Economic Determinism, Women, Men, Work and Family
Sex Discrimination
Economic Determinism, Women, Men,
Work and Family
Speech by Pru Goward, Sex Discrimination Commissioner at Reserve Bank Central Banking Management Program, Sydney, Tuesday 30 September 2005
Thank you for inviting me to speak tonight.
I am a great admirer of economists, having done my undergraduate degree majoring in economics, my Honours in economics and the beginning of a Masters degree in economics. For good measure I married my economics tutor in the days when that wasn’t unlawful.
Without econometrics my future as an economist was always going to be limited and anyway, the thrill of the news room and the daily deadline proved much too strong.
But that hasn’t stopped me from employing the principles of economics to guide my thinking and I am a happily self-described economic determinist.
As I get wiser of course, even the term economic determinist doesn’t quite do it. The fundamentally sound position for anyone in my position to take towards public policy is that of a nationalist. If the promotion of gender equity (or any other cause for that matter) cannot demonstrably contribute to the national interest, then why promote it?
The process of public policy development of any kind, equity being no exception, must be directly linked with the national interest, although curiously very little political debate in Australia ever addresses this directly.
It is implied and intuitive of course, but I like to think the rigorous testing of policy against the criteria of national good is a discipline which enriches our understanding of both policy and policy objectives.
What’s more, formally asking ourselves that question frequently enables us to improve and modify the policy.
The national interest is not, of course, a well defined concept and people frequently abuse the term. It is the art of politics to define it and it is the art of public policy to ensure that it does what it should do whatever the definitions dreamt up by our elected representatives.
While economists are very comfortable talking about economic growth, productivity and participation rates, all neat, measurable outcomes, and slightly less comfortable with concepts like health status or good governance, they are not nearly so comfortable with notions of contentment or peaceability, which I say is fundamental to the national interest. When I am feeling mischievous I call it happiness, which makes the teeth chatter of most economists other than Gary Becker.
Ensuring that public policy, including the rate of change of public policy, keeps an eye on social stability, is vital to the preservation and prosperity of the nation.
Accordingly my new national project, Striking the balance, women, men, work and family, is concerned with a broad range of national interest objectives and unselfconscious in including contentment amongst them, along with economic growth, fairness (that is, gender equity) and demographic sustainability.
Perhaps contentment might also be defined as social efficiency or socially optimal functioning, but I prefer the language of the preachers. Whatever we call them, these objectives are all related.
Striking the balance is also an exploration of the individual’s fundamental economic dilemma, the dilemma of choice.
It derives from the impossibility of reconciling the brevity of the human life span with the infinity of wants imagined by the human mind. Reconciling the desire to have it all with the impossibility of this happening is a cruelly peculiar human problem. It is the driver of human experience and human history.
Choice lies at the heart of economics. It is the fundamental problem of the dismal science- how do we spend limited economic resources on an infinite number of wants?
Choice lies at the heart of moral dilemmas and has been the stuff of plays, poems and essays from the time of the Greek philosophers, if not before. Love or some other personal fulfilment is pitted against duty and responsibility.
But while history and economics and literature have focussed on these familiar choices, today’s world offers up another impossible choice, the choice of time.
How do we spend our time?
In particular how do we reconcile the demands and responsibilities of paid time, that time that provides the money to sustain us and our families, with the demands and responsibilities of unpaid time.
Unpaid time is the time we spend recovering from the demands of paid work, but importantly also includes the time we spend caring for others- our children, our partners, the households we live in, our elderly, our community. This is the time that money cannot buy.
It is the glue that holds us together.
Communities and nations which do not enable people to spend sufficient time together pay an enormous price; in our own country, especially our capital cities, we are certainly beginning to see the emergence of this price; marriage breakdowns, childhood obesity at epidemic proportions, hurried children and harried parents, neighbours versus neighbours in the absence of time for a nice cup of tea and a chat.
Yet although it is ultimately all of us who pay the price for insufficient private time, it continues to be undervalued, shaved and squeezed wherever possible.
Importantly, the use of unpaid time also affects equality between men and women.
