Striking the balance with work and family in rural Australia

Striking the balance with work and family in rural Australia

Speech by Pru Goward, Sex Discrimination Commissioner for Women’s Health Goulburn North East (WHGNE), 57 Rowan Street, Wangaratta,
Friday 14 October 2005

---

The challenge today for women in regional Australia, as it is in our capital cities, is to achieve a better balance between work and family.

It is very easy to think of balancing work and family as a city issue.

In reality however rural and regional Australia is a significant employer of Australian women, and the two million women in regional and rural Australia contribute to their local communities and local economies while caring for their families. Certainly the women of Shepparton yesterday did not believe work-life balance was easy in Shepparton.

Many of the difficulties Australians experience in trying to balance their paid work and family responsibilities are magnified in rural areas.

These difficulties have been reinforced for me recently during the course of our nation-wide consultations for the Commission’s Striking the Balance: Women, men, work and family project. Common themes have emerged from my visits to regional areas and in submissions from rural families.

Accessing child care, for example, is difficult enough in cities despite the presence of numerous child care centres.   This problem is exacerbated in rural areas where resources and facilities are frequently simply unavailable.   Although many rural areas are large centres they simply do not have the population, large government offices or other large scale workplaces to sustain multiple childcare centres.   There is often just one child care centre.

Obviously its location and hours cannot suit everyone, and it is highly unlikely in a rural town that extended hours care will be available.   And for the families who rely on child care this can cause major stress and disruption to their work and family lives.

Having said this I was impressed to learn that Shepparton child care opens at 7.00am to accommodate the needs of the town’s fruit-picking industry.

Commuting times are also a major issue in many regional areas such as the NSW Central Coast.   Commuting for hours each day has a huge impact on the quality of family relationships, particularly for men who wish to be more involved with their families.

For many families in isolated areas, and especially those where parents are working in remote areas like mining, sheer distance is a barrier to help from extended family.

Work practices like 12 hour shifts and ‘Fly in, fly out’ arrangements can put an enormous strain on health and relationships.

Rural Australia cannot ignore the need to balance work and family for the same reason urban Australia cannot. Our sanity, our happiness and our prosperity depend upon it.

Especially when our economic growth is increasingly dependent on female workforce participation.

And when we have in place a system of government which prides itself on effectively responding to the challenges of those it governs.

Women in rural areas are particularly dependent on government responses to work and family issues.   Their female counterparts in the city can often rely upon larger employers to foster competitiveness and the need to acquire the best possible staff and reputation.   In this environment the ‘business case’ pushes employers to provide family friendly provisions.

Consider for example paid maternity leave. Without a national scheme in place it is provided ad hoc and at the employer’s discretion.   With only ‘business case’ as impetus for its introduction it is not surprising that it is most likely to be available to women with high skill levels and higher education working full time, or in the public sector.

It should come as no surprise that employer provided paid maternity leave is least available in rural areas. There are not the huge government bureaucracies or large scale private sector employers who can afford it.

To the contrary, regional areas are more likely to be small to medium size business strongholds – the employers least to be able to afford to pay for maternity leave themselves.

The absence of a national scheme often means private sector employers in country towns lose their best female staff to local government offices when they start thinking about having a family and move over to the government sector so they can get paid maternity leave.

Regional and rural areas are also heavily reliant on the strength of their communities – on the capacity for people to volunteer their energy and skills for the benefit of all.

For example, my recent visit to Kalgoorlie in Western Australia highlighted to me the great level of community participation in caring for others through services such as meals on wheels and participation in sporting clubs and other community groups.   While it may be tougher to juggle work and family in some ways, it is also evident that in small tight-knit communities this type of support is critical for country families and something that rural communities should be proud of.

It is surprising that present and past governments’ responses to work and family issues have been so slow and piecemeal.

Perhaps the nature of parliamentary life has affected the capacity of Australia’s political leaders to grapple with the work and family debate.   The tyranny of distance has forced federal and state parliamentarians to live lives unlike the rest of us.   Their lives are often remote from their children and families. Children, who are often victims of poor work-life balance, mostly don’t have a voice.

Very often they have partners who don’t work, or grown up children.   Perhaps it’s not surprising that male parliamentarians particularly find it so difficult to relate to the work-life collision being suffered by many Australians everyday and rely instead on their own memories or ideas about what should be the case.

Yet there has been a growing recognition of the issues.   The Prime Minister, John Howard, has described the debate about paid maternity leave, and work and family as a barbecue stopper. And he should know.   The Prime Minister’s reputation for great political feel is based on his habit of attending barbecues, many barbecues, and doing a lot of listening.

The Government’s decision to introduce a three thousand dollar Maternity Payment in response to this debate is said to have immediately produced less talking, and more babies.   Australia’s birth rate has gone up for the first time in 15 years and with the payment rising to $4,000 next year, perhaps this effort might continue.

But of course the debate about work and family was and is broader than a debate about the need for paid maternity leave.

The debate, and its effect on the barbecue, are the result of Australians increasingly feeling the strain of combining work and parenthood, but it also reflects how important our families are to us.

The debate also reflects men’s increasing interest in family life – it’s no coincidence that the barbeque metaphor represents a domestic activity that the Australian man takes great pride in.

Australians value their families as much as they ever did - what many of us are struggling with today is managing our competing family and workplace obligations in a time of rapid social and economic change.

