Work Life balance:Where to from here?

Work Life balance:

Where to from here?

Pru Goward

Sex Discrimination Commissioner and Commissioner responsible for Age Discrimination

Victoria University

International Women’s Day



Wednesday 8 March 2006

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Vice-Chancellor and President, Professor Liz Harman; ladies and gentlemen.

Thank you very much for inviting me to speak today.

International Women’s Day is a very special event in the calendar and yet this is the first time that I have been in Australia on the 8^th of March since becoming Commissioner almost five years ago.

For the past three years I have been in New York on March 8th, attending the Commission for the Status of Women’s annual meeting at the United Nations as a member of the Australian Government delegation. It runs for a fortnight and although some of its work is formality, much of the time is spent in dialogue and negotiation over the development of women’s human rights and the promotion and protection of their interests. Sadly, much of the negotiation is a frustrating exercise.

Countries of all political persuasions persist in using the Commission’s processes to either promote a particular domestic agenda, or to get even with an old enemy or, as in the case of various resolutions moved at last year’s meeting, to get even with a new enemy.

On that occasion, which was also the tenth anniversary of the Beijing Platform for Action, a number of countries opposed resolutions moved by the United States, for example, because they did not like the Bush Administration’s invasion of Iraq. Curiously several countries opposed propositions which were consistent with their domestic policies. Even recipients of US foreign aid felt obliged to oppose, or at least abstain from voting in favour of, the United States’ propositions.

Similarly the US has been known to vote with the Holy See and the Arab nations in opposition to motions relating to women’s reproductive rights. Reproductive rights in the UN context is said to be “code” for abortion rights.

There are also north-south divides at the Commission.

Developing countries consider many of the Commission’s outcomes expensive to implement at a domestic level and frequently inconsistent with their country’s broad cultural receptiveness to the notion of gender equality. The G77, as they are known, frequently resort to demanding that references to international aid be included in the text. European and first world countries fight just as hard to have those references deleted.

I remember one year when we negotiated a text on women’s health- it went on until 5am on the Saturday morning (the meeting was supposed to have finished on the Friday night).

After we got over the references to reproductive health, which took a few days, we got onto the vexed issue of paying for the plan.

The plan had been essentially proposed by western countries which had already implemented most parts of it and were merely seeking to have the text reflect what they were already doing. A waste of time you might well conclude- but of great concern to developing countries which either did not have the resources or, in countries dominated by war and insurgency, were not prepared to prioritise it.

In that case, as in many others, the text was watered down to something meaningless.

The truth is of course that UN processes are conducted by governments, domestic governments, for governments. It is only rarely that governments are prepared to depart from the comfort zone of their own national interest. After all, they and their tax payers pay to keep the whole UN show on the road. They are its shareholders.

Australia was one of the first signatories to the Convention for the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination against Women, CEDAW as it is so inelegantly named. The Convention has been signed up to by more countries than most UN treaties. But its effectiveness is limited by the huge number of reservations held by member states and the absence of any independent audit mechanism.

Australia has two reservations. One relates to the role of women in combat and the second concerns the absence of a national scheme of paid maternity leave or its equivalent social-welfare benefit. Progressively Australia has reduced the breadth of its exemptions but twenty five years later, they are still in place.

Australia is not alone.

Domestically, our Act also contains a number of exemptions unique to it. For example the Sex Discrimination Act exempts religious institutions from sexism although the Race Discrimination Act does not exempt them from racism.

Then there’s the treatment of sexual vilification. While it is unlawful to vilify someone on the basis of race, unless its purpose is genuinely in the public interest or for the sake of art, it is, as we know, alright to joke about blondes, mothers-in-law and women in general. It’s okay, in other words, to vilify men and women, unless it is part of sexual harassment, when it is unlawful.

Now in a jokey, blokey sort of place like Australia, it’s hard to imagine a ban on sexist jokes. That hasn’t stopped women loudly objecting and, with men also now fighting back at the constant barrage of jokes about their domestic incompetence ( not, I note, their sexual proclivities), perhaps sexual joking is wearing a bit thin and a culture change really is occurring despite the absence of any legal constraints.

As the comedians complain, there’s not much left.

But where there is constant complaint is the area of the portrayal of women- particularly in advertising. To make the vilification of men and women unlawful would mean the end of advertising as we know it!

The sexualisation of women is an essential part of advertising cars, underwear, sporting equipment (anything really that men buy) as well as high end fashion advertising, and no amount of complaining from women is apparently going to change that. Models bearing the marks of assault, anorexia or drug use apparently also sell clothes.

Men also have cause for complaint- when it comes to things women or children buy, they are continuously presented as bumbling idiots- incapable of getting their child to school without a rush to McDonalds, for example.

