Why Gender Matters in Public Policy
Address given by Sex Discrimination Commissioner Pru Goward at the SES Officers Lunch, Australian Federal Police College, Barton, ACT, 29 October 2004.
- I'd like to begin by congratulating the women who have been appointed departmental heads - now almost a third of departmental secretaries - and congratulating the Government for recognizing merit in so doing.
- Perhaps these appointments make it too easy to sit here in 2004 and assume gender doesn't matter any more. We have records being broken everywhere.
- More women in the federal ministry than ever before, more women departmental heads, more women in the SES.
- More women earning more money, more women graduating than men, more women able to read and write than men, plenty of first time women doing jobs formerly the preserve of men; more, more, more.
- I was not surprised that the Office for the Status of Women (OSW) is to move to the Department of Family and Community Services. Not only is the idea of a women's office doing a mixture of policy and program development out of step amongst the stream lined government administration of today, it is also doubtful that the Office has ever regularly influenced cabinet outcomes for a range of reasons not limited to the period of the current government.
- I do not believe this is a reflection on the calibre of the people involved, although when I joined OSW I did note an alarming proportion of officers who declared they had a passion for women's rights, rather than a passion for analysis, surely a key attribute for any cool-headed policy maker.
- Frankly, the task of OSW was always was an impossible one; a few dozen policy officers challenging the carefully honed and negotiated cabinet submissions of line departments with their hundreds of policy officers was doomed to end almost always in being ignored.
- There are fiefdoms throughout the public service as there are in any large organisation and no laird is ever going to easily succumb to arguments of another laird, even if she is sitting in the prime minister's department.
- Yes, there have been victories, but not often enough. OSW's major successes were with their own proposals, such as Partnerships Against Domestic Violence, or those they partnered with other agencies such as the development of the Sex Discrimination Act.
- The department of Prime Minister & Cabinet's own lack of confidence in the Office has also been reflected in its rare inclusion on Inter-Departmental Committee's, again denying the Office opportunities to contribute to national policy development.
- There is also a general view that women don't need special pleading any more.
- Apparently in some people's minds, as soon as there's a woman for the first time in any position, women have become the majority. And they say women can't do math.
- Whatever your view of the desirability of a women's office within the Commonwealth's key policy department, and it is not my intention to canvas the arguments further today, for a number of reasons gender remains a significant factor in public policy and will be ignored at your peril.
- And because of that, there is now a challenge for the rest of the public service, to properly integrate gender analysis into public policy formulation. The United Nations, usually a good lap behind the times, calls it gender mainstreaming. It does not mean every department having dinky little women's units who produce pink toned promotional pamphlets extolling the virtues of the National Dairy Scheme or whatever it is for women, it means all departments running a gender ruler over their programs, policies and legislation. If there are different gender impacts, then that needs to be recognised and accounted for. Indeed once we start integrating gender analysis into public policy, who knows, we might also be able to integrate social and economic policy! Now that would be a break through!
- I am not, of course, talking about politics. Politics is essentially about marketing and while there will be differences between men and women voters' interests and susceptibilities, this is the business of ministerial offices rather than departments, unless those pink toned pamphlets play a role in increasing public awareness.
- But policy as well as politics needs to be gender informed. The national interest is better served because of it. If governments choose to heed or ignore such advice, that is a political choice. However I have never known politicians to reject anything which might earn one extra vote, let alone those of an entire cohort's. In an age when women still have the right to vote, ignoring or opposing their interests would be foolish indeed.
- The reasons for gender awareness should be obvious to you. There are still major differences between the lives of men and women and undeniable physiological differences.
- Most obviously women still bear, breast feed and raise children. At least for now. Men may raise children, but Australian cultural norms still dictate that even this is primarily a mother's task.
- Women are also more likely to be the victims of male violence than perpetrators of violence against them.
- While there are many women firsts, it is still true that women are working to catch up on historical disadvantage with inevitable echoes in the present. Yes, there are more women departmental heads than ever before - but set against a century of almost none, even in the modern era when the public service has employed a majority of women.
- Yes, the majority of university graduates are now female but that is after only one hundred and thirty years of being allowed to even attend university. There remains a dearth of women in technical and trades occupations, despite the lucrative salaries and the emerging shortages.
