Work and family: the challenge for modern Australia

The challenge - achieving a work/family balance. How we respond to this challenge will affect the lives of women, families, and next generations.

The need to address it is recognised across society. When Valuing Parenthood: Options for paid maternity leave was launched, for example, it was intended to begin an informed and fair-minded public debate about the need or otherwise for a national paid maternity leave scheme for Australia.

The most we hoped for was that the Government might agree to pay for some economic modelling on a couple of options.

None of us anticipated the strength and depth of the public support for the issue. But perhaps we should have. Perhaps we should have known that if work wasn't working for women, then it wouldn't be working for anyone else much either- their parents, partners, their children and babies. Perhaps we should have believed that the anxieties we hold for the struggle women still face in Australia were anxieties shared by others, a lot of others.

Perhaps we should have realised, if we think we can no longer put off facing up to some of the profound social challenges emerging in Australia, then the rest of the country might be thinking the same way.

And they are - because they have to. Every year our fertility rate declines. It currently sits at 1.70. In 2000 it was 1.75. In 1990 it was 1.9. A fertility rate falling below the necessary replacement rate of 2.1 is the symptom of something going wrong.

But it is only a symptom. It is not the disease itself. Work and family is not a 'womb gazing' debate. It is a debate about women's working lives. It is about women making life choices around the fact that they continue to receive less pay, less opportunity, and less financial support in the workplace because they bear children.

Women still earn only 84 cents in the male dollar, when comparing average weekly ordinary full time earnings. This gap occurs for a number of reasons as we know - basic workplace discrimination; perhaps, women's career expectations; workforce gender segregation which is ongoing and high; and, of course, family responsibilities.

It is the gendered nature of family responsibilities that now form the greatest barrier to equal pay. Pay inequity is intertwined with work and family issues.

First, women who negotiate with bosses for salaries quite often end up with less then their male counterparts doing the same job. They arrive at the bargaining table feeling that they will have to forfeit a higher salary because they know one day they may need greater workplace flexibility or they may have to take days off due to commitments to their children.

Men - many of whom will become or are fathers don't even consider factoring these things when they sit down to 'talk figures'.

Second, promotion often isn't available to women, nor are the extra hours, nor is the senior positions available in the interstate office for three months - because they need to get home to their kids.

The disparity in the earning ratio between women and men grows to 66 cents in the dollar when part time and casual workers are added into the equation. It is not surprising then, to find women make up 73 per cent of all part time employees and 60 per cent of the casual workforce.

Women in Australia are most likely to have children when they are between the ages of 30-34. This is the age when women are most likely to be combining work and family. It is no coincidence that it is when the earnings of men and women over 30 are compared that the earning gap is most obvious. But, disparate earning ratios are only part of the workplace disadvantage that women experience due to their child bearing role.

It still comes as something of a shock for many independent and confident young women when they discover a whole new world of discrimination or barriers to work when they embark upon parenthood.

During pregnancy, there are still many employers who consider that women do not work as productively, while pregnant - they either demote or dismiss them, deny them training or otherwise allow their careers to stagnate.

At a paid maternity leave consultation held with union representatives in Tasmania a union representative relayed the experience of a member, who was forced to move to a different work area (away from the public eye) when she was pregnant as her employer felt that her 'bulge' showed that she led an active sexual life!

This treatment does not end after the birth. For women who want and choose to breast-feed, many workplaces cannot or will not provide suitable conditions for the expressing of milk.

Many women have to settle for unchallenging jobs, or to forego promotions in order to secure part time work or flexible hours. There remains a perception that part time work cannot be challenging and that part time workers are not sufficiently committed.

Women often experience a lack of sufficient financial support during maternity. They have no guarantees that a job is there when they return from maternity leave. They have difficulty accessing affordable childcare and difficulty finding working hours that suit their families. Or they have poor access to flexible work conditions, which would allow them to occasionally take time off for family reasons.

Women are also the ones who end up taking large amounts of unpaid leave, or just time out of the workforce, further contributing to the direct economic cost they bear for having our children.