My Striking the Balance project is looking at how women and men balance these responsibilities, the various pressures on both and ways in which we might do things better.

Much of the media coverage of the project has focuses on the role of various family members in keeping the family together, in particular, the gender roles around unpaid work in the home and providing care for family members.

My view, and increasingly I suspect this is the Australian majority view, is that it doesn’t matter who does what, so long as both men and women have the same options to choose from and the outcomes are fair.

And while many people tell me this happens already, the outcomes tell a different story.

Women do more unpaid work than men and less paid work. Women also do almost two hours of work, paid and unpaid put together, than men, each day.

This includes all the traditional blokes’ tasks such as lawn mowing and getting petrol.

For working mothers, double the enormity of this burden.

Yet 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.   Once all workers, including casuals and part timers, are included, that earnings gap for women grows to 66 cents in the male dollar.

And the end result of this earnings gap is poverty - women are two and a half times more likely than men to live in poverty during retirement.

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 financial 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.

Yet this alarming drop out runs counter to the business case for keeping women in work – reducing turnover costs, improving the competitiveness of labour, and raising standards and diversity.

Beyond the business case there is 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.   The treasurer, Peter Costello, talks frequently about the need for greater work force participation.

Australia ’s largest and most competitive companies have become extremely family-friendly as they desperately seek to retain their skilled staff.

The ageing of Australia is undoubtedly a major challenge for the world of work and for governments at a local, state and federal level. It is impossible not to take account of demography when we are thinking about the future of work for women but also men.

By the middle of the century, the proportion of people over 65 will be double the numbers of today, and will make up a quarter of our total population.

Significantly, the number of aged people dependent on each taxpayer will also have doubled.   This is the figure to focus on.   The cost to each tax payer.

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.

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.

Treasury Secretary Ken Henry estimates the GST will need to rise to 24 cents in the dollar to fund the increased expenditure on aged care!

So what has this to do with women and with the Sex Discrimination Commissioner? Plenty.

Part of my role as the Sex Discrimination Commissioner is to promote the principle of equality between men and women.

The Commission’s previous projects on sex discrimination and gender equality in the area of employment – paid maternity leave and the national pregnancy and work inquiry, for example – have acknowledged the serious barriers faced by women in paid work while pregnant and after childbirth.

Throughout these projects we were repeatedly told of the struggles that both women and men experience in meeting their responsibilities to their workplaces and their families, and of the need to enable men as well as women to take time out to care for their families without the risk of poverty or career penalty.

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.   Only 40% of Australian women over the age of fifty five are in paid work, much less than women in our peer group countries.

The lower workforce participation of older women is undoubtedly related to their share of unpaid work .

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.

As the Commissioner Responsible for Age Discrimination, a role I was appointed to after the introduction of the Age Discrimination Act last year, this is an issue of great concern to me.

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.  

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.

Meeting the need to increase women’s workforce participation as well as current and future needs for care is a challenge that we need to confront head on for equality, economic, and social reasons.

The answer, I believe, is to share the care.

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 independence and self funded retirement comfort, which means they also have a fair crack at sharing the unpaid care.

And that means we enter the highly personal and delicate war zone of the home, where time use statistics show that 70% of unpaid household work is 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.

We might expect this in households where the man is working long and hard to pay off the mortgage while the woman stays at home or works part time.   Yet the Household Income and Labour Dynamics Survey (HILDA) tells us that:

In couple households where both women and men are employed full time, women do more than twice the amount of indoor household tasks than men – 14.3 hours compared to 6 average hours per week.

Even in households where the male is unemployed and she works full-time, government figures show women, on average, do 5 hours more housework each week!

It is this domestic divide that we must cross in order to get real balance between work and family.

This means women no longer treating the home and the children as a cross between a personal fiefdom and a pyre on which their martyrdom 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.

During my national consultations it was not unusual to hear of men working 60 or 70 hours a week. Perhaps that’s why men live 7 years less than women and die at 3 times the rate before they’re 35, 2 times the rate before they’re 45.

If paid and unpaid work can be shared better among couples maybe they can both have a life, and maybe even time for each other.   There is nothing sexier to a working woman than a man in an apron, even fully clothed.

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 their role models, 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.

We may well look back on the 20 th century in wonder that we ever allowed men to become such a small part of family life.

I don’t think we need to pass a law as the Spanish have done, requiring men to do more housework as part of the marriage contract to bring about change.

To begin we need to practice what we often preach – the belief in the fair go.

All the national surveys show the same thing - a majority of men and women believe the work should be equally shared, yet few can match their beliefs with their domestic realities.

The future demands of work and retirement mean women are going to insist upon it.   They know they have to provide for their own retirement. Many men are already insisting that they be a part of their children’s lives and not just a distant breadwinner who gets home after they have gone to bed.

What is absolutely clear is that the challenge of ageing gives Australia no choice.   We do have to share the care.

Which, to return to the beginning, is why work and family remain a barbecue stopper. When a society feels its values are under-threat, in particular that the well-being of its children is under threat, it starts to talk about it, often.   Maybe not always articulately, maybe not always clear on what’s troubling them, but talk they do.   Until someone hears them.

Hearing them is the job of elected representatives, but also of all employers and the wider community. I commend it to you.

We can choose to change. It’s not a question of whether we can afford to, but whether we can afford not to.

Thank you.

Last
updated 8 December 2005