All interviewees had developed an interest in the area over a long period of time, at least 20 years and usually longer. All the female interviewees mentioned their own life experience as having stirred their interest and informed their views. All of the interviewees were asked to participate in this study because their published comments indicated a similar theoretical framework to that utilised in this research, including a willingness to recognise examples of women’s inequality and disadvantage in contemporary society and an orientation towards bringing about change to redress that disadvantage. However, each clearly viewed the topic through the lens of his or her own research and professional interests.
Professor Emeritus Lois Bryson of the Research Centre for Gender and Health, University of Newcastle and Adjunct Professor, School of Social Sciences and Planning, RMIT University, sees women’s inequality as embedded in intertwined and complex ways in the institutions of the labour market, the welfare state, and the family, to the point of impasse, with no clear and obvious agenda that would be effective in achieving equality. She would like to envision a better future and in a way considers herself well placed to be able to do so, and almost expects it of herself. However, she considers that even the European countries with social democratic policies have not been able to achieve equality for women, and there is no clear image of what would bring that change, but she is working on it. Her views have developed over many years as a sociologist, and have been influenced by personal as well as professional experiences. She recalls the experiences of women like her mother, who was forced by the legislation of the time to give up a promising public service career upon her marriage, and who, in a way, mourned the loss of that career for the rest of her life. She remembers creative and capable women who scrimped and saved to make do with very limited economic resources, while the men in their lives were never short of money for their smokes and beers and bets.
Bryson sees herself as having gained an orientation towards social change and skills in activism by her involvement in second-wave feminism. She celebrates the many gains of the women’s movement, but sees that despite many of the desired changes having been legislated, women still do not have equality.
In Bryson’s vision of a better future people would be identified much less as gendered family members, and more as individuals, but she has no desire to go in the direction of rampant individualism and economic rationalism. She sees a need for changes in relation to childcare, employment, social security, education/training and taxation, and believes that a ‘whole of government’ approach is necessary rather than fragmented and possibly contradictory initiatives.
Professor Belinda Probert, School of Social Sciences and Planning, RMIT University, in the 2001 Clare Burton lecture, referred to the ‘loss of momentum in the gender equality agenda, and the existence of visible and damaging conflicts between women over family life and the care of children’, and called for ‘the development of a coherent family policy across the traditionally separate portfolios of industrial relations and social security’ (Probert 2001:1). Probert became interested in these issues because her own research has shown that people are finding it harder to work and have family lives. She has found that workplace change is giving some women more opportunities, but that workplace experience has become one of work intensification, longer hours and more demands. Her many surveys in different industries show that women and some men are having great difficulty in being both the parents and the workers they want to be.
Probert has found, paradoxically, that in the 1990s women talk enthusiastically about wanting to have employment and careers, but they also think that young children should be cared for by their mother or a mother substitute. In resolving this paradox it seems that Australian mothers have become polarised into two groups, those who try to manage the two commitments, and those who have a clear ideology of being mothers first. Between the two groups, Probert found a gulf in empathy and
understanding, and a judgmental framework rather than a pragmatic or policy framework for discussion. She states:
Women are very critical of each other. Women who stay at home are more critical of women who work than visa-versa but there’s also the case that women who work tend to be baffled by anybody who would want to stay at home.
Probert believes that the fact that women are finding it very difficult to manage work and family is somehow linked with the moral and judgmental division among women. She sees this division as a barrier to getting better policy, because even among feminists there is no consensus on the issues, as demonstrated by recent rather hostile exchanges in the media.
In Probert’s vision for a better future, economic security for women is vital. She envisions more generous financial support to mothers who need it, financial incentives to remain attached to the labour market and provisions enabling both parents to withdraw strongly from the labour market when their children are young. In addition, Probert believes that we need changes in workplace cultures, legitimising parents’ everyday concerns such as going home on time and taking time off work when children are sick.
In a 1999 article in Refractory Girl, Ms Eva Cox, Senior Lecturer, Department of Writing, Journalism and Social Inquiry, University of Technology, Sydney, presented her vision for a future where men and women could participate in a balanced mix of paid work, caring work and collective involvement in political and community affairs. In addition to her well-known advocacy for more accessible affordable childcare, she stated that we need more women in positions of power and leadership, and that a system still geared to men and male values is holding us back. Cox’s opinions are informed by her own life experience as well as by over 30 years of sociological research. She was a sole parent from the time her now adult daughter was four years old, and has always been the family’s breadwinner. Her extensive and long-term social activism, political advocacy, and academic teaching have all provided
opportunities to develop her views, and she is widely recognised as an Australian feminist activist and social commentator.