Clearly, if the division of responsibilities for paid and unpaid work is uneven, if men spend more time away from their families in paid work and women spend more time away from work meeting their unpaid caring responsibilities, it affects their life outcomes.
Australians talk a good deal about the struggle for balance between life and work; as working hours stretch further and further and as the participation rate inexorably rises, this is understandable.
Take globalisation and the new economy.
Let me give you an example of what our new 24/7 economy means for family life.
There’s a construction site in Western Sydney. It uses million dollar earth-moving equipment, time is money, so the site goes day and night. That means shift work- that means drivers and crane operators starting at 3 in the morning.
For their families- and I met one of them-that means getting three little children up at 2.30 in the morning, putting them in the back of the car, driving dad to work and then driving home again because mum needs the car to ferry children to school and sport.
It also means she only works as a part time shop assistant, doing hours that fit with his hours. She has no superannuation. Security in her old age will rely very much on that marriage working.
Are they happy? They do the best they can.
Could we make it better? That’s what my new project Striking the Balance: Women, men, work and family is all about.
For some of course, the answer is obvious.
Conservatives argue that this is best done through traditional role assignments- men earn, women do the unpaid caring, together they keep a family going.
In my discussions with blue collar workers it is very clear that they still believe that this should be the case, even though most of their partners work part-time. As one man said dramatically in a consultation, his arm up in the air, “I’m shackled to this, to being the provider”.
My view, and increasingly I suspect this is the view of many Australians, is that it doesn’t matter who does what, so long as both men and women have the same options to choose from, the outcomes are fair and their families contented.
And you might say this happens already- but the outcomes tell a different story.
Women do more unpaid work than men and less paid work.
Women do more hours of work, paid and unpaid put together, than men. This includes lawn mowing and getting petrol….and I am reminded by talk back callers, cleaning the gutters.
Overall men do 10.7 hours of paid and unpaid work each day, women do 12.6 hours.
The ABS data, which I need to remind many of my correspondents, deals with averages, tells the story in detail.
- Time use data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS)1 and the Household Income and Labour Dynamics Survey (HILDA)2 tell us that:
- While single men and women do around the same amount of housework, once they partner women begin doing more – a woman with a male partner does 71 minutes a day more housework than her partner;
- With the birth of a child, unpaid work more than doubles for men and women – men’s increases from 50 minutes to 2 ½ hours per day and women’s increases to just under 8 hours per day;
Unsurprisingly, as women carry the brunt of the unpaid care load, their outcomes in the world of paid work are compromised.
Undoubtedly the two are related.
For two reasons: first, there are only 24 hours in a day and, secondly, being the household manager frequently makes pursuing a career, more senior status and higher pay just impossible. It’s a question of energy and priorities.
If you are offered the acting promotion to be store manager for Woolworths on the other side of town for a month, and it still means getting up earlier to make the kids lunches, manage their school drop offs and supervise their homework by telephone, many women, understandably, find that just too hard. Similarly we don’t take the job as acting producer on the local TV current affairs programme because we are already producing a sit com at home.
So what are the consequences?
Women in full time work without overtime earn, on average, 85 cents in the male dollar. A small gap by world standards but a gap nonetheless.
That it is small is largely the result of the low number of Australian women in full time work. Only 31% of the full time work force is female- and naturally these tend to be either young women without children or women whose children have grown up. Neither of these groups is likely to be work-compromised for the sake of their families.
Once all workers, including casuals and part timers, mostly women, are included, that earnings gap grows to 66 cents in the male dollar.
It ends up in poverty- women are two and a half times more likely than men to live in poverty during retirement. Half of women sole parents are not in paid work and live instead on the bread-line with their children or live on casual wages supplemented by means-tested government assistance.
Despite women working more than ever before, the Association of Super Funds predicts that by the year 2019, women will have half the retirement savings of men.
Interestingly the gap in economic outcomes for men and women only really begins at age thirty, the time when women are now having children. Indeed there is an enormous amount of evidence to suggest that the primary source of female economic disadvantage is child rearing.
