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Professional women: Choice and challenge

Sex Discrimination

Professional women: Choice
and challenge

Speech delivered by Pru Goward,
Federal Sex Discrimination Commissioner at the Second National Conference
on Women in Science, Technology and Engineering, Faculty of Nursing, Mallet
Street Campus, University of Sydney, 29 November 2002

John Baistow, Chairman
of Member Australia Credit Union, thank you for your sponsorship of the
Malcolm MacIntosh Memorial Lectures and thank you for inviting me here
today.

It gives me great
pleasure to be able to address the Second National Conference on Women
in Science, Technology and Engineering.

The movement of women
into professions such as science and engineering has not just been about
women entering 'new', dynamic professions.

It has and continues
to be about women making inroads into traditionally male occupations.

As such, the history
of women in the fields of science, technology and engineering is marked
by the achievements of individual women - when Emily Dornwell graduated
from the University of Adelaide with a science degree in 1885, for example,
she was only the second female university graduate in Australia.

It is also marked
by the establishment of women's organisations and events aimed at supporting
professional women in these fields. Today's conference bears witness to
this.

The entry of women
into all professions has, in part, been facilitated by the admission of
women into universities.

Since this occurred,
women have embraced and achieved in the study of sciences.

The group of more
than 60 women who graduated from the University of Melbourne before 1920
for example, amassed over 40 scholarships and prizes between them.

More recently, in
1998, over half of the university enrolments in science were women (53%)
and 39 per cent of enrolments in mathematics and computing were women.
[1]

For the women who
go on to pursue professional as opposed to academic careers in these fields
there are however, a plethora of challenges to be met.

They are the challenges
experienced by the majority of women in the workforce today; the challenges
experienced by the majority of professional women today; and also the
challenges experienced by professional women working in male dominated
areas.

In the time I have
today, I would like to discuss those challenges experienced by professional
women in employment generally and how they relate to the work I am currently
undertaking as Federal Sex Discrimination Commissioner.

Essentially, these
are the challenges associated with being the part of the population responsible
for bearing children.

For women in paid
work this challenge often translates into receiving less pay, less lifetime
earnings and being subject to less income security over their lifetime.

Women still only
earn 84 cents in the male dollar, when comparing average weekly ordinary
full time earnings.

This gap occurs for
a number of reasons as we know - basic discrimination; perhaps, women's
career expectations; workforce gender segregation which is ongoing and
high; and, of course, family responsibilities.

It is the gendered
nature of family responsibilities that now form the greatest barrier to
equal pay.

Women who negotiate
with bosses for salaries - professional women being the group of women
most likely to - quite often end up with less then their male counterparts
doing the same job.

They arrive at the
bargaining table feeling that they will have to forfeit a higher salary
because they know one day they may need greater workplace flexibility
or they may have to take days off due to commitments to their children.
Men - many of whom will become or are fathers don't even consider factoring
these things when they sit down to 'talk figures'.

It doesn't take long
for this pattern to set in.

The 2002 graduate
destination survey found that new male graduates earned $36,000, on average,
while the average salary for female graduates was $34,000. [Part of this
can be explained by men going into more high paid industries than women.]
The survey did find however that this discrepancy existed even when men
and women were graduates in the same field.

Second, that
promotion often isn't available to women, nor are the extra hours, nor
is the senior position available in the interstate office for three months
because they need to get home to their kids.

The disparity in
the earning ratio between women and men grows to 66 cents in the dollar
when part time and casual workers are added into the equation.

It is not surprising
then to find that it is women making up 73 per cent of all part time employees
and 60 per cent of the casual workforce.

The challenges do
not end at salary inequities.

As child bearing
responsibilities result in women having more limited time in the workforce,
pay inequities and discrimination in job access, women workers have substantially
poorer retirement incomes than men.

One estimate is that
an average superannuation balance for men in 2004 will be $74 000, while
for women it will be $40 000. [2]

Projected to 2019
the figures for men and women were $121 000 and $77 000 respectively.
[3]

Professional women
in employment also face the challenges of being overlooked for promotions
and being less likely to advance to higher positions within the workforce
in general.

Australia's first
census of women in leadership, released earlier this week, found that
women held only 8.2 per cent of board seats and 8.4 per cent of senior
executive positions in the country's top 150 listed companies.