In their defense, advertisers say they reflect current standards but don’t set them, but they certainly reinforce gender stereotypes we could do without.

This is not meant to be a diatribe against advertising, or the Act or the United Nations- this is a long story with a simple point: gender equality ain’t easy. If it were we’d be there by now. We’ve been at it for at least two hundred years, if Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women, 1792, is taken as the starting point.

Countries, cultures and people fight very hard to hang on to their traditional values, and the roles of men and women lie at the heart of those values. Those who wish to change the way men and women live, in particular to ensure men and women have the same range of choices, can live in dignity and respect, can be equally good AND equally bad, must be vigilant.

Men and women today might both consider they have a greater range of choices in the way they live than their parents or grandparents. Women can work, have careers and pursue public office. Men can choose to be devoted family men, part time or under-employed workers. There are an increasing number of young couples where she is the major earner. There are also women who choose the traditional path of home, hearth and motherhood, with partners employed full time. So the old has not, and must not, be thrown out for the new or we merely replace one form of discrimination with another.

But that does not mean we have reached Equality Nirvana. Not just because women seeking to combine work and family or achieve in a career still face hurdles men don’t dream about, but because some of the traditional choices are actually disappearing.

Childlessness, for example, is the often unwilling choice of women with a tertiary education or in managerial or professional employment. They are more likely to be childless than any other female socio-economic group, an outcome all the more irksome to many because their male peers- well educated or high earning men- actually have the highest fertility of any male socio-economic group.

It is men with year 11 or less education who have the fewest children. We have managed work and family so badly there is now a new gender inequality, an inequality in the right to have children.

Which is one reason why my new national project, Striking the Balance: Women, men, work and family is, I believe, so very timely. Its focus is quite unique; its focus is not work, working conditions, access to benefits, although all these are included, its focus is time.

In particular unpaid time and the relationship this has with gender equality.

The project is about men and women today- how they share their rights and responsibilities, their paid and unpaid responsibilities, and the consequences this has for not only equality between men and women but for other aspects of the great national interest. Getting the balance between work and family right is a key ingredient in sustaining Australia’s prosperity, while responding to the challenges of globalization, low fertility and increasing longevity.

It is also, if the stories of harried parents, worried grandparents and the lives of our children are anything to go by, crucial that we get a new point of equilibrium established for the sake of our families, for contented and peaceable communities.

Interestingly the Household Income and Labour Dynamics Australia survey, HILDA, the best source of data on questions of work-life balance, finds that women are not unhappy with their working conditions, but with their home life. Women in full time work do more work, paid and unpaid combined, than any other group, male or female. They do an average of more than 14 hours housework a week, whereas men in full time work do an average of 6 hours. No wonder women, according to HILDA, are the most likely to declare that motherhood is more a burden than a joy- and be the ones always to have plenty to say about who is NOT doing what in the home. These women are time beggars.

Men, by contrast, complain their working conditions limit their access to family life.

Working hours are a key reason for their discontent.

The working hours of Australian men- managers, executives and blue collar tradesmen in particular, just keep getting longer and longer. According to the OECD, Australia is continuing to pursue longer working hours as other countries have either stabilised or actually reduced theirs. Almost a quarter of the Australian workforce works more than fifty hours a week. Most of them are men.

I don’t think any Australian audience needs reminding about the cost of housing in Australian cities and the inevitability of mortgages requiring two working parents. Like men, women today work for a combination of pleasure and necessity. The difficulties of finding appropriate and affordable child care, after school care or someone to supervise the Year 10 teenager’s homework are all management stresses.

Frequently grandparents fill this gap- so that the work-life struggle is now extended to people who thought they had finished with juggling, only to discover that they are needed to mind grandchildren regularly to either save the cost of child care or to provide that intimate and loving care that would otherwise be unavailable.

A second reason for work-life balance drama is the intensification of work. Information technology, supposed to free us up from tedious jobs like typing and book-keeping, has in fact, doubled the white collar work load. And it’s not just white collar; once the plumber could get on with fixing one person’s pipes and get his next lot of jobs that night over the telephone. These days he’s getting them on the mobile and expected over there in an hour.

A third reason is globalisation and the incredible increase in competitive pressure brought about by free trade. Australia has become increasingly internationally competitive and undoubtedly much of the productivity growth of the past

past fifteen years has resulted from our new industrial flexibility; people being prepared to work longer hours, or less family friendly hours without penalty rates, or more uncertain hours as casuals or contract workers. That was all traded away against more money and, of course, more jobs. Job growth has been terrific. Undoubtedly having a job is the best cure for poverty and therefore for income inequality.

But it has come at a price, and the price is time. The time money can’t buy. Unpaid time meeting unpaid responsibilities, family time.

Ah yes, the sanguine might say, but families adapt. This is just an adjustment phase.