Strange, since men also rear children but without ill-effect.
Child rearing in Australia means women either drop out of work altogether, or for a number of years, and when they return, return as part timers or casuals.
A third of women who work in this country have no paid entitlements and even more have no significant superannuation.
Women in the prime child bearing years of 30 to 40 (also the prime working years) with two or more children work significantly less than European women, British women or American women of the same age. Try 43% of Australian women compared with 64% of Americans and 81% of Swedes.
Their children are no less impossible than ours, despite this.
Yet this alarming drop out runs counter to the business case.
There can be no one in this room who is not familiar with the business case for keeping women in work; it reduces turnover costs, improves the competitiveness of labour, raises standards and diversity.
Improving retention rates has always been important for cost saving. Losing a check-out operator is estimated by Woolworths to cost them $3,000. A lawyer costs hundreds of thousands and a bank teller $80,000. That’s advertising, selecting, interviewing, negotiating, training and doesn’t include putting up with mistakes.
There can also be no-one in this room familiar with the macro economic or national interest case for ensuring we have more women in work.
And that case is about the demographic ageing of Australia and the shortage of workers which, like the greenhouse effect, looks set to plague Australia for most of this century.
Whereas the micro-economic case for employing more women has always floated queasily in an Australian sea of macro economic fluctuations and high unemployment, the trending down to 4% unemployment this year makes the business case a whole lot more attractive- and not surprisingly the past couple of years have seen Australia’s largest and most competitive companies become extremely family-friendly as they desperately seek to retain their skilled staff.
Sixty percent of the top two hundred now have paid maternity leave programmes for instance. The rest will follow now that this critical mass has been reached and retention rates with it. Just because it always made sense didn’t mean they always did it of course. Old habits die hard but competition is competition.
Australia ’s unemployment rate is also on a long term, not just a cyclical downwards trajectory.
The ageing of Australia is undoubtedly a major challenge for the world of work and indeed for governments local, state and federal. It is impossible not to take account of demography when we are thinking about the future of work for women but also men.
Demographic change ensures work and family will remain a barbecue stopper, and an increasingly complex and difficult one.
It is hard to believe that in half a life time, my life time, Australia could have gone from a country where people scrabbled for work to one where there was too much. But this follows exactly the life cycle of the baby boomer, of which I am one.
By the middle of the century, the proportion of people over 65 will be double the numbers of today, then will be a quarter of our total population.
Significantly, the number of aged people dependent on each taxpayer will also have doubled.
Obviously if nothing changes, it means taxpayers of the future will be paying double the per capita bill of today to keep our elderly in the same standard of living as today.
But as health care continues to improve, providing both greater quality of life and longevity, it is possible that the burden to the tax payer will actually more than double.
For instance the Productivity Commission estimates that health expenditure will almost double to 11 ½ percent of GDP- basically because old people take a great toll on health services.
Treasury Secretary Ken Henry has anticipated that the additional taxation required to fund aged-care, including healthcare, would be equivalent to raising the GST to 24%.
No one believes it is sensible for countries to devote such a huge proportion of national taxation to ageing, yet the voting power of this generation is such that it remains a very real prospect.
Funding aged care is probably one of Australia’s top three national challenges in the next half century- water and Asia being the other two.
So what has this to do with women and equality and the Sex Discrimination Commissioner? Plenty.
Women are part of the problem, but also the solution.
The solution begins with work.
Work has always been the best insurance policy against poverty; today, that definition of poverty extends to old age.
Whereas twenty years ago governments and communities were content to allow people to subsist on old age pensions supplemented with generous health benefits, today they are looking nervously down the track to a time, not far off, when a generation of retirees subsisting on old-age pensions and health benefits could literally break the bank.
Governments and policy planners are starting to look at alternatives- and the obvious one is paid work. More of it and for longer.
Ageing isn’t gender neutral. Not only do women live longer than men, as we know, they also live poorer.
No one should forget the gruelling reality for life on an aged pension today.
So wisely, and perhaps only just in time, governments now promote self-funded retirement as the best way of reducing the demand for scarce government funds.
