card which makes interesting reading.
It is also true that companies are no longer dealing with a homogenous work force of people who walk in at 20, work full time for 35 years and leave for the heart tablets and caravan trip around Australia at fifty five.
Today"s workforce is made up of groups with quite different plans and aspirations- young people who demand a life, young women and men who want to be more than latch-key parents, older women and men facing elder care, senior managers who want to enjoy the fruits of their hard work before they"re put on Warfrin for the rest of their lives.
Essentially, this is what my new project, Striking the Balance: Women, Men, Work and Family is about. In particular it is about how men and women manage their paid and unpaid work and the impact this is having on us as families, as communities and as a nation.
It is about whether we could better share our unpaid caring responsibilities - for not only ourselves and our families, but for economic prosperity, the challenge of ageing and indeed the very sustainability of Australia"s population.
What this project is not about is blame. It"s not about how unfair it is that men don"t clean the bathroom and women don"t die at 65 of heart attacks because they"ve spent a lifetime flogging themselves for ungrateful employers.
What"s needed is not blaming but conversations, conversations long overdue.
It"s about that quarter of all Australian men who work more than 50 hours a week and don"t know what to say when told they need to be mentors to their sons and daughters.
It"s about teenage children with nobody home, or mothers anxiously sitting on the bus worried about getting to the child care centre before it shuts, or picking a sick child up from school before they vomit again.
It"s about husbands and wives angrily confronting each other over who does what - or not confronting each other and walking out.
It"s about the half of marriages which end in divorce over a 30 year period - with who does what at home often to blame. It"s about fathers and custody after divorce, and male role modelling.
It"s about frail elderly parents ringing their children at work to tell them they"ve been robbed or need to see a doctor, and middle aged children unable to come because all hell is also breaking loose at work and it"s a 40-minute drive each way.
It is not about all families all the time, and certainly it is true that many families manage to avoid these stresses almost entirely, but it is the reality for countless others.
This project is about the time that money doesn"t want to buy. It is about avoiding the inevitable consequences of sharing our unpaid work as unequally as we do.
To begin with, you could say the way couples divvy up their unpaid caring responsibilities is not good for the world of paid work, the economic world. Although 60% of Australian women are in paid work, by Western standards we are low to middle of the range. Try almost 90% percent in parts of Scandinavia.
Australia currently has a record low unemployment rate of just over 5% and the pressure is on - on wages especially, with interest rate rises yet to come.
In the OECD"s 2004 Economic Survey of Australia, unsurprisingly it was recommended that Australia increase the size of its workforce, especially its older worker numbers, to maintain economic growth. Recently these sentiments have been echoed by the treasurer.
We could easily start with older Australians. Australian women over the age of 55 have, by Western standards, average participation, 40%. A bit lower than Portugal, not as low as Turkey and Greece and Italy, but much lower than northern Europe, the UK and the US. In Sweden, 70% of women 55 to 64 are in paid work.
But it is also about encouraging younger women to work. Australian women between 35 and 44, the peak child bearing years, work far less than their foreign sisters. More than half young Australian mothers don"t return to work before the child is six.
Many will say that is a good thing for many Australian families; this is a choice freely made and good for kids. But the streets of Stockholm and other Scandinavian countries are not filled with delinquent children suffering maternal deprivation because their mothers work.
It is also not clear to me that Australian women have always willing chosen not to work with young children.
For example when part time jobs became widely available after the labour market deregulation of the early 1990s, women flooded into work. Women in fact will work with small children, if they can find work which fits with their family.
Evidence from the rest of the world certainly suggests that it is possible for more of us to successfully combine paid work with parenting than we do, and there are risks, including poverty, for families today in not having two working parents.
The reasons women don"t work more in Australia are clear - while some just prefer it, others consider they have caring responsibilities for their partners and children and increasingly, responsibilities for the elderly which, when combined with paid work, would make their lives impossible. In fact, 88.5% of parents receiving informal primary care are cared for by their daughters- someone else"s sister.
It"s no wonder women work less here than they do elsewhere - there"s only so much they can fit in a day.
Yes, they have subsidised child care and one of the highest part-time work rates in the Western world, but between their kids, their parents and their jobs, they are working not a double shift, but a triple one.
On average, Australian women do 12.58 hours of paid and unpaid work a day all up, compared with men on 10.7 hours of paid and unpaid work combined - and we"re counting washing the car, mowing the lawns and getting the petrol in here.
Sixty percent of women in full time work also do more than twelve hours housework a week - and don"t think they scrub the bath for love.
Mothers in paid work also sleep less; have less time for personal grooming and less child free leisure time than anyone else, even working dads. And for all this effort, they end up as poor old ladies, living on half the retirement savings of men.
None of this means it is men"s fault, but it does mean they need to be part of the solution.