This may be true although I cannot see how relationship building, the development of love, trust and respect between family members, can simply be sped up to accommodate the requirements of work. Love takes time.

Yes, some of us, not all of us, can out- source meals and even cleaning, but there is more to family time than that. In any case this is of no real comfort to the child who, in their short childhood, suffers the unintended consequences of this speedy adjustment phase. Nor the elderly parent who needs some support if they are to stay living at home, nor the marriage, teetering on the edge because the two of them are always stretched, never alone, never with enough time.

This is why the Prime Minister calls the work-life balance debate a barbecue stopper.

Looking to the future, work-family tensions don’t look like going away.

In the case of women, get ready to move from the double shift to the triple shift. This is because women are having children later in life; the median age for mothers in Australia is 30.5 years, continuing a consistent increase since 1972.[1][i] With this increase, the likelihood of overlap between caring for children and caring for ageing parents will also increase.

Already we are hearing of women with the so-called sandwich problem – being squeezed between the demands of care for children and care for elders.

The ageing of the western world, brought about by vastly improved longevity and collapsing birth rates, has not only produced skill shortages around the western world but great pressure on government budgets.

A rapidly growing generation of retirees needs a rapidly growing amount of government assistance, to be got from a less rapidly growing generation of tax payers. No wonder governments are all busily privatising old age.

Australia, one of the world’s younger western countries, may now only be seeing the ageing of its workforce but it is already acutely conscious of the need to change the level of support it provides to the elderly.

As the population ages – whether we see this as the looming ‘crisis’ that some predict or as one demographic challenge among others – the question of who will provide the care for these people is a critical one for all of us, and not just those concerned with gender equality.

We know that by 2044-45, one in four people in Australia will be 65 years or over, double what it is today.[2][ii]

Over this time the costs of formal aged care are expected to increase by about 2.5 times more than GDP growth.[3][iii]

The Productivity Commission estimates that health expenditure will almost double to 11 ½ percent of GDP - basically because older people take a great toll on health services. The Head of Treasury, Ken Henry, estimates the GST will need to rise to 24 cents in the dollar to fund the increased expenditure on aged care!

One response to this dilemma is to help people stay in the workforce for longer- not only to pay taxes for others but also to fund their own old age. In particular their own superannuation accounts.

Treasury’s Intergenerational Report makes no bones about that. But if we are serious about assisting people to stay in the paid workforce for longer then we need to make sure these (often older) workers are also able to balance their paid work with their caring obligations.

A large proportion of women in the labour force provide care not only for children but for people with disabilities and older people, so let’s move beyond policies for working parents to policies for employed carers.[4][iv]

In 1998 employed women made up 34 per cent of all primary carers of people with disabilities and the frail aged.[5][v] Fifty nine per cent of carers combine caring with paid employment, with most carers located in older working age groups.[6][vi]

And almost a quarter of people aged 55-64 provide some level of care.[7][vii]

Although historically Australia has had only a moderate participation rate for women, a low rate for mothers with children under five and an even lower rate for women over 50, that is now rapidly changing. Mortgages and a dawning realisation that an old age living on a pension and not much else should be put off for as long as possible, have both contributed to that.

As labour force projections indicate a sustained increase in the workforce participation of women workers aged 45-64, and as women in this age group are almost half of all female primary carers,[8][viii] the tension between paid work and caring commitments can only become more of an issue for older workers.

Will it be resolved by sharing the responsibilities more equally between husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, by employers providing an unprecedented amount of family flexibility for all their employers, not just the young mums? Or will we prefer to see taxes rise and do none of the caring ourselves?

These are big questions- ones Striking the Balance is trying to answer. Yes, you can call it ambitious, call it risky, but don’t call it unconsultative!

Since the first discussion paper was released last June, we have conducted 9 focus groups, 28 community, union and employer consultations in outback, regional and urban Australia and received 181 written submissions. On the basis of this, I expect to bring down our final discussion paper in the middle of this year.

As you can imagine people are generally agreed that addressing the balance is about more than tinkering at the edges and that the obvious solutions of spending more on child care, legislating for part time work options and mandating paid paternity leave are far from adequate.

What is clear is that work conditions can and must change, but that the home front is in need of as much reform. It is our culture- which includes the value we place on being with our children, our elderly, taking time for private responsibilities- which needs to be challenged.

Essentially the natures of work and life have both changed enormously in the past thirty years but not necessarily in step with one another. We still have for instance, fairly traditional views about the share of paid and unpaid work responsibilities, views that we know are no longer fitting with reality.

Take Australia’s approach to family law and post-custodial arrangements: one example of institutions reflecting traditional family arrangements about who does the caring and who does the earning that need no longer apply. At this traumatic stage – the breakdown of the relationship – it is difficult to develop flexible family arrangements, let alone real choices for men and women constrained not by gender expectations but by their own wishes and capacities. This too, could do with rethinking.