If you query this, if you think that families will always share their income, do I need to remind you of the high rate of divorce over the long term? Or the higher reliance of older women on social welfare compared with the reliance of older men?

Some women work because they have to financially, some because they may choose not to work while their children are young, or decide to do so to keep their skills current. Others see paid work as satisfying, as a time for themselves away from the home.

And of course there are many of us for whom work is intrinsically satisfying - it forms part of our identities. Women work for a range of reasons. Just as men do. And we have a right to do so.

However, as we know, the world of work as currently constituted, was designed by and for men - men with women at home to support them. If women are to fully participate without discrimination in the workplace we need to do at least one of two things - change gender roles or change the workplace.

Our best bet may be to change the workplace - to create an environment that welcomes women as we are - including our family responsibilities. This is called substantive equality - delivering equality of outcome for women in work - delivering our right to work.

There are a number of ways. We can implement family friendly work practices; make flexible working hours the norm; make good childcare more accessible and affordable; and replace our current system of paid maternity leave - ad hoc, and at the individual employer's discretion - with a national scheme of paid maternity leave.

Flexible working hours

In its current form, part time and casual work is a double-edged sword for women. It gives women the opportunity to fit around their family responsibilities, thus remaining the preferred form of work for women with families.

However, it is difficult to find well paid part time or casual work (the bulk in hospitality and retail) and extremely difficult to find it at the professional or managerial end of the labour market. In addition, finding formal child care on a part-time or shift basis is almost impossible.

There is no systemic approach to part time work in Australia. It is offered - and at the employer's discretion. In this respect Australia is lagging behind.

From April 2003 in the UK, employers will have an explicit duty to properly consider mother's and father's requests to work part time. This measure will be introduced as part of a government commitment to increasing access to flexible working practices.

Four and a half years ago, with the Equal Opportunity Commission decision in Hickie v Hunt and Hunt it appeared that Australia was moving towards a similar legal recognition of the right to part time work. We do it through an attitudinal change towards work and family issues. Across society, we recognise and accept that women work and have children.

Paid Maternity Leave

A national scheme of paid maternity leave is one way of providing the cultural recognition of this fact within the workforce and within society. It recognises the non-work related responsibilities of half of the people in the workforce.

It says we recognise women, who bear this particular responsibility, are entitled to the same workforce respect and recognition as the bloke who uses his defence leave entitlement to go into the army for 12 months. Or those who take study leave or long service leave; or the person who accesses their entitlement to jury duty leave.

Paid maternity leave is also about income replacement. With no universal scheme of paid maternity leave in place, the majority of women lose their entire income for at least the first few weeks following the birth of a child. Paid maternity leave will go someway to addressing the loss of income, and therefore, at least slightly reduce the gender pay gap.

It will mean that women can afford to be out of the workforce, while recovering from childbirth, establishing a breastfeeding routine and bonding with a child without the stress that they cannot financially afford to be doing this.

While the birth of a child is often a special time for families for women it is also a time characterised by colic, croup, cracked nipples, six feeds a day and sheer physical exhaustion. Post natal depression is common, as is the need for a physical recovery from caesarean section births.

Dragging yourself out of bed after your head has just hit the pillow-following feed number five- to go to work is 'that's life' for many women with newborn babies.

My final point I would like to address is why is work and family the issue of today? Why are we discussing paid maternity leave and flexible work hours?

Because these are realistic responses to the needs of the modern Australian family - the two income family.

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, because the real cost of living is high. In particular, housing affordability, Australia wide, has declined by 29 per cent within the space of a generation. You need two incomes to carry the mortgage on the slum of your dreams, forget the four-bedroom mansion with the spa bath and optional pool room!

Into this heady pressure pack, you can now add the fact that women still bear children and somehow have to cope with all this while juggling a major responsibility that hasn't changed for thousands of years and isn't likely to!

Traditionally, we have based our support for families around the male breadwinner model. A model which is no longer relevant.

The family has changed, therefore the sort of support we give to families has got to change.

Paid maternity leave acknowledges this. As does the introduction of flexible work practices, and an acceptance of part time work. These are sensible and effective way of supporting today's Australian families.