HREOC Striking the Balance Project
Paid Work and Family Responsibilities Submission Sex Discrimination Unit,
Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission
Women’s and Men’s Caring Work: Findings from the Families, Fertility and the Future Study
Dr JaneMaree Maher and Dr Maryanne Dever
Centre for Women’s Studies & Gender Research
School of Political and Social Inquiry
Monash University
SUBMISSION CONTENTS:
- Project Background and Relevant Research Centre Activities
- Key Policy Implications from Research
- Key Findings Relevant to Inquiry Terms of Reference
- Concluding Comments
- Study Publications Relevant to Inquiry Terms of Reference
Contact:
Dr JaneMaree Maher
Centre for Women's Studies and Gender Research
School of Political and Social Inquiry
Monash University , Clayton Campus
Melbourne VIC 3800, Australia
Phone number: 61 3 9905 2949
Fax number: 61 3 9905 2410
Email: janemaree.maher@arts.monash.edu.au
http://www.arts.monash.edu.au/ws/staff/janemaree_maher.html
1. BACKGROUND
HREOC in discharging its obligations under the Sex Discrimination Act 1984 (Cth) (the Sex Discrimination Act) has resolved to focus on ‘workers’ family responsibilities, with legislative provisions, awards, agreements and workplace policies in place to allow both women and men greater flexibility about how they participate in family life.’ HREOC notes ‘this issue concerns men as much as women and seems to be growing in urgency, despite much public discussion and some measures to address the problem .’ The Terms of Reference for the project are as follows:
‘HREOC believes that further discussion of the gender and sex discrimination aspects of the paid work and family debate should be encouraged for the following reasons.
- While women bear the major responsibility for unpaid caring work, their ability to engage in the paid workforce will be artificially limited.
- This unequal burden will mean that paid work and family balance will continue to be a “women’s issue”, resulting in women’s continuing disadvantage and discrimination in the workplace.
- With work and family balance seen as a women’s issue, fathers will have even less ability to obtain part time work or flexibility in their paid work to allow them to share unpaid caring work.
- Men will continue to be locked into a breadwinner role and excluded from participating actively as parents or carers, thus unfairly limiting their and their partners’ range of choices.
- Equality for men and women should be recognised in all spheres of life, including the workplace and the home.
- While these arrangements persist, many children will continue to miss out on fully developed relationships with both parents.
- Caring work will need to be supported and shared more equitably in order to meet the greater demand for care as the population ages and ageing parents increasingly rely on their children to enable them to remain in the community.’
Striking the Balance: Women, men, work and family
Discussion Paper 2005
CENTRE FOR WOMEN’S STUDIES AND GENDER RESEARCH
This submission is provided by the Centre for Women’s Studies and Gender Research at Monash University in Melbourne. Based in the School of Political and Social Inquiry in the Faculty of Arts on the Clayton campus of the University, the Centre was established in 1987 and for 18 years has provided undergraduate and graduate teaching in feminist and gender issues, served as a focal point for research into a wide range of gender issues and provided an important point of contact between the University and the broader community on matters pertaining to women and gender.
The Centre recently led a large team in a research project: Families, Fertility and the Future: Understanding the Current Downturn in Australia’s Birthrate; focused on the factors that drive fertility decisions. The research sample of one hundred women were drawn from five different areas across Victoria, including metropolitan, outer urban and rural. The areas included were: the City of Port Phillip, Casey, the North West, focused particularly on Brimbank and Maribyrnong, Gippsland and Bendigo. The women came from diverse family backgrounds, represented a broad range of ethnicities, and differed in education levels and socio-economic location. Study participants were asked about their decisions to have children, their workplace needs and the impact of government policy on family formation.
The findings of this research are pertinent to this HREOC project, and are relevant to understanding how workplace constraints limit women’s engagement in the paid workforce and shapes their caring labour.
The project was prompted by interest in the on-going political debate regarding the role and provision of paid maternity leave and other initiatives designed to encourage or support those Australians planning or raising families.