Cox believes that we need to examine current models of child rearing in the light of changed social conditions. She states that current models of child rearing propose an unrealistic role for mothers, and a restricted range of experiences for children:
We still get sold the idea that motherhood is something you do on your own. It comes in the popular media. There’s still a very strong pressure on women to pick up that traditional role and I think it has become stronger over the last few years.
Cox sees Australia as ‘not a particularly child-friendly society’. She draws attention to social changes that have reduced Australian mothers’ access to supportive informal networks of people who would share parenting with them. She sees the resulting isolation as destructive for both mothers and children. Cox’s research and community activities have brought her face-to face with the frustration, anger and resentment experienced by many mothers of young children because of the excessive demands and expectations placed on them. Cox recommends:
We must acknowledge both the fact that we’re not perfect and nobody can expect us to be perfect. It is good to recognise our fragilities as mothers and then we can recognise that there are real benefits for kids in spending some time with other adults who like doing different things. It’s not changing the notion of motherhood but it’s being much more realistic about the limits of any one person spending time with one or two small children.
Cox has for years been intrigued by the misperception that feminism or the women’s movement constantly denigrates women who choose to stay at home with their children. ‘I think there’s a sort of false dichotomy that gets set up by women who stay at home assuming they are being judged and putting words and ideas in our mouths.’ Cox is a well-known advocate of accessible affordable children’s services, but she emphasises that she also recognises the importance of loving relationships between parents and children:
The closeness of good relationships, however, does not necessarily correlate with the time spent, i.e. more time more love. In fact, I would maintain time away, if not too
stressful and limited, makes for better qualities of relationships, as the time together tends to be more precious and valued. Obviously the younger the child, the more time they need, particularly infants. But even these can cope with other carers, if the bonds are strong. So trusting your ability to make good relationships, even without full-time attention is part of learning good emotional skills.
Cox’s vision for a better future would include more and better services and supports for parents and young children, and changed ideas about mothering and the value of formal childcare. ‘Kids need other kids, mothers need other adults, but this doesn’t mean I think that women should work full-time with young kids. I think it’s too hard.’
In The Double Life of the Family, Mr Michael Bittman, Senior Research Fellow, Social Policy Research Centre, University of New South Wales, Sydney, and his colleague Jocelyn Pixley (1997), put forward a strong case that caring for children produces a public benefit, and that the costs of the high levels of care required by young children are borne predominantly by the mothers who provide most of that care. Bittman’s interest stems from his years of research into time use and unpaid work. Looking at housework, broadly defined to include outdoor work and tasks such as car maintenance as well as indoor work, childcare and shopping, he found that women did twice as much as men. He found that when men reduce paid working hours, they increase leisure hours, but that women in a similar situation increase their unpaid work. He found little difference in hours of unpaid work between women not in the labour market and women in part-time employment. Thinking about these and other findings, he believes that responsibility for unpaid work acts as a barrier to women’s labour market participation. He states: ‘When you look at lifetime earnings then the swap away from full-time employment or even discontinuous employment seems to have a lasting effect’. He has come to the conclusion that full-time employment puts women in the strongest position, both in terms of limiting their excessive unpaid work, and in securing their economic independence.
Bittman found that men’s unpaid work stayed steady at about 20 hours per week over the life course, with little variation unless they outlived wives. Women’s unpaid work, on the other hand, rose dramatically on marriage, rose even more dramatically on the
birth of a first child, dropped when the youngest child started school, continued to drop as the children aged, then rose again when husbands retired. Examining reasons for the gender differences in paid work, unpaid work and leisure, Bittman found that men in the 1990s claim to believe in gender equality in relation to housework, and explain their own unequal arrangements, not in gender-role terms of ‘men’s work’ and ‘women’s work’ as people did a generation earlier, but in terms of expertise or individual preferences. Looking at his own findings and other research, Bittman characterises women’s situation in relation to housework as ‘locked bargaining’, with men unlikely to share equally in unpaid work unless women take up full-time employment. He sees market substitutes for unpaid work such as restaurant meals as important in establishing new, more equal lifestyles. He found, curiously, that technology such as washing machines and microwave ovens did not reduce time spent on unpaid work. In considering what social arrangements would both improve women’s economic independence and reduce their responsibility for unpaid work, Bittman has looked at conditions in Scandinavian countries as most likely to suggest possibilities for Australia. He has examined the situation in Finland in some detail.
