Women & work: ‘We have to stop talking about paid parental leave and childcare as costs’

Six female leaders talk policy and personal stories and reveal what really annoys them in the debate about women.

Six female leaders talk policy and personal stories and reveal what really annoys them in the debate about women.

In the final instalment of our series focusing on women and work, we speak to women who, in different ways, have spent much of their careers advancing social change.

Some are directly involved in lobbying for policy reform; all are active in trying to shift thinking. They are unanimous that advancing gender equality in the workplace will benefit not only the bottom lines of organisations but also the wider society.

We asked them what annoyed them most about the debate about women and work; the policy reforms that would make the biggest difference to changing the equation; and their experiences.

Sam Mostyn
President, Chief Executive Women

The debate

We know from research Australia has the most gendered, segmented and segregated workforce in the OECD. Segmented in terms of who does what, and segregated in terms of who progresses. We have fallen into some tropes that have seen care as women’s work – particularly childcare and increasingly elder care and other forms of care, such as teaching and early education. On the other side of the ledger, we’ve seen a lot of roles with good career advancement, security, capacity for a career and leadership opportunities are typically held by men. That starting point is what is the most disappointing and disturbing part of the debate. If we started with an acknowledgment that we’d like all people to have access to good work, and the policies and supports that release men and women to do that, then we’d be having a different conversation about why universal early childhood education and care is not just for women, it releases us into an economy where there’s more equal opportunity for anyone who wants to participate in paid work.

Policy

Over many years, economists and evidence-based thinkers have proposed the things that would lift those barriers; unfortunately, they seem to always be received in the context of “helping women”. Angela Jackson from Equity Economics says gender inequity is a failure of our society and economy to properly harness all its talents and resources, and that it’s government policies or the absence of them that keep women in caring roles and men in income-earning roles. When a family decides to have children, the conversation goes to how much leave the woman will take. We want a policy environment where men take as much parental leave as women, and flexible arrangements, and engage in the caring parts of the family responsibilities. We have to stop talking about these policies around paid parental leave and childcare as costs. These are similar kinds of investments for the long term that JobKeeper was during the Covid crisis, to keep people attached to their employers, and we see the benefit of it now. If we think about the crisis we have in available talent to face into the future as a long-term issue, then we’d put the money in as an investment. If we keep women in work at the same level as men, there’s greater economic growth. KPMG research has shown if we just halve the gap in workforce participation, that would increase Australia’s gross domestic product by $60bn per annum by 2038. The Workplace Gender Equality Agency and Bankwest Curtin Economics Centre did a report showing that when a woman is appointed chief executive of an ASX-listed company, it led to a 5 per cent increase in its market value. The CEW Senior Executive Census shows that, across the ASX 300, women hold only 6.2 per cent of CEO roles, and only one out of 23 CEO appointments in the 2021 reporting period was a woman. That’s why CEW is calling for targets. On the government side, we need purposeful, intentional policies, and on the company side we need purposeful targets and to get on with the job of meeting them ­enthusiastically.

Personal

For women who’ve been early arrivals into environments where there haven’t been women before, in some respects men think you’re bringing the women’s perspective. I’ve often had men ask me how we should handle sexual harassment. I always say, “Hang on, we need to care about this in exactly the same way. Being a woman doesn’t mean I’m your moral arbiter or your mother, or the check on men’s bad behaviour.” Women who were in these roles early had to find ways to bring men along, to be respectful, but never give up on the need for change. I’ve long been inspired by Ruth Bader Ginsburg – I’ve kept her in the back of my thoughts and actions in terms of how to persuade. RBG always found a way to bring people along. It wasn’t about the contest of ideas, it was about the most logical path, and backing it in with the data and the intensity of why we need to do these things.

Danielle Wood
CEO, Grattan Institute

Danielle Wood

The debate

What annoys me is the false concept of merit. This idea that it just happens to be this very narrow sliver of society – generally white men who went to privileged schools – that’s best suited to the key leadership roles, whether it’s politics or business. There’s now an incredibly strong research base on implicit bias, on gendered views of what leadership looks like, what potential looks like, the impact of lack of role models and support networks, the disproportionate burden of unpaid work that falls on women. You cannot with any intellectual honesty say this is merit-based, yet every time we have conversations about leadership issues, that’s the counter­argument. It’s probably understandable to some extent: it’s pretty confronting to think maybe you were helped to get where you are by a system that promoted one group of people at the expense of ­another.