Qualitative interviews were used to probe how people assess social, economic and policy factors in their choices about having children. This type of data is a necessary addition to survey and demographic data for effective policy setting, since that data can illuminate patterns, but can only guess at the underlying reasons for such trends. In depth qualitative data is necessary to understand how women’s reproductive choices, in particular, are negotiated in relation to social, economic and institutional factors.
The final project report is available in HTML or PDF format:
What Women (and Men) Want: Births, Policies and Choices September 2004. http://www.arts.monash.edu.au/ws/research/projects/what-women-want/index.html
2. KEY POLICY IMPLICATIONS FROM RESEARCH
2.1. Workplace policies are integral to the choices women and men make about children and caring.
Overall, many women and men ended up lowering their expectations about what both governments and employers would provide in supporting their caring labour. The women and men in this study generally accepted what Kerreen Reiger has identified as a new phase in Australian social history where “the production of children is now viewed more and more as a private choice rather than a social contribution” (Our bodies, our babies: The forgotten women's movement, MUP, 2001, p.4). The people in this study recognised the low level of support from social services and employers as part of what they had to negotiate when thinking about children, caring and paid work.
- Workplace experiences were a crucial part of women’s considerations about birthing and caring for children. Many women recounted incidents of difficulty in combining working and motherhood that they had experienced or that they had observed. For women with and without children, these incidences reflected an ambivalent attitude in our society towards combining mothering and paid work, where genuine flexible support was lacking.
- The centrality of flexible, available and satisfactory part-time work to the reproductive decisions women made was further supported by the stories of women with three or more children, who very often cited flexible work circumstances as central to their decisions about having a second or third child. Such issues were particularly important to women raising children alone.
- Women who were not in the workforcedescribed the pressures and difficulties faced in trying to combine a satisfactory working life and motherhood as important to their choices. Limited and costly possibilities for education and retraining were identified as a concern even where women were not immediately contemplating a return to the workforce. There were often anxieties about future employment opportunities and financial security expressed, even when women with children were not seeking employment at the present time.
- The gender wage gap between women and men curtailed the flexibility families had to share caring labour. Women identified differential wage earnings opportunities between themselves and their male partners as central to decisions they made to carry the bulk of the caring labour. These decisions then had impact on their future labour market activities.
- Men and women approach thinking and talking about child bearing and rearing in different ways . The issues that were most important for men were not necessarily the issues that were most important for their partners, or for the other women who participated in this study. Reflecting society-wide constructions of men as breadwinners and providers, the males tended to be far concerned more about money, age and lifestyle and far less concerned (if at all) about career interruption, difficulties associated with birthing or child care arrangements
Workplaces influenced the decisions that women and men made about child bearing and child rearing. Given social expectations about caring labour being ‘women’s work’, which were also reflected in men’s ability or willingness to access flexibility, options to share caring labour can be limited. Our findings suggest that employment policies need to address women’s and men’s needs for aspirations as carers and workers.
In our research, women with one or two children particularly reported that the successful management of work and family demands is often extremely difficult to achieve. This difficulty impacts on their work choices and on their choices about having further children. Sole mothers in our research report great desire to gain paid employment, but a considerable struggle with workplace structures which make this difficult. The ease of achieving viable compromises with workplaces that allow for and facilitate the combination of family life and professional aspirations is central to how women determine the number of children they will consider and their patterns of caring. Issues of wage parity for partnered women meant that caring labour carried out by women was more viable for the family unit.
Although some research has suggested that there is resentment about entitlements between groups with and without children, this research found no negativity towards policies to support child-bearing and child caring choices even where women or men did not plan to access them. Women firmly committed to remaining childless, for example, did not question paid maternity leave or workplace assistance for women seeking to combine paid work and family. They also did not consider (except for a very small number of negative comments) that other women’s and men’s access to flexible employment options impacted negatively on them.
RECOMMENDATIONS:
- Gender equity in terms of pay is important if women and men are to have genuine choices about sharing caring labour for children.
