Equality for women? Don’t make me laugh

And the news from the home front is just as grim. ABS Time Use Surveys tell us that women spend, on average, nearly three hours a day on domestic activities, compared to the hour and a half devoted to the home by men. Women spend more time on purchasing goods and services, more on cooking, more on cleaning, and more on voluntary work and care than men. In 2006, women spent nearly three times longer each day on primary child care activities than men.

If this relative positioning of women and men on so many indicators was not bad enough, as a population group, women are broadly divided in terms of opportunity and quality of life.

There are two tracks for women in Australia today. The first track is for women who are privileged. These women don't have to worry about shelter, or whether their children's bellies are growling with hunger. They can afford a visit to the GP and buy medicine when required, and they can afford regular dental checkups for themselves and their families. They are educated, healthy and have a high degree of autonomy over their lives and the choices they make.

The other track is trodden by women whose world is marked by what they don't have and can't get. Women who struggle to live with dignity every day, without adequate finances, in the face of significant structural barriers to participation in the labour market and broader community. Women living in locationally disadvantaged areas, where no one has a job, whose children experience poor health, and who worry constantly about safety and making ends meet.

What are we to think about these two classes of Australian women? The recent Fair Work Australia ruling on the relationship of gender to some types of low-paid work offers an opportunity for us to pause, collectively draw breath, and consider what it means that so many women are trapped in cycles of poverty and exclusion on welfare, and in low paid work, in a country enjoying the longest mining boom in history.

The impacts on women left behind while others enjoy the booming elements of our patchwork economy are deep. The impacts are also intergenerational. We know that children who grow up in jobless households are far less likely to find and keep a job when they grow up, than kids who grow up surrounded by adults who work.

ARACY research released in the last week, highlight that finishing year 12 is the strongest predictor of getting and keeping a decent job in adult life. Locational disadvantage is a negative predictor of stable secure work.

These are structural issues. They are system issues that can only be overcome by system responses.

The fact is that a person's life chances are determined in large part by circumstances out of their control. No baby chooses the family they are born into, or where that family lives, but family of origin and location are increasingly strong predictors of an Australian's life chances.

It's time to stop blaming women who struggle to live with dignity on very little. I am so over comfortable armchair commentators, blind to structural inequalities, who seem to believe the blockbuster movie narrative that people can actually pull themselves out of poverty by their bootstraps.

Work is important to women's health and wellbeing. Because women still do the majority of parenting in Australia, decent work for women is important to the health and wellbeing of many Australian children. Secure and adequately remunerated work however, is not enough on its own.

It's too easy to assert that work is the silver bullet to address disadvantage and exclusion and that all unemployed Australians need to do is get out of their chairs and get a job. Really? If that's true why is the number of working poor households growing across our country?