- Yes, women are free to move around unescorted and they are not stoned to death for having unmarried sex. But they do get called sluts and tarts who were asking to be raped if they stay out late with a footballer.
- Yes, we have apprehended violence orders and national campaigns against domestic violence, but we still have domestic violence and most of its victims are women.
- Not all of this can be explained by the onerous responsibilities of managing work and family. Some of it is based on naive and biased assumptions about the nature and rights of women and of men and the choices they should have.
- The consequences of these differences, particularly for their life outcomes, are undeniable. There are already two and a half times as many women living in poverty in retirement as there are men. Not all of this is because there are more old ladies.
- That is today. After a generation of workers who have paid into superannuation accounts all their lives moves into retirement, around the year 2019, men are predicted to have accumulated, on average, double the retirement income of women. Not surprising given that women on average work and are paid for half the number of working hours of men in a life time.
- Sole parent mothers remain a significant percentage of the poor, and, when their children are included, the largest group. So the consequences for the state of not ensuring young women have access to employment opportunities, to training and technical education as well as university training, are significant.
- Yes, girls do better than boys at the HSC- but it is still true that despite that, more teenage girls are unemployed than teenage boys and amongst those in work, boys and young men earn more. Because of the link between teenage female unemployment, teenage pregnancy and underclass family formation, it would be dangerous or naive to focus entirely on assisting boys improve their HSC outcomes.
- To take another example- any drugs prohibition policy needs to take account of the fact that the consequences of female addiction and drug abuse, because of the flow on effects to an unborn generation, are at least as serious as the consequences for men, and might even benefit from differently designed public awareness campaigns.
- Family welfare payments: Australia has only now embarked on what could be described as a simulacrum of a national scheme of paid maternity leave and there are certain design aspects of the Maternity Payment which may not ensure that all working women who receive it will stay at home for at least twelve weeks.
- How could we have developed a national prevention program for domestic violence, Australia being one of the few countries in the world to attempt this integrated approach, without reference to gender? Perhaps it is no accident that Australia leads the world in its approach to domestic violence prevention, and that the policy development work was coordinated by a policy unit with a keen eye for gender analysis, the Office for the Status of Women.
- We could go on and on, enumerating the importance of gender analysis to public policy.
- But there are also overwhelming national economic interest concerns which demand that gender analysis be part of Australia's national public policy development.
- The future. The economic future for a tiny population of 19 million people up against a world of global competition.
- In particular, in this century of the Dragons, 19 million Australians competing with India and China, who between them will have a population of 3 billion and who will dominate world economics.
- The need to improve Australia's labour force participation rate is an obvious must do. Standing at 63.5%, low by western standards, it represents an obvious source of further economic growth. Total work effort is directly related to economic prosperity.
- Breaking this figure down by gender, the greatest source of potential growth is clearly amongst females. Only 55.8% percent of women are in work, compared with 71.4% of men. It's also useful, as Treasury proposed in the Intergenerational Report, for older workers to contribute for longer. Not just knowledge workers who love their work and make their own efforts to stay, but perhaps even those who don't.
- The same link between prosperity and women's rights, incidentally, can be drawn for Arab countries. With a growth rate averaging around .5%, the Arab Development Bank, no bleeding heart human rights NGO, has identified three factors -poor education, limited economic freedom and restricted rights for women as the major factors contributing to this failure to develop. Low labour market participation is one of the manifestations of restricted rights, in particular the right to economic independence through paid work.
- Although women's education in many Arab countries is limited, it is still a considerable investment in people whose use of it will also be limited. The absence of women from the work force also limits the competitiveness of Arab economies by reducing the size of the potential merit pool.
- The consequences for Australia of low workforce participation by women similarly involve economic costs.
- Gender analysis demonstrates that it is mothers of children under 5 and women over the age of fifty five who have particularly low work rates.
- The participation rate of mothers of pre-school children in Australia for example is 45% verses 66% in Denmark, 52% in Germany, 55% in the UK and 61% in the US. On the other hand Hungary, the Slovak and Czech Republics and Spain are lower and none of them are economic power houses.
- Now you might say that it is a good thing for our families to have stay at home mums, if not for our economy or arguably the women themselves. But there need not be that trade-off. It need not be one or the other. As international comparisons demonstrate, if women are assisted to combine work and family life, family happiness and prosperity are both possible.