Because at a certain point women are going to start challenging this unequal allocation of unpaid work. They are already getting snappy, if the talk back I"ve taken since the project was announced is any guide. You might say it is amazing that Australia"s got away with it for so long.
Women today can barely afford to drop out of work and stop paying into superannuation so they can care for their elderly parents - yet at the moment employed women make up a third of all primary carers.
This will change fast. Increasingly women instead will insist that responsibility for their parents is shared with their brothers and partners. And if nobody does it, how does a declining percentage of tax payers foot a bill for formal care alone which is predicted to go up 2 and a half times faster than Australia"s GNP over the next 40 years?
The imputed value of unpaid care in Australia was estimated to be almost $29 billion in the year 2000-2001. Either taxpayers and companies help employees to provide this care through work-life policies and programmes, or we will have to fork out for a chunk of that $29 billion and pay for it anyway. Whichever route Australia chooses, it is going to cost money.
Yes, there are some women willing to provide enormous support to their children and grandchildren, lucky children and grandchildren. But these are rare and likely to become rarer- families move, cities spread out, distances between families grow, older women need to keep working. Again, my experience with focus groups is that many families also don"t think this is fair to either granny or the children.
And leaving aside grandmothers, increasingly mothers won"t give up their jobs or promotional opportunities, increasingly they won"t stay at home or work part time when the children need them - the first thing they"ll do is choose companies which provide support, then they"ll seek pro family husbands who will share the chores, and, if none of that works out, just not have children.
And of course, it is our well educated young women in full time work who are already the least likely to have children.
Indigenous women and women from ethnic communities hold up Australia"s dismal birth rate.
Who knows, we could follow the American route, where half of all women earning more than $100,000 a year are childless by the time they turn forty.
It is actually impossible to look at the division of unpaid caring responsibilities without considering what it means for Australia"s fertility rate.
For so long as motherhood means either greater economic risk, more, not less housework and no leisure time, why would you be surprised to find Australian women choosing to have fewer children?
In the 20 years since 1980, only-child families have gone from being one in five of all Australian families to one in three. In Sydney and Melbourne you can find primary schools where half the classes are made up of one child families.
There used to be a joke that if men had children there might be one child but there would never be two. You don"t hear that joke so much anymore, because the same is now true of women.
This has huge social implications.
Nobody to fight with, be picked on by, share with, learn to negotiate with. No aunties and uncles or cousins either.
If we make anything too hard, if we don"t support it enough, we shouldn"t be surprised if fewer and fewer people do it.
Today"s birthrate of 1.75 children per woman, well below the replacement level of 2.1, is even lower than the birthrate during the Depression. There is absolute agreement that it is unsustainable.
However, Australia"s only now starting to take the fertility challenge seriously - employer-provided paid maternity leave, the government"s maternity payment, subsidized child care and a range of industrial flexibilities are necessary responses.
But there are as yet no initiatives that encourage men to be more engaged as parents, to share the load - and so long as this remains the case, there has to be a limit on how many children a woman is prepared to have.
Very few women are prepared to embark on motherhood alone or with a man who cannot contribute unpaid time.
But working couples don"t find it easy to work out who does what at home, even with only one child and some work flexibilities.
Long hours and the uneven spread of work between men and women puts enormous strain on relationships. I have not been at a single focus group which has not said they fight more about the housework and child care than anything else.
No wonder half of Australian marriages break up in a 30 year period. They must be a frequent early casualty of the battle between work and family.
As labour economist Barbara Pocock's research shows, the 'hidden costs' of these pressures for women are significant, being a source of anger, tiredness and relationship strain in many marriages, and for some constituting grounds for divorce.
As it is, 50 percent of all marriage break ups are instigated by women. Far fewer by men. That means there must be a lot of surprised men in Australia who thought the division of unpaid caring responsibilities in their households was just fine as they worked their 50 hour weeks, until the night they came home to an empty house and a note on the kitchen bench telling him she had decided to leave, along with their children.
The next surprise is when they start talking to counselors or the Family Court about having their children with them for more than weekends. They are unable to claim the depth and strength of bonds their children have with mothers who, by contrast, spent hours each day with their children and have part time work that suits them.
Fathers in these situations are destined to become weekend Disney dads, at great loss and sadness for all concerned - their children, their grandparents, themselves. And don"t forget the mothers, who frequently become impoverished single parents with limited opportunities for paid work. Not always, but often.
One of the interesting outcomes of the Government"s recent decision to toughen up the work test for single parents with children at school may well be the greater pressure this puts on their ex partners to forego paid work in order to stay at home with the children.
It"s true that many Australian workplaces make work place flexibilities available to men, many government programmes are available for both men and women; the problem is men don"t take up their entitlements. As a recent Michael Bittman study demonstrates, men are more likely to take bereavement leave than carer"s leave.
One reason might be the attitudes of others.
Many men say that those who do take time out for their family responsibilities are immediately moved to the never-to-be-promoted daddy track, doomed not to reach senior ranks.
