Its About Time: Women, men, work and family
Speech given by the Hon John von Doussa QC
President, Acting Sex Discrimination Commissioner and Commissioner responsible for Age Discrimination
Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission
Its About Time: Women men, work and family Final Paper Launch
Blake Dawson Waldron
Grosvenor Place
Level 36, 225 George Street, Sydney
Wednesday 7 March 2007 10.30 am for 10.45 am
Speaking time: 10.51 (12 minutes)
Thank you for that welcome Liz and thank you to Blake Dawson Waldron for hosting our launch today.
Id like to begin by acknowledging that we gather today on the traditional country of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation, and I pay my respect to their elders.
I would also like to acknowledge that today is the eve of International Womens Day.
I am delighted to be joining you today to formally launch the final paper in HREOCs project about women, men, work and family. This paper Its About Time: Women, men, work and family is the culmination of two years research, investigation and discussion with Australian families, employers and community organisations about how we can all work together to better support workers with family responsibilities.
It is fitting that we are launching this paper at a time when women around the world are gathering to celebrate the enormous social, economic and political gains made by women in their quest for the full enjoyment of their human rights.
Australian women today enjoy education and labour market opportunities that would have been unthinkable to their predecessors just a few decades ago. And as a nation, Australia has made significant progress towards gender equality in public life.
Yet International Womens Day is also a time to reflect on the barriers not yet overcome that women continue to confront.
Arguably, one of the most substantial barriers is the ongoing lack of equality in unpaid work in the home.
It is clear that many women find it difficult to juggle their dual loads of paid work and family work. This can be seen in the large numbers of women working part time and in positions below their skill levels. And it can be heard in the stories that women told HREOC in our public consultations. Personal stories of always feeling rushed, stories of the stress involved in meeting competing demands on their time and of feeling guilty about their families and their jobs.
It is important to emphasise that the men that we spoke to also felt these difficulties. They complained about missing out on family time, and commonly raised unsupportive workplaces and old fashioned stereotypes as barriers. In spite of these very real constraints, more men are now expressing the desire to share hands-on care, particularly for their children.
The missing half of the gender equality revolution, as Pru Goward noted on a number of occasions, lies in the lives of men. Without changes in mens lives - especially without a greater involvement of men in the essential unpaid work of care - womens quest for equality will be forever stalled. And women will continue to experience severe time pressures, lower levels of workforce participation and much lower retirement incomes.
This requires the ongoing barriers and tensions that men experience between paid work and home life to be resolved.
This is why gender equality is one of the three key themes in the new approach to paid work and family responsibilities put forward in our paper being launched today.
Reflecting on my own career in the legal profession I shared with many male colleagues a sense of the relentless workloads that pulled us into the world of the absent breadwinner father and away from family life. Many of us have wished for more time at home with our children, particularly in their precious early years.
So it is refreshing to hear Liz speak about the efforts that Blake Dawson Waldron have made to make family-friendly conditions a reality for their employees. If a law firm, with all of the difficulties inherent in enormous workloads can successfully implement flexible working for one in five staff, then it is surely possible in a great many more workplaces.
Flexible working will, by necessity, become more common as Australias population ages. Increasingly, people are experiencing working lives that overlap at various points with caring responsibilities - caring for young children or teenagers, or caring for spouses or older relatives at the other end of the life cycle.
This is why the second theme of the framework HREOC advocates in this paper centres on the need for a life cycle perspective.
Modern working patterns are no longer defined by an orderly, unbroken career trajectory - they are, and will increasingly be marked by, movements in and out of paid and unpaid work. Australia must have a social vision and appropriate supports to facilitate these transitions without harsh penalties.
The third key element of the framework is a the concept of shared work - valued care". This means properly valuing the unpaid, informal care provided to both children and adults. Care makes an enormous social and economic contribution to the nation, in addition to its value to the individuals receiving care. Access Economics estimates that this unpaid care would cost $30.5 billion a year to replace if it was no longer provided informally.1
Valuing care is also about ensuring decent wages and working conditions for paid carers - the demand for both paid and unpaid care is booming and as a nation we must consider how we will meet this demand.
Valuing care also means sharing the care fairly - and by sharing I mean not only sharing the load in individual families - but sharing the costs and benefits of care fairly across society. They must be better shared between individual families, governments and the workplaces who all benefit from the productivity of the workforce that is generated by the work of care.
The so-called work and family debate - the debate that stops the barbeque - is not really about whether women can have it all", but about how we can work together to share it all".
The law plays a central role here. One of our key recommendations is a new piece of legislation - a Family Responsibilities and Carers Rights Act.
Existing legal protections for workers with family responsibilities are limited, and HREOC believes that a new specialised piece of legislation is the best way of improving legal protection for workers with family responsibilities.
Our paper does not put forward a draft law, and we believe that the process of developing this legislation must be done in consultation with key stakeholders - particularly employers - and the community. But our proposed Act contains a number of key features.
The Act should make discrimination on the basis of family and carer responsibilities unlawful in all areas of employment.
The new Act should also include a right for workers to request flexible work arrangements due to family or carer responsibilities, and to have the request reasonably considered by their employer. The right should encompass all forms of carer responsibilities and be available to all men and women workers.
While HREOC acknowledges that the right to request will impose some additional obligations on employers, it is important to emphasise the limited nature of the new employee entitlement. This law aims to ensure there are no obligations on an employer who is unable to meet the request due to genuine operational reasons beyond the duty to reasonably consider the request. HREOC believes this law is a key part of helping working Australians to strike a better balance between paid work and family life.
But law reform alone is not enough. HREOC has proposed a whole suite of measures to make our communities, tax and welfare systems, child care, aged care and disability services, as well as our workplaces, more family-friendly.
While no one paper can comprehensively examine every issue, this paper stresses the need for a holistic response and points us in the right direction for further work. Our 45 recommendations represent priority areas for this further work but they are not the end of the story. They are the beginning.
This paper aims to set out the beginning of a new social vision for Australia which is based on the wealth of time spent with family as well as the wealth that comes from economic prosperity.
I would like to thank all the people who wrote to us and spoke to us with openness and honesty over the past 20 months.
I would also like to acknowledge the vital support of the many organisations who assisted us with organising focus groups and community forums.
Finally I wish to acknowledge the contribution of Pru Goward, whose vision and leadership got this project off the ground and who got Australians talking about an issue that touches on the most intimate parts of our lives.
In the lead up to International Womens Day we should acknowledge that universal human rights begin, as Eleanor Roosevelt so famously said in the small places close to home",2 in our daily practices and in our life choices. Easing the constraints that underlie these choices so that women and men can make genuine choices in meeting their care responsibilities is the aim of this final paper.
In 2007, its about time for a new approach.
Thank you.
[1] Access Economics The Economic Value of Informal Care Report for Carers Australia August 2005 (2005 estimate).
[2] Where after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home - so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm or office where he works unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world." Eleanor Roosevelt, Chairman of the United Nations Human Rights Commission, 1948.