Bittman’s vision for a better future would include equity between parental households and non-parental households as well as between women and men.
At the 2001 IATUR12 international conference in Oslo, Associate Professor Duncan Ironmonger (2001), Head, Household Economic Research Unit, Department of Economics, University of Melbourne, presented a paper entitled ‘Caring for kids: The greatest economic use of time’. When asked about his interest in this topic and why he thinks it is important, he replied ‘I think really it’s guilt. Guilt because I’ve been giving a wrong message.’ He has spent the past twenty years researching the household economy. When he examined the 1974 time-use survey he found that childcare was about third in importance within the household. Since that time he has been saying that household meal production is the biggest industry in Australia. However, once he started to look at time-use in terms of parallel time the picture changed. He states:
12
A lot of the time-use in the household is simultaneous time or parallel time. We do more than one thing at once. You can do the shopping while you’re looking after the kids. You can do the ironing while you’re listening to the radio. In fact, in addition to the 50 million hours a week of childcare recorded as a primary activity we have another 150 million hours that is recorded while we’re doing something else. We also have another method of collecting time-use data by what we call a stylised question. I ask you did you do any childcare yesterday, and you say you did so many hours of childcare and that would include whether you were doing something else at the same time. So those two approaches tell us that childcare is actually the most important use of our time.
In Ironmonger’s vision of a better future, we would take an economic view of the world that includes more than the market economy:
Work includes all this work that’s involved in the childcare, all the meals or the cleaning. The gross product should include all the valuable things that we do for ourselves even though we don’t pay for them and it is perhaps a bit difficult to get a monetary value on them. It really has to be put on our agenda.
Ironmonger has identified some of the areas where a more complete view of the world would make a difference to public policy. These areas include childcare, conditions for unpaid work, age pension and superannuation provisions and volunteering.
In a recent article Professor Peter McDonald (2001b), Head, Demography and Sociology Program, Research School of Social Sciences, The Australian National University, Canberra, described Australia’s system of supports to families raising children as fundamentally flawed, and called for a national work and family review to propose and cost a coherent system of policies. His interest in and commitment to the area has come from his demographic work, including cross-national studies of fertility rates in different advanced countries. In these studies a pattern emerged. He found most of the advanced countries had fertility below the replacement rate but some of them were a long way below. He started looking at the characteristics of the countries that had reasonable fertility rates (around 1.7, 1.8, 1.9) compared with those that had very low fertility rates (around 1.2 and 1.3). The pattern emerging from those studies related to what McDonald calls gender equity. He found that countries with very low fertility rates tended to be holding on to the male breadwinner model of the family. Women in these countries had education and paid workforce opportunities but if they had children then it was difficult to combine work and family. Conversely, countries that could be characterised as having a higher level of gender equity, countries that looked to
support work and family had higher fertility rates. McDonald first wrote about this link between fertility rates and gender equity in 1997, and has been refining and developing his ideas since then.
McDonald believes that these issues are important for two reasons. The first is demographic:
Australia’s fertility rate is around 1.75 children per woman now. That’s not such a big issue for future population because we can quite readily balance off with migration. We don’t face population decline with that fertility, but if the fertility rate were to fall below about 1.5 to anything like the European levels of 1.3 and 1.2, it becomes extremely hard to balance with migration because the levels of migration you need are way above what we’re used to, they’d be huge. I don’t argue that we should be trying to push the fertility rate up, much rather that we should be trying to stabilise it, trying to stop it falling any further, spiraling down to the levels in Western Europe and in Japan.
The second reason is the human reason:
We’ve shown from research that if you interview women in their early twenties and you ask them about how many children they want to have, they express a desire for two plus on average. So we’re not producing young women through the school system and through their families who by the time they reach their early twenties don’t want to have children, that’s not the case. During their twenties they start to experience what it means if they do have a child and how their life is going to change and their fertility intentions start dropping downwards. In other words our social arrangements are frustrating what people want to do. People do want to have children and we’re making it difficult for them to do so and that doesn’t make for a healthy