We’ve Come a Long Way… Maybe

We’ve Come a Long Way… Maybe: Choices and challenges facing 21st century women

Speech by Federal Sex Discrimination Commissioner Pru Goward at the Victorian Independent Education Union (VIEU) Women’s Conference, 13 June 2003.

• Tony Keenan, VIEU secretary, Deb James, VIEU deputy secretary, union members, ladies and gentlemen thank you for inviting me here today.
• It is with great pleasure that I address the Victorian Independent Education Union (VIEU) Women’s Conference.
• The story of women in most professions is the story of women making inroads into male dominated areas.
• Women in education tell quite a different story.
• Along with nursing, teaching – in particular, early childhood education - has always been defined as an essentially female occupation.
• It began in the 19th century when teaching and governessing were regarded as more ‘desirable’ forms of employment for to single women.
• By 1901 the number of female teachers in Queensland schools outnumbered male teachers.
• And in other states, men and women were employed in almost equal numbers.
• Despite this, women were consistently paid less than men and occupied less senior positions.
• But that was over 100 years ago.
• That was in the early years of the 20th century.
• Today we are here to discuss the choices and challenges of women in teaching in the 21st century.
• The picture however is not vastly different from that of 100 years ago.
• In 2003 female teachers outnumber males across all states, in both government and non government schools.
• Looking specifically at non government schools we find that in Catholic schools 73 per cent of teachers are women and 27 per cent are men.
• In other non government schools women make up 65 per cent of teachers and men make up 35 per cent.
• Of the VIEU’s 12,000 members, 70 per cent are women.
• It is fair to conclude that education continues to be a female dominated profession.
• Unfortunately today we can also continue to conclude that there exists in the education sector a gender pay gap.
• When the average weekly earnings, including overtime for full time adults are compared, men in education earn on average $936.60 a week, while women in education earn on average $836.70 a week.
• This means women in education are earning 89 cents in the male dollar.
• When all average weekly ordinary full time earnings are compared women earn only 84 cents in the male dollar.
• While it looks then like women in education are doing well comparatively, let us not forget that we are talking about a profession dominated by women - there are more female teachers and educators yet they continue to earn less than the small proportion of men with whom they work!
• By sheer weight of numbers, if there is to be a pay gap at all, it should be skewed towards women.
• One of the reasons why men are able to earn more than women in this traditionally female profession is because like 100 years ago, men continue to hold senior and therefore better paid positions in schools.
• Look at the statistics.
• While girls’ schools tend to have female principals, across Independent schools, 66 per cent of all principals are male.
• There is only one female principal of a boy’s school.
• In Victorian Catholic schools 52 per cent of principals are male and 48 per cent are female.
• In Catholic secondary schools, 68 per cent of principals are male and 32 per cent are female.
• There are no female principals of Catholic boys’ schools – however four Catholic girls’ schools have male principals.
• Why does this leadership inequity continue to exist?
• Surely in a female dominated profession women we should see everywhere – this means at the top too.
• And this isn’t a matter of ‘compassion’, this is a matter of merit! This is a matter of how productive, efficient and competitive we want our private schools to be.
• It exists for the same reasons the pay gap continues to exist in the education sector.
• It exists because despite working in a female dominated profession, women in teaching face the same challenges faced by the majority of women in the workforce today - the challenges associated with being responsible for bearing children.
• And as these statistics show, for women in paid work this challenge translates into experiences of inequity – less pay, less access to positions of seniority and less income security over a lifetime (a issue I will discuss in more detail later).
• It is the gendered nature of family responsibilities that form the greatest barrier to equality in the workforce for women in the 21st century.
• That promotion often isn’t available to women, because it goes along with the extra hours – and women often can’t take the more senior position available in an interstate or regional school for three months because they need to get home to their kids.
• Currently we lack creativity in defining leadership and what is required for positions of seniority.
• Higher positions are directly associated with more time in the office or at the school.
• We continue to apply a model that rewards the male life experience – get into an organisation or a school, put in the time (overtime, months, years) and work your way up the ladder.
• There is no room for breaks – necessary for at least even a few days if you are to give birth to a child; or shorter hours – necessary if you are to at least see your children.
• These are seen as signs of ‘lack of commitment’ or ‘lack of ambition.’
• And women who take them pay the price – literally.
• Leaving the workforce to have a child severely reduces a woman’s lifetime earnings.
• Women with high levels of education (12 years) forgo $239 000 in life time earnings from having one child.
• A women with average education (10 years) forgoes around $201 000 and a woman with a low level of education (less than 10 years) forgoes $157 000.
• Breaks from the workforce to bear or raise children also mean that women workers have substantially poorer retirement incomes than men.
• One estimate is that an average superannuation balance for men in 2004 – next year- will be $74 000, while for women it will be $40 000. A bit less than half.