In this grim picture, women will fare much less well than men. Overwhelmingly this is because of their lengthy periods out of the work force and their work at reduced capacity, which have enabled them to keep their primary focus on their children.
Poverty and poor health is their destiny, if women do not seek to change it.
Added to the pressures of child care now emerges an additional reason for women to work less than men, the pressures of elder care.
Only 40% of Australian women over the age of fifty five are in paid work, much less than women in our peer group countries.
Australia’s older women participation rate is slightly lower than Portugal’s, not as low as southern European countries such as Turkey, Italy and Greece but much lower than the wealthy European nations of the north, the United Kingdom and United States. In Sweden, 69.5 per cent of women 55 to 64 years are in paid work.3 [8]
Why is this- is it their older husbands retiring and taking them with them on that big caravan trip around Australia, is it women of this generation who have never been in paid work, or is it also the need to care for elderly relatives?
Extraordinarily 91% of elderly parents receiving informal care receive it from their daughters, not their sons. Some of these daughters will work, but many will be in part time work (where frequently there is no superannuation) and others will have stopped work to look after mum or dad.
With baby boomers moving into old age, and with governments keen to keep the pressure on the public purse to a minimum, the children of baby boomers will be expected to care more, not less, for their parents.
And because there are generally only two or three children in this post baby boom generation- and soon you can make that only children- there won’t be the opportunity to spread the caring responsibilities around.
Ironically, at the same time that these women will be looking to contribute to super and get together a bit of a nest egg after a working life marked by years either out of the workforce caring for their children or in part time work, their parents get to the age when they need them.
Or maybe it will be their husband’s parents who need looking after. It will be women again expected to forsake their economic security for their parents.
How do we resolve this impenetrable, impossibly unfair quadratic equation?
How do we enable more women to work for longer- both to save for their retirement as well as to stave off the day when they will be reliant on those savings? At the same time how do we ensure our old people are cared for voluntarily, by their children instead of by tax payers?
Well there is only one answer really, isn’t there? We share the care. Thus my new discussion paper, Striking the Balance: Women, men, work and family.
We share the upbringing of children, the caring of grandchildren, the care of our parents and of the house and of the dog. We make sure everyone has a fair crack at economic security and self funded retirement comfort, which means they also have a fair crack at sharing the unpaid care, and, incidentally, the priceless joys of caring for people you love.
And that means we enter the highly personal and delicate war zone of the home.
That means men being able to take time off to care for children, men being able to care for their own aged parents and men being able to pull their weight with the laundry and the school runs and cleaning the bathroom.
Remember 70% of unpaid household work is currently done by women. For those of us with wonderful husbands who do more than 30% of the unpaid work, remember this is the average.
There are clearly many others who do much less.
It means women no longer treating the home and the children as a cross between a personal fiefdom and a pyre on which their matrydom is sacrificed daily.
It means my daughters no longer presenting me with fridge magnets declaring “my mother just doesn’t do guilt trips, she runs the travel agency”. It means women taking on more paid work so their husbands can work less.
Perhaps men wouldn’t argue too much- at the moment a quarter of all people work more than 50 hours a week and most of them are men. 40% of men in full-time work work more than 50 hours a week.
And if you think this is the same all over the western world, think again. The latest Bureau of Statistics data confirms that Australia is bucking the trend. The fastest growing group of full time workers are those working fifty hours or more- but this trend towards longer working hours is now relatively uncommon among other OECD countries, most of which either have experienced little change, or have continued the longer term trend in reducing full-time working hours.
We’re talking of a transfer of, on average, an hour. Men doing an hours more unpaid work a day, women doing an hour less….but that hour might mean dad getting home earlier and mum being able to extend her working hours, maybe even taking permanent work with decent super attached.
Maybe that way they would both have a life, and maybe even time for each other.
I haven’t met a consultation group yet which didn’t agree that long hours is a frequent cause of marriage breakdowns.
I am sure I don’t need to point out the non financial benefits to you of shifting the balance- men growing up knowing their children and being a greater part of their lives, children relating to both parents, parents being cared for by the child they made, not who he married.
