The Great Exhaustion hitting Australian women

Women have gone backwards in the pandemic and Australia’s good fortune — driven by their underpaid efforts — ‘is now in danger of running out’.

Sam Mostyn. Picture: David GeraghtyThe Australian.

Australian women have suffered from the “Great Exhaustion” of the pandemic and now face worse inequality in the workplace, according to one of our best-known corporate leaders, non-executive director Sam Mostyn.

Mostyn, who is president of the advocacy group Chief Executive Women, told the National Press Club on Wednesday Australia was in danger of running out of luck and must recognise the driving force behind past luck had been the nation’s underpaid and unpaid women.

Ms Mostyn said it was “hard to imagine a more tumultuous period … To say this has been both a difficult and galvanising time for women is, therefore, an understatement.”

The pandemic had smashed communities and deepened existing inequality.

“It exposed the fragility of our economic assumptions and the flaws in our structures,” Ms Mostyn said. “It illuminated how fundamental social infrastructure is to a strong, well-functioning economy … What would our country look like if it finally moved on from all these worn-out notions of toughness and blokey mateship and, instead, began reimagining a society that truly celebrates care and invests in all its women; that ensures opportunities for women and men alike, and treats women with the decency and respect that is our basic human right?”

Ms Mostyn said that for every 100 women enrolled at university there were only 72 men, and yet women continued to earn less than men.

“Women radically outnumber men in the Australian bachelors degree-qualified population and yet they continue to take on more unpaid domestic work than men, even more than before the pandemic,” she said.

Ms Mostyn said that for every 100 women enrolled at university there were only 72 men, and yet women continued to earn less than men.

“They often find entry to the lucrative jobs barred to them, they are overlooked for promotions more than men, work twice as hard as men to achieve positions of leadership, retire poorer than men, and all this while still experiencing belittlement, harassment, abuse and violence in the workplace and at home.

“What a shocking waste of investment and talent”

Ms Mostyn said an incremental response from government and business would not “cut it”. “We need wholesale immediate change … accessible early childhood education and care, government leadership on paid parental leave and superannuation, we need secure, well-paid jobs and careers in the care industries.

The pandemic had forced the hand of even the most sceptical employers, and it turned out that productivity wasn’t destroyed, “and the sky didn’t fall in” as people worked from home.

“What an opportunity, then, for us to now dispense forever with the tired assumptions and stigma that only women want to work flexibly, or that there’s something wrong with men who want to,” she said.

We needed a country with as many women in its cabinet as men; where early education and universal childcare was a given; and where paid parental leave and flexible working arrangements — for both women and men — was part of the pledge between government and its citizens.