• Projected to 2019 the figures for men and women were $121 000 and $77 000 respectively.
• This is the experience of women in education - however it is not a unique experience.
• Women in all professions 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 year 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 the crux of the challenge experienced by most women in the paid workforce today – the challenge of combining work and family.
• The statistics leave us unable to conclude anything other than that the workforce has failed to accommodate women as they work and mother.
• This needs to change.
• Why?
• 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 from 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.
• In this global scramble for labour, employees of all kinds will be the most valuable, rare and sought after commodity.
• Being an employer of choice or a profession which accommodates the non-work related needs of staff will no longer be a choice but a necessity.
• If you don’t want to take my word for this, David Morgan, CEO of Westpac, has said much the same thing.
• And this mad scramble for people will not be limited to our shores.
• Shrinking workforces are an international trend.
• The competition for employees will be a global.
• People will be in a better position than ever before to decide who they work for and where they work.
• Countries where the general trend is not to support employees in their other needs such as family responsibilities, will find themselves losing their young, educated and mobile workforce who will take up jobs in other countries.
• It’s already happening.
• Last year, despite our great beaches, fantastic economic growth, great people like you and me and political stability, Australia lost 40,000 people.
• People who permanently migrated.
• That is the highest number ever. Part of the new global workforce.
• It could go higher.
• They went: teachers, nurses, doctors, scientists, lured by better jobs and conditions elsewhere.
• It was estimated that in 2002 there were 6,000 and 15,000 Australian and New Zealand teachers in Britain.
• Although predominately lured by the higher wages, let us not forget that they are landing up in a country which offers better social conditions too.
• The UK recently upped its paid maternity leave from 18 to 26 weeks.
• Canada’s leading work and family expert, Professor Linda Duxbury, told an Australian forum recently: “We’re out to get as many of your good people as we can”. Canada offers a year’s parental leave at full pay, by the way.
• And Australia is still yet to introduce any such scheme.
• Along with the US, Australia is the only OECD county without paid maternity leave.
• A scheme which for so many reasons is becoming increasingly necessary.
• Under our current system of paid maternity leave – ad hoc and at the employer’s discretion most women go without.
• In the independent school sector only 30 per cent of schools offer some form of paid parental leave; and only 21.4 per cent offer it to non-primary carers.
• Most prestigious, award free boys schools do not offer any form of paid parental leave.
• And in schools where paid parental leave is on offer, the amount provided is often dismal.
• The Catholic Schools Certified Agreement provides for 6 weeks paid parental leave.
• Even if only one week is taken before the birth of the child, a mother may be forced to go back to work with a one month old child.
• I understand that the VIEU is planning to ask that this be increased to 14 weeks in the next agreement.
• If we are to ensure that all women have access to paid maternity leave, that all babies are equal, we cannot leave its provision at the discretion of employers.
• The only way we can ensure equality is through the provision of a government funded scheme.
• In December last year I launched my paper entitled A time to Value in which I outlined a proposal for a national scheme of paid maternity leave.
• I recommended a government funded benefit of up to the minimum wage for women who had been in paid work for fourteen weeks, to enable them to stay at home after childbirth.
• The minimum wage was at the time $431 per week (it is now $448).
• My proposal for a national scheme of paid maternity leave was a very modest recommendation.
• I proposed that women who received this benefit would not receive others and some may even choose not to take the paid leave.
• As I said, the net cost of the scheme was calculated at $213million a year; this would have to be the cheapest family support programme in the country.
• It was with much disappointment then that on budget night last month, we saw the Government pass up the opportunity to introduce this or any other such paid maternity leave scheme.
• While acknowledging that the introduction of a scheme of paid maternity leave is only one of the positive steps we need to make –the workforce a female friendly and therefore family friendly place – and the Government has also said paid maternity leave must be part of a suite of work and family measures - it is both the starting point and centrepiece of facilitating the combining of work and family.
• This is why I have focussed on in my first year as Federal Sex Discrimination Commissioner.
• How can we convince employers that they need to have in place flexible work practices allowing parents to care for their children if they did not even afford women time off work to give birth to them?
• It is an obvious and logical path – you have to take baby steps before you can walk.
• Why then paid maternity leave, with so many benefits at such a modest cost has sparked so much debate is a mystery to me.
• Perhaps it is because the discussion around the introduction of a national scheme of paid maternity leave has become more than just a public debate about a very modest social policy measure.
• It has become representative of a huge demographic challenge for Australia.
• Foremost, the challenge of who will have our children.
• Every year, slightly fewer women of child-bearing age in Australia, as elsewhere, decide to have children.
• The current fertility rate is 1.7. It is continuing to fall.
• Our necessary replacement rate is 2.1.
• Men as well as women are choosing not to have children.
