The government hasn’t shied away from addressing the drastic disparities between Australian men and women, pledging close to $5 billion to improve gender equity.
Minister for Women Katy Gallagher proudly held the women’s budget statement in her hand during this afternoon’s budget press conference, reading aloud from the statistics and telling the public that this government was going to change things. The government has announced record investments in closing the gender disparity gap — but then again, so did the last government, to little avail.
The statement is frank but its findings and aspirations aren’t new. We’ve had the horrifying statistics drummed into us time and time again. But will anything change?
More than three in 10 assault hospitalisations between 2019 and 2020 were caused by domestic violence. In 2018, 228 women were killed by a current or former partner. First Nations women are 34 times more likely to be hospitalised because of violence than non-First Nations women. More than half of women in their 20s, and 34% of women in their 40s, have experienced sexual violence. Twenty-two per cent of Australians believe that “gender inequality doesn’t really exist”.
The cost of violence against women and their children is estimated to be $26 billion a year, so the $1.7 billion for the recently announced national plan to end violence against women and children is a small investment if it does what it promises — eliminate violence within the span of a generation.
There’s $65.3 million over four years from 2022-23 to invest in respectful relationships education to help prevent gender-based violence and keep children safe (though just $1.1 million of that comes through this year).
The government addressed the “motherhood penalty”, highlighting how taking time off to care for children impacts career progression. Women reduce their hours in paid work by around 35% across the first five years following the arrival of children, regardless of whether they were the primary earner or not. Men’s paid working hours only drop during the first month of parenthood, with nearly a third of fathers and partners reporting experiencing discrimination when requesting or taking parental leave.
The government has announced a $4.7 billion investment in early childhood education and care and $531.6 million to expand the paid parental leave scheme up to 26 weeks by July 2026. But there’s been little discussion about addressing childcare workforce shortages.
Just 34.3% of ASX300 board positions are held by women, and less than 10% of ASX300 CEOs are women. And the gender pay gap remains stubbornly at 14.1%, with a woman working full-time earning $263.90 less per week than a man working full-time.
Australia now has the Women’s Economic Equality Taskforce; is implementing recommendations from the Respect@Work report; is funding the National Women’s Health Strategy 2020-2030; and is developing a national strategy to guide whole-of-government actions to achieve the goal of being a global leader in gender equality.
The government acknowledged, in a separate budget paper, that trying to assess Australia’s equality, well-being and progress indicators compared to OECD data is difficult. Some OECD data takes years to aggregate, with a lag between when the data is taken and when it is published.
It’s the same story with gender indicators.
After nearly a decade of Coalition control, it’s taken a long time for gender equity to be given the attention it deserves. But the previous government did attempt to address it (following marches, protests and political resignations). Still, the numbers are slow to change. The previous 10-year plan to reduce violence against women and children did nothing to reduce the prevalence of violence. The current one, again, lacks clear, measurable targets in assessing its success.
There are some moves: following the jobs and skills summit, the government announced it would expand data collection on key gender equality indicators.
But for $5 billion, it had better figure out exactly what it wants to see to make sure the funding is reaching its full impact.
Over my forty years in the workforce I’ve done many, many different jobs in both ‘gender traditional’ roles, and I’ve earned very different amounts and experienced very different working conditions while doing so. I find the current debates over ‘gender equity’ simplistically reductionist to the point of being doomed to fail. No one is going to make genuine progress in this area until we start talking more specifically about the real relationship between types of work, life priorities (at various stages), workplace compatibility with child raising, and – especially – the often unavoidable focus and time demands of different professional roles.
A very important but invariably overlooked factor is the way public debate and policy leadership in this area is almost exclusively driven by a knowledge class cohort – of both genders – for whom it has proved possible to re-engineer our civic structures to make both raising kids and very satisfying, self-actualising paid work pretty tenable. As an ACT-based community worker, then a union organiser and now a professional Labor politician, Katy Gallagher has achieved what she would presumably regard as a high level of ‘gender equity’ while also helping raise her three kids. That’s an unambiguously good thing, but it’s simply not a work/family life profile that would have been quite so ‘easily’ do-able had her professional aspirations been in, for example, surgery, capital works engineering, housing construction, long haul transport or flying rescue helicopters. It’s not because women can’t do such jobs – there are supremely successful women in all these sectors. It’s because achieving (what this debate inadequately calls) ‘workplace equity’ in such areas demands life choice trade-offs that, typically, come at a necessary ‘cost’ to family life, and especially to gender-particular aspects of it, ie especially early childhood motherhood. Not for every single man or woman, because every individual has different ambitions regarding kids (including not wanting any), but from a civic point of view, at scale.