A reduction in marital tensions perhaps- every focus group I have ever discussed work life balance with agrees that the thing they fight about most is who does what in the home.
And how do we change it- do we pass a law as the Spanish have done, requiring men to do more housework, or do we subsidise employers who provide flexible work practices for their workers. I don’t think so.
And it’s true, Australians claim belief in the fair go as one of our national virtues. All the national surveys show the same thing- we don’t always practice what we preach, but a majority of men and women believe the work should be equally shared.
The future demands of work and retirement mean women are going to insist upon it.
I guess many of you would asking why anyone would voluntarily give up the authority and power of paid work to spend more time folding clothes and supervising a year 11 English essay.
Not half as exciting as chairing that staff meeting and, if a man earns more than a woman you ask, doesn’t it make good economic sense for the family to specialize?
Well yes, which is why this is connected to everything else- like ensuring that those women pouring out of higher education are as able as their male peers to pursue promotional opportunities so that it isn’t always her who does earn less.
What is also clear is that there’s plenty in this for men’s rights. Men’s choices. Men live 7 years less on average, die at three times the rate as women before the age of 50, most don’t have residency with their children after divorce, frequently spend their lives in low-paid, unrewarding and boring work with little control or status, while their wives or partners enjoy the benefits of the family life they have funded.
And remember, if unpaid work were distributed a little more evenly, it might not be necessary for either parent to give up work.
This is certainly the experience of the Scandinavian men and women, who enjoy a much more equal share of unpaid care, but where women are more likely to work full time than in Australia- so women earn more without men earning less.
What is absolutely clear is that the challenge of ageing gives Australia no choice. We do have to share the care.
Mind your own parents, discover the joys of Year Twelve Maths with your teenager, suffer the humiliation of Parent Teachers Nights. Make sure you can run a household as well as you do that office.
Globalisation, economic change, demographic shifts and the need to finish the equality journey have coalesced to mean the future of work for women and the future of work for men must become the same: They are converging onto the one life-cycle course that begins with study and education, varies in work intensity and worked hours for fifty years of working life - more years than previous generations have actually lived- and eventually needs to end in self-funded retirement for the last fifteen and most expensive years of our lives.
Sharing the care makes it possible for men and women to be on the same train.
And that train is coming.
Attitudinal and cultural shifts will make a virtue, a new virtue, of what will certainly become a necessity. Men who care will be cool and sought-after.
We need to think harder about work-place flexibilities / part-time work? We need to use the AIRC’s ruling that employers be required to reasonably consider all requests for part time work from parents of children under 6 in awards. A ruling, I note, that has not drawn serious criticism from any major employer group.
Primary and secondary schools where boys are expected to sweep and clean and cook as well as girls will promote these cultural shifts. Not because boys need to be made to suffer as much as girls, but because they too, will be entering a world where self-sufficiency for all is an important goal, including responsibility for the maintenance of domestic order and hygiene.
Public policy professionals, in which I include academics and journalists as well as public servants and parliamentarians, sometimes forget that technological and economic changes inevitably lead to demographic and social change, even if it takes a generation for them to emerge.
Without intelligent social policy, the good order and peaceability of society is threatened and the gains from economic and technological change are compromised accordingly.
This does not mean that the State must oppose change to protect the existing social order.
This was the mistake made by the medieval church and it cost southern Europe a century of economic progress, while northern and Western Europe leapt ahead.
Of course we cannot deny change, we must continue to seek to provide people with choice, we must seek to reconcile competing wants. After all, isn’t the point of prosperity fundamentally, about being content.
Thank you.
Note:
1 ABS How Australians Use Their Time 1997 Cat No 4153.0
2 HILDA data Wave 1 analysis has been carried out by Janeen Baxter, Belinda Hewitt and Mark Western for a forthcoming article “Post familial families and the domestic division of labour” (2005) 36 Journal of Comparative Family Studies 4
3 [8] Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, OECD Employment Outlook 2004, pp 303-305.