- It is important to acknowledge the Government's determination to support women who are able to choose not to work, through a range of government assistance. This too, is part of promoting the choices available to men and women. But there is no doubt that it has economic implications for the country, the family and the woman herself. Increasingly this will be a choice taken up by fewer women, certainly not those in the low to middle income groups. Stay at home mums are mostly to be found either in the ranks of the poor, where there is no work, or in the ranks of high income families or in rural families, where farm work and the lack of work opportunities makes paid work less possible.
- We all know the policy prescriptions- promote part time work and flexible hours options, paid maternity leave, affordable child care. The Prime Minister in particular has recognised the concerns people have about the lack of teenage supervision in dual worker families and the election commitment to a national exercise programme for secondary students is surely an idea with more than a single purpose. Perhaps we also need to consider work loads in the home and their allocation; the time use survey figures demonstrate a huge discrepancy between the hours of housework done by full time working mothers, for example, and full time working dads. The HILDA survey shows that over 60% of full time working mums do more than 12 hours housework a week - only 11% of men do. I can't see the national public policy outcome in this, but its contribution to the work choices made by women must be of concern.
- For women over the age of 55, we need to know more about why they are dropping out. Forget the "old generation" argument. Many of us in this room are that generation.
- Are they dropping out because their older husbands are retiring and it is time to get into that caravan for the fabled trip around Australia? Are they dropping out to care for elderly relatives, are they dropping out because people don't like employing older women? We need to know because we need to fix it.
- By encouraging older women to work we are raising the participation rate increases the ratio of tax payers to aged dependents, a crucial issue in an ageing Australia. Not only does this spread the tax burden more thinly, it gives these women more opportunities to provide for their own retirement. Again, an issue of national interest but one not easily solved without gender-sensitive policy.
- One even longer term problem for Australian economic growth is the size of our population and its composition. While we do not have a population policy, and perhaps we should, even if we were to assume it should remain the same as today's, it is clear that the current fertility level of 1.7 children per woman is not going to get us there. We need an average of 2.1 children per woman to sustain the population. With Treasury predicting our fertility might fall to as low as 1.3 or 1.4 children, it is little wonder that Australia's population is expected to start declining around the middle of the century. Again, gender analysis suggests it is the difficulty of combining work and family which is largely responsible for this continuing decline. In particular, women in full time work or in professional or managerial positions are the least likely to have children.
- This too is reflected in other countries- the last British census found, for example, that 10% of male managers were childless and 39% of women managers. (The same is true in Australia, with the exception of women in that workers paradise, Canberra. The fertility rate in the ACT is actually marginally higher than that in Melbourne.)
- And women who do have children, will have fewer than ever before. Unless again, they are unskilled, unemployed or rural women. Women in some ethnic communities and indigenous women also have more children than the average.
- Twenty years ago, one in five Australian families was an only child family- today it is one in three, closer to one in two in the cities.
- That's a big change in a generation- no brothers or sisters to argue with, share with, come second to. No cousins, aunties or uncles.
- It is clear to every one, including the Pope, who recognised it recently in a papal edict, that this new dilemma of choice is the result of the difficulty of combining work and family. For the first time the Pope talked about the need to support women in their public roles as well as in their mothering.
- The solutions seem clear; wherever you look in the western world, countries which provide support for working motherhood enjoy higher fertility rates than those who do not.
- Northern Europe, for example, has a higher fertility rate than heartland Catholic Europe to the south, where tradition decrees that women may work, or have children, but not both. The exception to this trend is the US, which, with a fertility rate of 2.1- higher than the rest of the western world, appears to confound this theory.
- After all, nobody could say that American industrial regulation was family friendly and there is, like Australia, no national scheme of paid maternity leave. But there are extenuating circumstances such as the high birth rate of the Hispanic population.
- Addressing demographic change in Australia without gender analysis is impossible.
- And now it is up to the entire public service. Indeed, it should always have been up to the entire public service. Yes, OSW has traditionally been the gatekeeper, there to ensure that nothing bad slipped through the net. With the passing of OSW, there is no where for the remaining 120,000 public servants to hide.
- Just how well Australia navigates the shoals and eddies of the 21st century depends on us being a smart country. Ignoring half the problem and half the answers, isn't smart.
Thank you.
Last updated 12 November 2004.