I’m an ATPL helicopter pilot, and in a different universe I’d be now earning $150k as an offshore or AME captain, say. But I wouldn’t have been able to spend five years as a homemaker raising our son and then another eight as a casual disability carer focussing on active participation in his primary school years, because that chunk of time out of my flying career at that time would have precluded my professional trajectory to the captain’s seat, not least the typical demand to rotate month on/off rosters in remote areas. That applies regardless of gender. There are I think a few female offshore pilots; very few are also ‘hands-on’ mums. The job simply can’t be re-engineered by government policy to make it possible. So is it a ‘gender gap’, or just a ‘job gap’ that most offshore choppers are blokes? A similar metric can apply to the twelve months I spent as a senior exec at an energy start-up: I was earning fairly silly money…but working seven sixteen hour days a week. Again, women do this, too. But you can’t be a hands-on parent at the same time…at least not without exceptionally artificial – and absolutely not ‘scaleable’ – imposed social re-engineering. Usually at taxpayer expense. Workplaces like politics and public service are increasing geared towards this…but only at the rarified upper reaches.
You can apply this kind of analysis to many if not most sectors outside the ‘knowledge classes’. Including, by the way, to most traditionally ‘male’ jobs down at the ‘menial’ or ‘lower status’ end of the workforce – which curiously the ‘gender gap’ debate simply never addresses. There are almost no female bricklayers, rubbish collectors, builders’ labourers…or say few hospital porters, scaffolders, truck drivers, tradespeople, marine hands. But is it – again at scale – really a ‘gender gap’ or just a ‘job gap’?
The vast majority of people who want to have kids recognise that for all but an elite few it is always going to demand a trade-off between work choices and family choices. For most it also necessitates a partnership. What this debate is I think now seriously de-valuing is the extent to which, often, and however it may differ from career women like Katy Gallagher who may have prioritised differently, women make a knowing and happy choice to put their professional trajectory second to the early childhood needs of their kids…because those needs turn out to be theirs, too. Men ate increasingly making that same choice, too – I did, and it’s the best job I’ve ever had – but we shouldn’t ignore the distinct possibility that the tenacious ‘gender gap’ that still exists in the ‘home-maker’ role in infancy years especially might, too, just be a ‘job gap’. I was a pretty good stay-at-home dad, but unquestionably there were child-raising requirements I just couldn’t fulfil, well beyond the obvious such as breast-feeding. Feminism, I think, would be smart not to continue unwittingly imposing exclusively ‘masculine workplace metrics’ on this ‘gender gap’ debate, by devaluing the uniquely value-adding (and immensely self-actualising) civic skill set that mothers can apply to our collective tribal reproduction.
thanks mods
The so-called “drastic disparities” between men and women are a delusion. By any sensible metric, apart from the “gender wage gap” myth, it is all illusory. Females are surpassing males in university enrollments and graduations. Large swathes of our media are now represented by women. Political representatives are increasingly female, particularly local politics. With measures already in place, women are increasingly represented in board-rooms and top administrative positions. The “gender pay gap” has repeatedly been shown to be a lie, but such is the power of mass delusion that people simply refuse to accept the truth. The reasons for the pay differential between average male earnings compared to average female earnings are multi-faceted, but chief among them is the fact that women gravitate towards lower paid jobs – generally in the “caring” professions, which attract lower salaries than some other occupations. So unless you are proposing that we pay child-care workers the same salary that we pay engineers, that “gap” is not going to change much – and that difference in salary goes much of the way to explain that so-called 14.1% disparity. Perhaps Ms Schultz can provide her detailed thinking on the reasons she believes is responsible for the disparity?
‘women gravitate towards lower paying jobs’ … or ‘the jobs women want to do are systematically devalued because they’re done by women’? Personally I have no problem with the idea of child-care workers getting the same pay as engineers
Yes! Framing the wage gap in terms of career choices really begs the question – is the way we currently determine the ‘worth’ of a job actually fair or functional?
I’ve been hearing a lot recently about shortages in traditionally female-dominated areas like teaching and age care. Is that possibly because we’re … not paying enough? Decision-makers feel like carrying jobs – female-coded jobs – just aren’t *really* the sort of work which ought to be well-paid
(oops – _caring_ jobs not carrying jobs. DYAC!)
I do. I’m not disagreeing childcare workers are woefully underpaid, but attaining qualifications as an Engineer is substantially more difficult, and working as an Engineer entails significantly more responsibility and liability.
Pick a better example to make your point like, say, a real estate agent, mortgage broker, most of the HR industry, large percentages of middle and upper management, etc, etc.
Well so be it – push for the same pay as engineers for child-care workers. But unless you get the government to pay that wage increase, it’s not going to happen. Would YOU be willing to double what you pay for child-care? The reason engineers get paid more, btw, is because their work is much more “valuable” than that of a child-care worker. They work in a “reward for production” environment. They design and build stuff that produces wealth. That is how we value remuneration (why else would people like Pink or Madonna be super wealthy?). And when did “fair” really apply to wages and salaries? Is it fair that CEOs get paid millions while their employees get paid a pittance?
The wage gap *is* real, though not as bad as the averaging-across-all-jobs methodology suggests.
My wife recently received a pay rise of ca. 20% – equating to several tens of thousands of dollars (also paid retrospectively in the form of a bonus) – because a company-wide salary review instituted by a new executive identified the systemic under-payment of women within their organisation. My wife was one of the more egregious examples, but the difference was generally 5-10% across the org.
A large part of the problem is the complete lack of wage and salary transparency. If all companies were required to publish salaries then a large part of the real gender pay gap would probably disappear in a matter of months. I expect it would start pushing wages up overall, as well.