Westpac IT Women’s Forum: Women, men, life and having it all

Women, men, life and having it all

Speech by Pru Goward, Sex Discrimination Commissioner at
Westpac IT Women’s Forum, Sydney, Tuesday 16 August 2005.

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Acknowledgements

Women, men, life and having it all.  

At the time I nominated that as a topic, I had something clearly in mind. But that was a while ago and I have long since forgotten what it was.   Which is the wonderful thing about being forgetful; every day is new and exciting. Today’s idea about women, men, life and having it all are likely to be different to yesterday’s. By the time I have finished speaking both of us might have discovered something new.

The question of having it all has been asked through the ages.  It lies at the heart of the human dilemma; the impossibility of reconciling the brevity of the human life span with the infinity 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.

Choice lies at the heart of religious teaching; we may choose to follow the teachings of our religion or we may choose to stray.   Heaven or hell is our reward.

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 pressure on 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.

Which is why work/life balance has become a barbecue stopper.

It’s about choice, and part of it is the different choices men and women make or are obliged to make and the consequences of those choices.

Women and men are worried that they can’t keep it all together- the kids, the job and the care for their elderly parents- and the family’s starting to give way under the pressure.

We should think this is strange because we all thought the point of prosperity was making us better off not just materially, but spiritually and emotionally as well!

But you couldn’t say it is entirely driven by concern about families.   Fairness, and gender equality, also has something to do with it.

There are different worries for men and women- national surveys frequently find that men worry about not spending enough time with their families while women complain that although work frequently accommodates their responsibilities, motherhood is chaotic and frequently unrewarding.

This debate is tied up with Australia’s economic boom and our long working hours, globalisation, technological change, the ageing of the workforce and even the collapse in our fertility rate as women increasingly choose not to have children as one way of balancing their lives.

Take globalisation and the new economy.

Let me give you an example of what this 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 Strking the Balance: Women, Men, Work and Family is all about.

How do Australians spend their time, how do men and women share their responsibilities, what consequences does it have, could we do better?

Conservatives argue that the time-share formula were written on the back of the two tablets Moses carried down from the mount:  men earn, women do the unpaid caring, together they keep a family going.  

To date, my discussions with blue collar workers demonstrate that they still believe that this should be the case, even though most of their partners work part-time!

My view, and increasingly I suspect the view of middle Australia, 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.

For working mothers, double the enormity of this burden.

According to the Household Income and Labour Dynamics Australia Survey, probably the biggest in the country, even in households where women work full time and he is unemployed, women still do five hours more inside housework each week!   Go figure!

This uneven division of paid and unpaid work inevitably affects the happiness of both men and women.   They suffer in different ways.

For many women it ends up in poverty- women are two and a half times more likely than men to live in poverty during their old age.

Most sole parents are women and half of them are not in paid work and live instead on the bread-line with their children or 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.

Clearly the reason women work so much less than men is family responsibilities.

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, generally low paid.

A third of women who work in this country have no paid entitlements and even more have no significant superannuation.

This is very different for women in most of Europe, or Japan, who more commonly do enjoy retirement benefits.

There can be no-one in the Liberal Party unfamiliar with the national interest case for ensuring we have more women in work.   The Treasurer has put it on the national agenda.

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 ageing of Australia will ensure work and family remains a barbecue stopper.

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.

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.   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.   Other expenditure, on schools and universities, may decline.

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 Treasury Secretary Ken Henry has anticipated that the additional funding for aged-care, including health, 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 my 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 the Asian dragons 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; not always fashionable to say so, but always the best.

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 free public hospitals and pensioner health cards, 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.

Let’s not forget the gruelling reality for life on an aged pension today - those generous health benefits mean you get a bed in a public hospital if it’s a matter of life or death; but cataract operations, hip replacements and arthroscopies however, are not counted as life threatening, understandably.   You go on a waiting list instead.

A waiting list that often never turns your number up. So poor old ladies live in pain and discomfort for the final years of their lives.   They don’t go for walks, because their knees hurt, they don’t wash every day, or tidy every day, because their shoulder joints or their hips are damaged.

Yes, they live, but their quality of life is severely compromised by those years of unpaid caring, those years of being the centre-pieces of their families.

The extraordinary longevity projections, which have us living well into our eighties by the middle of the century, only reinforce the need for change.

So wisely, and perhaps only just in time, the government 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.   Unless they too, work the years that men do.   It is not only Australian mothers who work less than women in other western countries. Only 40% of Australian women over the age of fifty five are in paid work, much less than elsewhere. Australia’s older women participation rate is slightly lower than Portugal’s, 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.ⁱ [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.

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.

Striking the Balance is attempting to work out how.

How do 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, and men being able to care for their own aged parents.   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 are there for more than 50 hours a week.

Quite different, again, to other western countries where the trend is to shorter working weeks.   You can start to see why our divorce rate is so high!

I haven’t met a consultation group yet which didn’t agree that long working 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.

What is also clear is that there’s plenty in this for men’s rights.

Our present arrangements aren’t making men happy either. 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.

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, ageing and changing relations between men and women have coalesced to mean that the lives of men and women will increasingly converge onto the one life-cycle course-that begins with study and education, goes to paid work, either part time or full time, stretching over fifty years or more - 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.

We need to think harder about work-place flexibilities and part-time work. We need to think harder about ensuring boys as well as girls can cook for themselves, clean, organize a social life, manage their children. Adult independence is about more than economic independence.

And the good news is that making our workplaces family friendly and sharing the care between men and women is good for family values - care for children, care for our elderly, the importance of families spending time together.

It means that despite economic and technological change, we will have been able to preserve fundamental social values, like the importance of the family.   If we don’t- the gains from changes like globalization, which we have all embraced, are diminished by social instability and other unintended consequences we can see around us today.

Teenage pregnancy, childhood obesity, diabetes epidemics, family breakdown, oldies left to fend for themselves, women trying to do it all and ending up tearing their hair out and making life miserable for all around them.

Which, to return to the beginning, is why work and family remain a barbecue stopper. Our choices are no longer working out for us.

It is a new moral dilemma.

When a society feels its values are under-threat, it starts to talk about it, often. Grandparents talk about how much they do for their daughters and grandchildren and worry about the hours they are working. Parents complain about schools not doing enough and the shortage of male teachers- because the real male role models, the dads, are working such long hours.

Maybe people don’t always complain articulately, maybe they’re not always clear on what’s troubling them, but talk they do.   Until someone hears them.

The women’s movement has a key role to play in listening and lobbying for change.   It always did.

Today what is needed is a women’s movement that works with men.

Either as individuals or as part of a national campaign, women and men need to say together that workplaces and communities must take notice, that change will not come from being stoic, from putting up with it, but from demanding that life be better.

Men will not ask alone, and women who ask without accounting for the concerns of men will not succeed.

For daring to do so, we will be accused, disparagingly, of wanting to have it all.   We will be accused, as we are already, of wanting utopia.   At that point we can back down, humbled, made to look foolish, and keep stumbling on.

Or we can remind our critics that daring to dream of having it all has driven mankind from the moment we first dropped from the trees and stood up right upon earth. Having it all is the dream of mankind.

Not to dream is to condemn us to a time poverty which threatens to eat away at those values we hold dear.

Values of family, values of equality.

There can be no greater condemnation of this generation than to say we did not dare to dream of having it all.   I commend it to you.

Thank you.

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Note:

i [8] Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, OECD Employment Outlook 2004, pp 303-305.

Last
updated 6 December 2005.