- A work and family policy framework should make explicit the intersection of family support policies and workplace policies. Initiatives to support women and men in balancing family and employment obligations need to offer equal access for women and men.
2.2. Women and men do not see single policy measures and limited access initiatives as removing barriers to labour force attachment and to decisions about children and caring labour. Their choices were made in light of broader policy settings and available services.
- Single policy initiatives and entitlements were not identified as changing decisions about the raising of children and paid work, but these policy initiatives were definitely taken into account in how women made decisions about reproduction and paid employment. While policies and entitlements were not generally identified as the factors which directly influenced first birth timing or decisions about having children, they were significant in choices about employment afterwards and were particularly important to women considering further children after a first birth.
- Women with one child or two children cited a sense of shock often about the effect of children on their lives: at the cost and availability of child care; and at the near impossibility of effectively managing work expectations and parenting. A number of women without children did view parental leave provisions as likely to feature in their future decisions, but these women also focused on long-term career effects of balancing work and children as crucially important to their choices about whether or not to have children. For women with and without children, issues of work/life balance presented a challenging and often difficult balancing act.
In this context, the issue of limited a ccess to paid maternity leave is a crucial one. Only a quarter of the women in the study had access to paid maternity leave, and while the limited availability of paid leave was not identified as a ‘make-or-break’ factor in family decision-making, one third of the women interviewed believed it to be very important, as a way of providing additional financial support to their reproductive decisions and as a crucial way to maintain a connection with the labour market. Given that our research indicates that people no longer feel that their family choices are supported by governments (due to lack of childcare, diminished maternal and child health services, issues with the provision of health care and education), government action to provide universal access to paid maternity leave would provide direct support to women’s and men’s choices in the first instance and would re-establish government as committed to the effective balancing of work and family life.
RECOMMENDATION:
An effective work and family policy framework will reflect an integrated approach to workplace and social policies
3. FINDINGS RELEVANT TO TERMS OF REFERENCE
- Single policy initiatives and entitlements did not directly influence the decisions made about fertility, but they did form the landscape in which women and men negotiated their choices about families, work and life. Rather than operating as a direct inducement, policy initiatives formed the backdrop that encouraged and shaped women’s decisions, in particular. Although policies and entitlements were not generally identified as the factors which directly influenced first birth timing or decisions about having children, they were significant in what occurred afterwards and were particularly important to women choosing to have more than two children.
- Policies that are specifically focused on managing parenting, and mothering in particular, such as maternity and paternal leave were most significant to women who have already had a child. A number of women without children did view parental leave provisions as likely to feature in their future decisions, but these women were as likely to cite cultural pressures and expectations of motherhood as important to their choice not to have children as they were to focus on potential benefits. The exception to this was issues of work/life balance, which women in all groups identified as a challenging and often difficult balancing act.
- Access to maternity leave is not yet universal, and only a quarter of the women in the study had access to paid maternity leave. While most women said that the availability of paid maternity leave did not factor in their decision to have children, one third believed it to be important, primarily as a way of providing additional financial support and as a crucial way to maintain a connection with the labour market. There is a substantive difficulty with asking women to determine how much maternity leave affected their decisions when so few women have access to it. Many women in this instance are being asked about an initiative that is not currently a real-life option for them.
- Broader social services, most particularly affordable child care, appropriate health care and education were identified as important by women, when describing their reproductive experiences and decisions. When women talked about deciding about children, health issues, child care availability and other community services were important to them. The cost of education; both retraining for themselves, and education for their children, was often mentioned. Despite the high number of references to these issues, there was little anger expressed about the diminution of these services, such as limited visits to maternal and child health care centres, the expense of child care and access to medical care, with most women and men accepting this is the way things work now.
