Not so much a choice as a daily dilemma

Option three also contains inbuilt costs. Apart from the guilt of not complying with societal images of “good motherhood”, most women need to compensate for their increased workforce participation by eliminating other activities, such as leisure. Finance and career-wise there are also costs, with many women settling for lower paid, lower demand jobs or declining career advancement opportunities to manage their family workload.

Current Australian policy, influenced by ideas such as Catherine Hakim’s preference theory, talks about women’s decisions around these options in terms of “choice”. Hakim, a British sociologist, neatly divides women into three main groups: work centred women who have no children or want to return to work quickly; home centred women who regard child rearing as their most important job; and the majority of women, categorised as adaptive women, who try to balance the two roles by dipping in and out of the workforce.

Under preference theory Hakim asserts that the vast majority of women now have real choices between a life centred on private, family work and a life centred on market work. This theory stacks up descriptively against current Australian maternal employment patterns. Nearly 40 per cent of partnered mothers are currently employed part-time, around 22 per cent are in full time employment and the remaining group are not in the labour market (ABS 2003).

Whether these work decisions reflects true preferences is a very different question. Women’s choices are not made in a vacuum. They occur in a social system, which increasingly requires female labour market activity for both family economic viability and, as espoused in Treasury’s Intergenerational Report, for future national economic well-being.

They also occur in a social system that, while promoting a self-sacrificing model of “good motherhood”, provides little real support for this role. The non-negotiable nature of much family work, means that although many women express satisfaction with their mother-worker selections, such decisions are more about what is practicably feasible, financially viable and reconcilable with their own beliefs about motherhood than they are about choice.

More importantly, while determinations of an achievable work-family life mix are privately made, all strategies result in real, ongoing, financial and other costs that reverberate throughout the lifecourse. These already high costs are dramatically multiplied in the event of a major risk of parenthood, relationship breakdown. With around 40 per cent of Australian marriages ending in divorce, this risk is substantial and the multiplication factor is higher for women who have prioritised care-giving within the two parent family. For Australian women dealing with the daily dilemma of achieving a work-family life balance translates into a lifecourse dilemma.