• A recent study confirmed that men are deferring parenthood to an even later age than women – if they become parents at all - 68 per cent of men aged between 30-34 had not fathered a child by 30.
• There are a variety of economic, biological and social changes contributing to this paradigm shift – the shift to smaller families, later in life, if at all.
• First- education and training periods are longer, meaning earning capacity begins later in life for most young men and women.
• A third of people aged 20-24 are still in higher education – unheard of in previous generations.
• Next, having spent those years and that money on getting an education or other qualifications, young women are understandably reluctant to trade this all in for ten years at home, knowing how hard it will be to pick up a job or career again at the end of it. To say nothing of their desire for independence, for choices, for security in their retirement years.
• Then, the nature of work has changed. Few young people enter the workforce with permanent full time jobs the Bank is going to lend money for a home on.
• Contract and project work is very common, 45 per cent of Australian workers do not have permanent jobs, with the consequence that not only do home mortgage lenders feel understandably uncertain about the young couple’s prospects, but so does the young couple!
• Most families today need two incomes to survive. Sure, one parent might only need to work part time, but work they both do.
• It’s not about saving up for the overseas family holiday, if indeed it ever was.
• Today the majority of women will have to work part or full time for at least part of their parenting years.
• Why? Because the real cost of living is high. In particular, housing affordability, Australia-wide, has declined by 17.8 per cent in the past 12 months. You need two incomes to carry the mortgage on the slum of your dreams, forget the 4 bedroom mansion with the spa bath and optional pool room!
• The monthly loan repayment needed to meet a typical first-home mortgage in Sydney reached $2538 - 40.6 per cent of average household income. In Melbourne housing prices rose 20 per cent in the last financial year.
• Risk management is emerging as another major reason why we now have two income families, even when the children are less than a year old.
• The risk of divorce, first of all, and, increasingly significant, the risk of temporary unemployment for the primary income earner.
• Currently Australia’s divorce rate is just under 50 per cent over a thirty year period, meaning that for 50 per cent of families, the second income earner at some stage MUST become the primary income earner, at least for herself if not herself and her children.
• In defacto relationships, the break-up rate, even with children, is even higher.
• Yes, we can work harder at keeping marriages together, but in the mean time, we need to address the consequences when divorce does occur.
• Despite Australia’s outstanding child support system, it remains the case that divorce means poverty for women who have not worked in the period before separation.
• The high percentage, say 75 per cent, of single mothers on supporting parents’ pensions in Australia, is much higher than overseas percentages and suggests we just have not faced up to this reality nearly well enough.
• This welfare dependence is compounded in the years that follow and results in their greater dependence on welfare for the last part of their lives.
• Risk management of job uncertainty is a further compelling reason for the two income family.
• Where once skilled workers at least could be confident of continuous employment, downsizing, restructuring, mergers and the need to be internationally competitive means that for many, periods of unemployment are to be expected. 42 per cent of workers today are in a job for less than 2 years.
• Families need to spread that risk by having two in work, not just one.
• Low wage families have always needed to do this- now the middle class is in the same boat.
• As history has shown it takes the middle class to start a revolution – and here we are!
• So we have no choice but to support families in a meaningful and relevant way because families have no choice.
• It’s not about selfishness or personal greed on the part of young men and women.
• It’s about being able to work and have a family.
• Our task as a community is to make this choice viable for them.
• Paid maternity leave alone will not make it possible for women to do both.
• But no one has ever suggested that any one policy alone can or make it possible for people to combine work and family.
• Every western country in the world that’s trying to facilitate the choice of women to have children has done so by providing a package of work and family measures. NOT work or family.
• And there is no package that does not include Paid maternity leave. It is a must-have.
• It means that women do not have to forego much needed income when they take time out of the workforce to give birth, recover from birth and bond and care for a child.
• It is a recognition and a valuing of the dual role women play in the 21st century – they work and they mother.
• Sometimes they will focus solely on one of these tasks, usually they will be tackling both together.
• Hence the tyranny of juggling.
• Family responsibilities extend well beyond the first three months of a child’s life and take many, often unexpected forms.
• Employees – and that is all employees, not just women – must be able to fulfil these responsibilities.
• And employers must make it possible for them to be able to combine work and family or they won’t get the workers.
• Flexibility in working arrangements is therefore essential.
• Creative ways of allowing employees to meet their work and family commitments should be encouraged by employers – not resented.
• A parent, needing to pick up a child from day care at 3pm, who suggests that he or she take her lunch break from 3 – 3.30pm rather than 1 – 1.30pm should be seen as coming up with a solution that will work for both the worker and the employer – not dismissed.
• At least this is the opinion of our courts. And it makes sense.
• Child care should be affordable and easily accessible.
• Part time work should be an accepted mode of working, not seen as a career limiting move – it should not have the trade off of promotion and career advancement. And it should be an option for all employees – not just women.