Surely this must change?
Especially in this day and age, when we have working lives of 50 years looming before us, a couple of years of less intense work should not be a death sentence.
There is some shift amongst men in their late fifties and early sixties which might lead the way.
Many are now seeking to convert their fifty hour a week full time jobs into part time positions which will give them time to smell the roses left to them, play golf, get to know their grandchildren and maybe even care for their now very old parents. As this pressure grows part time management is likely to spread, to the benefit of younger men and women who also need more time with their families.
The market always has its ways, but also its limits. When it comes to increasing fertility or cutting the divorce rate, there is a limit to how much employers can accommodate families; there is a limit to how much money governments can give families.
In the end, how many children we have and how we share our responsibilities and our time is up to us.
Australians need to start taking on board the consequences of squeezing and stressing domestic life until it bursts at the seams and childlessness, or fewer children than people want, become the easy option.
There will never be progress so long as we just put up with it. Progress is driven by discontent, by wanting something better, not by good old Australian stoicism.
However you look at it, relationship breakdown, custody arrangements, the feminization of poverty, care outcomes for our elderly, the fertility rate and economic growth are directly related to how well we divvy up our unpaid caring work between men and women.
It goes without saying that it also has a bearing on equality between the sexes.
There"s no debate about who is bearing the lion"s share of the unpaid burden, with of course, honourable exceptions, because government national time use statistics tell the story.
Time use surveys show Australian men do more with their children than ever before, but rarely instead of working.
On average, men in full time work do one and a half hours less work, combining paid and unpaid work, than women with full time jobs.
So if some of us have wonderful partners who love doing the washing, including putting it away, and supervising bath time, it means there must be plenty of other blokes who aren"t.
There is a strong case for encouraging more men to do more at home - it need not mean they reduce their working hours, but instead reduce their leisure hours in the way working mothers have done. Remember, these years of young families and needy parents feel like they are forever but go very fast. Men doing more at home could well mean she increases her working hours, or even takes a promotion.
It is of course, excellent for children to have both mum and dad around. Hanging around the kitchen or sorting out the washing isn"t as exciting as working those extra unpaid hours of over time, or having a drink after work, or going to the football without the children on Saturdays, but it is much more likely to pay off in the long run for marriages, assets and in particular your children.
According to the Household Income and Labour Dynamics survey, HILDA, it is men with less than year 12 education who are the least likely to accept a non traditional sharing of responsibilities and are most attached to the male bread winner model, with the woman at home.
Amongst younger men, they are also likely to have fewer children than any other male group - perhaps because of these beliefs.
This suggests that education and awareness raising plays a role in changing male expectations about what they and their partners do. It also suggests it"s not in the genes but in the mind.
If the focus groups are anything to go by, women probably need a bit of awareness raising too. There is more than one way of folding a sheet, washing a child or stacking the dishwasher, their way. Let men find their own way and be thankful.
Of course there are national public policy questions that need to be at least asked: what can governments do to improve the sharing of unpaid work? Or if they choose not to, how do they plan to deal with its consequences .... divorce, at risk children, expensive aged care, falling fertility, rising tax rates, slowing economic growth and so on?
Some of this thinking is clearly going on in government ranks federally- and the states need to join in.
Whether governments do or do not actively address the challenge, you can be sure it will end up being a matter for them.
In the same way that special measures were made available to women in the paid work force, perhaps governments have to consider special measures to men to enable them to enter the unpaid work force. A number of Scandinavian countries, for example, provide paid paternity leave that can only be taken by fathers, otherwise it is lost.
The British have gone a softly-softly route with legislation that requires employers to reasonably consider requests for part time work from fathers and mothers.
Relationship programmes could promote active fathering as a means of assisting families stay together. Both single parents and non custodial single parents who wish to increase their contact hours could be assisted with part time work options. The family responsibilities provisions of the Sex Discrimination Act might need to be reviewed.
For 21 years the Sex Discrimination Act, and indeed women throughout Australia, have focused on the world of work.
Increasingly, Australian employers and governments come to the party; women are, slowly, getting what they say they want in the world of work.
And it has all been to the great advantage of the Australian economy and the Australian people.
It has enabled us to expand our workforce, raise family living standards and economic growth.
There are very few who believe we would be better off without women in the workforce.
But a day for a family is 24 hours, not merely those we spend at work. And for 21 years the Act has been almost silent on the remainder.
We can no longer afford the cold war going on in private time and what this is doing to so many of our families and our collective future as a nation.
We can no longer afford to ignore the need to get right the sharing of responsibilities for our aged, before baby boomers overwhelm their daughters.
We can no longer afford to accept the high divorce rate when its causes are clearly not rocket science.
We cannot continue to agitate about inequality between men and women in the workplace when many of its seeds are sown in the home.
Sex Discrimination