Just over half of
those companies have no women in executive positions, and only two of
them have a woman as CEO.

This situation does
not arise because women are less competent.

It arises because
despite being as qualified, and achieving as much professionally as their
male counterparts, assumptions continue to be made about women by those
around them concerning their career aspirations.

And all of this occurs
before most women have even contemplated having a baby!

Which brings us to
another challenge experienced by professional women in the paid workforce
today - the challenge of combining work and family.

This challenge is
not unique to professional women.

The workforce has
been failed to accommodate all women as they work and mother.

This needs to change.

With the demographic
squeeze now upon us, with Western countries like ours expecting long term
labour shortages, and unemployment predicted to fall to four per cent
form today's six per cent by the end of next year, we have no choice even
if we hate women's rights, but to make sure women can work and have children.

We need to take positive
steps to make the workforce a female friendly and therefore family friendly
place.

Paid maternity leave
- income replacement for women when they take time out of the paid workforce
at the time of the birth of their child - is part of the suite of measures
that will facilitate this change.

It is both the starting
point and centrepiece and it is what I have focussed on in my first year
as Federal Sex Discrimination Commissioner.

In two weeks time
I will be launching my final paper on options for a national scheme of
paid maternity leave.

The paper is the
result of a series of nation wide consultations on the issue with employer
groups, unions and women's groups and communities.

It reflects the views
expressed in the submissions we received to our interim paper on options
for paid maternity leave and responds to public debate on this issue.

A public debate that
has centred around the need of the vast majority of women working in the
paid workforce today - across all industries and professions - to balance
work and family, to combine having children with paid work, to perform
a dual role as mothers and workers.

Because this is the
reality for women and their families today.

However this need
is currently not being met.

The result?

Women are forced
to make a cruel and often personally difficult either/or choice - work
or family.

Although, social,
economic and physiological factors are fast combining to make this a 'lack
of choice' choice.

This is the experience
of women in science, as highlighted in the submission made by the CSIRO
in response to the interim paper outlining options for a national scheme
of paid maternity leave.

Most of the CSIRO
members who took maternity leave did not have their first babies until
they were in their thirties - mostly mid thirties and some into their
forties.

These women able
to successfully delay childbirth, did so for a number of reasons:

Increased time spent
in higher education gaining qualifications and then time establishing
themselves in their professional field.

Keeping in mind that
the time required to get a career started is even greater for research
scientists who pursue post graduate qualifications and then have to be
mobile to gain postdoctoral experience interstate or internationally.

Financial stability
for these women and/or their partners was also an important consideration.

They found that achieving
this stability may take a few years in view of the limited term employment
that most women have to take up to start their careers.

It will take even
longer for those women who are the primary income earners in their household.

Combining this with
the high cost of living today, a household in 2002 relies on two incomes
to meet mortgage repayments, car repayments and the daily cost of living
- and forfeiting an income, for even a short period of time becomes an
impossibility.

This is the reality
today for all women in all professions. This is the reality
to which paid maternity leave offers an effective response because paid
maternity leaves means that women do not have to forego this income when
they take time out of the workforce to give birth, recover from the birth
and bond and care for the child.

It is one element
- a crucial element - of the suite of measures that will make having children
a choice for women in paid work.

Because this is about
choice.

When university opened
its doors to women in the 19th century choice was opened to women.

Women could enter
professions that had previously been the domain of men only.

As a result today
women are crucial, important and necessary professionals.

They face a unique
set of challenges - but then so does the rest of society.

The nature of our
challenge is nothing new. It is about women and choice.

It is the challenge
of making the working and mothering a viable choice for women.


1.
P.10 of Wisenet science journal.

2. Ross Clare Women and Superannuation paper presented
to the Ninth Annual Colloquium of Superannuation Researchers UNSW School
of Economic and Actuarial Studies, Association of Superannuation Funds
Australia 2001, 22.

3. Ross Clare Women and Superannuation paper presented
to the Ninth Annual Colloquium of Superannuation Researchers UNSW School
of Economic and Actuarial Studies, Association of Superannuation Funds
Australia 2001, 22.

Last
updated 30 January 2003.