What has become clear from our consultations, ranging from some of the most senior business executives in the country to young couples struggling to bring up their kids, was that we need big change.

No one knew quite how to do it, but they all consider fiddling with the levers here and there was not cutting it.

What we do know is that living in a world of continuing economic, technological and demographic change will always be a challenge to social stability. It is the role of public policy to ensure that social values are preserved through these periods of change, such as now.

If fundamental social values, like the importance of the family or gender equality come under threat, then so does the good order and peaceability of society. The gains from change are compromised by social instability and other unintended consequences.

This does not mean that the State must oppose economic or technological change in order to protect our values.

This was the mistake made by the medieval church and it cost southern Europe a century of economic progress, while Northern Europe leapt ahead.

Rather the State, through the application of public policy, should seek to ensure that the technological and economic changes are managed and adapted to uphold our prevailing values.

We need to think smart.

We need to look beyond what a single government can do to what we can all do.

Although we are a federation of states, there is no doubt that Australians increasingly look to their federal governments to solve their problems, particularly on big ticket items. Like balancing work and family. Federation however means it requires the strategic integration of state and federal policy to get this right.

Take the case of child care. The government spends a fortune on it and it is never enough. Meanwhile Australia is crying out for more and better educated workers. We could provide more extended early childhood education, starting at 3 not 4, and solve both those problems- but it would be a cost shift from the Federal to the state governments.

Greater investment in after and before school care by the states would not go astray either. Governments need not defend these as mere sops to two income families but as keeping up with educational trends and in addressing the additional needs of teenagers.

Anyone who has seen teenagers hanging around pinball parlors and city bus stops looking for trouble at 4 o’clock in the afternoon knows what I mean.

Anyone working with teenage boys with learning difficulties and desperate for coaching time will also know. Anyone worried about teenage obesity and associated disease might also consider there are some spin offs. We need to acknowledge that teenagers, while well beyond the age when they get put in an after-school hours centre to do craft five days a week, could benefit from supervised programmes after school, instead of being allowed to wander the streets or sit hunched over a computer or in front of the television after school each night because mum and dad aren’t home yet.

Again, it requires the cooperation of state and federal governments. Ditto community care services for the elderly.

So long as the Federal Government is responsible for retirement pensions and the accreditation of nursing homes, it is difficult to see what incentives there are for the states to think laterally about community-based aged care.

From the prevention of domestic violence to the management of mental health to work-family balance, we need a form of federalism that ensures all levels of government and all levels of community will work together.

Federalism isn’t the only institution that could do with improvement. As I think my final paper on Striking the Balance will describe in more detail, we are presently working with a social system that no longer fit with the modern world of work. It’s not that our family values have changed, it’s just that we’re all finding them harder to hang on to thanks to the intensity of economic and technological change.

So we need to start talking not about more incremental change but about some fundamental changes that enable us to respond to the twin juggernauts of internationalism and demography without throwing our sanity, our families, our happiness- and our commitment to gender equality- out with it.

That is the challenge for policy makers, academics and other contributors to social debate in Australia.

If they are to lead us through this time of change, they must be informed, wise and, most importantly, able to inspire the community with the confidence to change, that change will be for the good. It is a great challenge, but also the most crucial of the 21^st century.

On International Women’s Day 2006 it is time to declare our determination to get it right.

Thank you.

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[1][i] ABS 3301.0 Births, Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2003, p 11.

[2][ii] Productivity Commission, Economic Implications of an Ageing Australia, Draft Research Report, Productivity Commission, Canberra, November 2004, p 1.1.

[3][iii] Productivity Commission, Economic Implications of an Ageing Australia, Draft Research Report, Productivity Commission, Canberra, November 2004, p xxxix.

[4][iv] AIHW, Carers in Australia: Assisting frail older people and people with a disability, Aged Care Series, No. 8 Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, Canberra, October 2004, p 59.

[5][v] AIHW, Carers in Australia: Assisting frail older people and people with a disability, Aged Care Series, No. 8 Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, Canberra, October 2004, p 59.

[6][vi] Seniors and Means Test Branch, Australian Government Department of Family and Community Services, “The role of families in an ageing Australia” in Family Matters No. 66, Australian Institute of Family Studies, Spring/Summer 2003, pp 46-53 at p 49.

[7][vii] David de Vaus, Diversity and change in Australian families: Statistical profiles, Australian Institute of Family Studies, July 2004, p 251.

[8][viii] AIHW, Carers in Australia: Assisting frail older people and people with a disability, Aged Care Series, No. 8 Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, Canberra, October 2004, p 35. Last
updated 9 December 2005