We are among the best-educated in the world. Why are workplaces failing us?

In the 1920s, when my grandmother was working in a Manchester office, some of her married girlfriends used to wear their wedding rings on chains around their neck. They did so because if their employers realised they were married, they would lose their job and their income – which then, as much as now, was often vital to the financial security of young couples. When my grandmother married my grandfather in 1927, she automatically lost her job.

Until 1966, under what was called the “marriage bar”, Australian women who worked for the public service lost their jobs when they got married. No doubt many of them employed the same sort of subterfuge as my grandmother’s friends a few decades before.

Far from being a loss for men, an equal society is a gain for everyone.Credit: iStock

Thankfully, those days are long gone. In fact, the status of women has changed so much, it’s hard to imagine such constraints ever being accepted as normal or reasonable. But before we get too self-congratulatory in the week of International Women’s Day, maybe it’s worth thinking about what we might be accepting now as cool and normal that will shock future generations.

Australian women are still not as free to succeed or fail on their own merits in the same way as their male peers. According to the “Breaking the Norm” report from Deloitte Access Economics, our progress on gender equity has stalled. Women are still earning only 86 cents for every dollar earned by a man, still do more of the domestic load and hold down just 6 per cent of the CEO positions on ASX 200 companies.

The report blames “rigid gender norms” for the slow progress. We used to call them gender stereotypes, the ingrained prejudices most of us still hold about the things women can and should do and the things men can and should do. These prejudices are stubborn and self-defeating.

“Australian women are still not as free to succeed or fail on their own merits in the same way as their male peers.”

Australian women are among the best-educated in the world according to the World Economic Forum, but we have fallen from 13th to 70th for women’s workplace participation and achievement. Surely such a criminal waste of talent ought to be cause for radical action (hello quotas), but frankly, little has been done. Rigid gender norms and then some, I’d say.

And those gender norms may be getting worse. According to Queensland University of Technology Associate Professor Michael Flood, a Victorian Health Promotion Foundation survey reveals that while younger males (aged 16-17) may have more progressive ideas about traditional gender roles and their negative effect on men’s health, they have more rigid beliefs when it comes to violence and the right of men to dominate and control relationships. Given that an average of one woman is killed by an intimate partner in Australia each week, this is terrifying.

Why, as women try to progress, do so many men greet any change with such fear? How do we crack that code? A yet-to-be released report from research and advisory board The 100% Project may give us a clue. As Scott Morrison famously put it, some men feel the rise of women can only come at the cost of men, as if freedom and access to opportunity are a zero-sum game.

Despite the evidence that increasing equality of opportunity for everyone benefits everyone – the more equal a society, the more stable, prosperous and safe it is – many still fear that her gain can only mean his loss. The 100% Project’s research suggests that to overcome the resistance of such men, we can’t just dismiss their anxieties. Instead, we must acknowledge their fears and help them to understand that more freedom for women will also mean more freedom for men.

“As Scott Morrison famously put it, some men feel the rise of women can only come at the cost of men.”

After all, rigid gender norms constrain us all. Men are trained from childhood to reject their tender, gentler side, then taught to stifle their tears and pretend a toughness and self-reliance they may not feel. That’s lonely. Women of the past may have had to give up their jobs, but men had to give up their wives’ potential income, and the freedom that sharing the financial burden might have given them. The wage slave enslaves himself as long as he tries to shut women out or keep them corralled into lower-paid, lower-status work.

Men have just started to break the constraints of rigid gender roles. They have more choice about what they wear, the emotions they express and how much time they spend with their partners and children. They’re also better able to develop deep relationships with one another and with themselves.

Far from being a loss, a fair and equal society is a gain for us all.

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