• Look at Holland.
• Here all employees have a legislated right to part time work, and legislation prohibits discrimination against part-time workers.
• It ensures them equal hourly pay, pro-rated benefits, and equal opportunity for career advancement.
• Part time work is considered ‘good work’ in Holland.
• It is the norm for women and men; Holland has the highest rate of part-time work among OECD countries (17 per cent for men and 68 per cent for women) and a very low rate of involuntary part time work (6 per cent).
• We can make our workforce more family friendly.
• We can make achieving the work and family balance a reality.
• It just requires a change in attitude and practice, by employers, across industries and in society.
• It requires ‘best practice’ standards to be set.
• This is where the education sector can play a vital role.
• As a female dominated profession it should be leading the way. Child care, access to part time work and paid maternity leave should be the norm in an industry where the majority of employees are female.
• The sector has chosen to miss the opportunity to lead, rather it lags.
• What example of leadership does this set for the children it educates and moulds?
• I consulted a number of representatives from education unions in writing my paper on paid maternity leave.
• Time and time again hearing how access to part time work is almost impossible for teachers, a reasonable spread of hours difficult to attain and affordable childcare unheard of.
• It is hardly surprising then to hear that the VIEU is planning to run a family friendly workplace campaign in the education sector.
• I congratulate the union on taking this step.
• All of this is not being said to black mark the education sector.
• The situation in this sector mirrors the reality for all women in all professions.
• But the other reality, the reality which we are increasingly being forced to respond to, is that today women are a crucial, vital and necessary part of the Australian workforce.
• In 2003 women make up 45 per cent of the overall labour force. Every year this figure increases – In 2001 they made up 44 per cent.
• What were once ‘women’s needs’ are now the needs of nearly half the workforce.
• Employers therefore face a unique set of challenges. They can no longer ignore these ‘women’s issues’.
• The rest of society also faces a challenge, because inevitably the well being of the next generation is our responsibility.
• And their well being affects our future wellbeing.
• The nature of the challenges facing us all is really nothing new.
• It is the challenge of embracing a changing in social, economic and biological factors.
• We have done this many times before and we will have to do it again.
• It is the challenge of evolution, of being human, of living in a rapidly changing world.
• Of course, each time the set of changes we are excepted to embrace are different.
• Today facilitating these changes means allowing people to combine work and family.
• As they did before the Industrial Revolution - William Blake’s dark satanic mills.
• It means making work and mothering a viable choice for women - but it also means not leaving women with the entirety of this double shift.
• Giving birth remains a ‘women only role’ – for now at least, but parenting certainly is not.
• However most men remain unaware that there even exists 52 weeks unpaid parental leave entitlements to them available after the birth of their child.
• They rarely utilise their employee rights to flexible work practices or other workplace benefits designed to make caring for a child easier.
• Despite a desire to be more involved in their child’s life, the reality is that at the time of the birth of his child a man will take on average, one week of paid paternity leave, a few weeks annual paid leave and then it’s back to work as usual.
• In this environment the only indication that he just had a child may be his initial ‘proud new father beam’ which is fast replaced by ‘bleary eye glow’ as the reality of life with a sporadically sleeping, always hungry, screaming machine sets in for him and his partner.
• Further down the track evidence of fatherhood may become further eroded – reduced to an array of photos on his desk – from baby photos to first day at school snaps.
• With modern technology, even this cluttering of office space may not be necessary – the photos can be scanned, updated regularly and stored as a screensaver!
• Looked at this way, there is a yawning gulf between what men say they want and what they do.
• Having a child barely registers a ‘blip’ in their working arrangements.
• This isn’t because men are selfish or insensitive.
• It’s because that’s the way family economic imperatives work today.
• The greatest amount of overtime is worked by men in their prime young parenting years.
• They are working harder to make up for the income lost by mother being at home, unpaid.
• The reality is however that men are the primary earners in most families. So while there remains in place a gendered pay gap, families’ choices over caring arrangements will continue to be undermined.
• They will also continue to be undermined as long as society sees men who adopt flexible working arrangements as less ambitious, soft or slack.
• While paid maternity leave obviously addresses issues directly related to a woman’s child bearing role, return to work issues are not just about mothers.
• They are about parenting and how we accommodate this at work.
• As long as they are seen as options for women and more specifically mothers – women will remain outside of the normal practices of the workforce. They will be the problem, not the norm.
• So while it is easy to see the problems and challenges facing women in the 21st century they cannot be addressed by women alone.
• Whether this makes them more challenging or not depends on all of us – it depends on our ability as a society to change our attitudes and change our practices.
• It’s time Australian Society stopped talking about what they’d like in a perfect world and started action on the realities of the world we actually live in.
• Equality, in the end, in a perfect world – rules – ok?

Last updated 25 August 2003.