4. CONCLUDING COMMENTS
The picture of work/family balance and the decisions women and men make regarding child caring and paid employment in Victoria that emerged in our research was a complex one. A policy framework that makes explicit the intersection of social and employment policies is crucial to supporting women’s and men’s choices about family formation, family care and workforce participation. The one hundred and fourteen women and men in this study, whether they were childless or not, in full-time or part-time employment or out of the workforce, identified the importance of flexible work, supportive workplaces, community services and cultural attitudes in how they chose to negotiate their varying life aspirations.There were many in this study who noted that they felt less secure generally now than they had previously. While women with children did focus more specifically on maternity leave, all the women interviewed talked of issues of work/life balance as important for them. It was clear that single policy initiatives addressing reproduction, family support or workforce participation of women with children will not be effective unless they are provided in the context of broader social, community and workplace supports for women and men to undertake caring labour.
Our research also found that people’s work/family decisions, whilst influenced by perceptions of limited government or publicly supported services, difficult and/or expensive access to childcare, and concerns about workplace flexibility or inflexibility, are accepted as private decisions from which government and public policy are distant. Key workplace indicators such as the number of hours Australians work, and the concentration of women in part-time work suggest that work/family balance is becoming increasingly challenging for women and men. Public policy influence and leadership on issues of work/life balance, workforce participation by women and men with child care responsibilities, and family formation decision-making by men and women, will remain marginal at best, and negative at worst, unless a comprehensive policy framework is developed that:
- locates and integrates workplace and employment policies with social and family support policies;
- addresses key issues of gender equity such as pay, opportunities for flexible and rewarding part time work;
- recognises the significance of paid maternity leave and more extensive parental leave generally as demonstrating a public policy commitment to child care, women’s workplace re-entry and shared care;
- engages peak employer bodies in policy approaches to workplace attachment for women and men with children; skills retention within the workforce; and family decision-making.
5. STUDY PUBLICATIONS RELEVANT TO THE PROJECT
FULL REPORT
MAHER, JaneMaree, DEVER, Maryanne, CURTIN, Jennifer and SINGLETON, Andrew. What Women (and Men) Want: Births, Policies and Choices, Monash University, 2004. http://www.arts.monash.edu.au/ws/research/projects/families-fertility-future.html
CURTIN, Jennifer. ‘Representing Women’s Interests in the Paid Maternity Leave Debate’. Australasian Political Science Association Refereed Conference Proceedings, University of Tasmania, 29 September – 1 October 2003, http://www.utas.edu.au/government/APSA/RefereedPapers.html
DEVER, Maryanne and CURTIN, Jennifer. ‘The politics of reproduction: The Howard government, paid maternity leave and family friendly policy’. Fertility, Families and the Future Working Paper No 3. February 2004, School of Political and Social Inquiry, Monash University.
DEVER, Maryanne and MAHER, JaneMaree. ‘Families, Fertility and the Future: Preliminary Thoughts and Findings’. Fertility, Families and the Future Working Paper No 1. October 2002, School of Political and Social Inquiry, Monash University.
DEVER, Maryanne and SAUGERES, Lise. ‘ I forgot to have children!’: Untangling links between feminism, careers and voluntary childlessness. Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering: Special issue on ‘Mothering and Work/Mothering as Work’. 6(2): 116-126, 2004.
MAHER, JaneMaree. ‘Undervalued, expensive and difficult: Young women talk about motherhood’, Youth Studies Australia , 24(2): 11-16, 2005.
MAHER, JaneMaree. ‘A mother by trade: Australian women reflecting on mothering as activity, not identity’. Australian Feminist Studies 20 (46): 17-30, 2005.
MAHER, JaneMaree . ‘Skills, Not Attributes: Rethinking Mothering as Work’. Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering 6 (2):7-16, 2004.
MAHER, JaneMaree and DEVER, Maryanne. ‘What matters to women: Beyond Reproductive Stereotypes’. People and Place, 12(3): 7-12, 2004.
MAHER, JaneMaree and SAUGERES, Lise. ‘To Be or not to Be a Mother?: Cultural Representations and Ideologies of Mothering in Australia’. Fertility, Families and the Future Working Paper No 2. February 2004, School of Political and Social Inquiry, Monash University.