Policy

The single biggest thing we can do to improve economic outcomes for women is making childcare more accessible and more affordable. Our work at the institute shows we’ve got really high out-of-pocket costs in Australia by international standards, which significantly erodes the capacity of women to do paid work and particularly to work more than part time. Our analysis, right across income distribution, suggests the person who flexes their hours to manage caring for children is working virtually for free for the additional days, once they go more than three days a week and pay for childcare. That’s almost exclusively women. Australian women are much more likely to work part time than their counterparts in most OECD countries, and that doesn’t so much look like a choice as a rational response to those financial settings. If we were to do something meaningful to substantially bring childcare costs down, it would make a significant difference to the choices families make. The differences in patterns of work are the biggest contributor to the lifetime earnings gap between men and women. Our projections show a 25-year-old woman today can expect to earn $2m less over her lifetime, if she has a child, than the average 25-year-old man. Childcare reform can help narrow that gap. Paid parental leave is the other area that will help workforce participation and has much broader benefits. Again, we’re towards the bottom of the pack by international standards – most countries have substantially more generous schemes, and are setting aside a much bigger provision of time for dads, with a “use it or lose it” provision. It means dads are much more likely to take leave when children are young, which starts to shift social norms about who does the care work. There are also other social benefits: better parental wellbeing, greater relationship satisfaction, lower rates of divorce, benefits for child development from having a second parent really engaged in those crucial early years. I see that one as a win-win-win and a no-brainer for policymakers.

Personal

I went to Walford in Adelaide (an Anglican girls’ school), and I had to do year 12 economics at a different school. It suffered the problem of a lot of girls’ schools not offering economics. I was this typical idealistic 17-year-old who wanted to change the world and my teacher, Di Averis, gave me an understanding about how economics could help me do that, which helped shape my direction to become an economist and work in policy. I don’t think of my career being marked by big obstacles, though I certainly had people come up with a standard pushback that I’m too young. My predecessor (John Daley) began in the CEO role when he was only slightly older than I am now. I don’t think anyone said that he was too young.

Annika Freyer
CEO, Champions of Change Coalition

The debate

For me, the issue is when debates about gender equality are held on the outskirts of power – among women, about women. Gender equality is not a women’s issue, it’s a human issue, an economic issue and a core business issue. Change and progress on gender equality requires disrupting a system that was built by men for men. We need to engage men, specifically men of power and influence, to step up beside women to be part of those debates to lead change. If you want to change the system, you need to go to the heart of power. By and large, men still hold those levers of power, unfortunately.

Policy

Rather than policy, the coalition is about practical actions to drive change on gender equality. Our report, Test the Messages You Project, is a practical tool to audit the face of your organisation. Who are your corporate spokespeople? Who are the people allowed to speak on the record for your company, who is representing you? We also have our Panel Pledge, a commitment to call out panels that aren’t gender balanced. Where are the women and why weren’t they invited? You get all sorts of excuses, but you’ve got to look harder, create the opportunities and shift the system. It’s not about encouraging more women to put their hand up, you have to change the entire structure. The pledge has made it unacceptable (for there to be no women on a panel).

Personal

My personal experience is very much interlinked with the work of the coalition – that’s my career ambition. The angle that the coalition is taking is from a workplace/employer lens. It’s an extremely powerful and important lever, but it’s only one lever. We need change throughout the whole ecosystem and all parts of society. When we started our work a little over a decade ago, gender equality was not a core business issue. A challenge for me, personally, and for our champions as well, is accepting that change will require time. We want to see progress happen so much quicker, but we have to accept that this is a massive societal issue.

Mary Wooldridge
Director, Workplace Gender Equality Agency

The debate

What really frustrates me is that – in the face of clear evidence and logic – more isn’t happening in terms of gender equality, that we haven’t shifted the dial. Our work at WGEA has presented a clear causal link between having more women in senior management and better profitability and value in companies, but so many CEOs are still not acting in the face of this undeniable evidence. We’ve got to work out how we go beyond evidence and logic to change hearts as well as minds. We’re thinking through how we can do this differently and turning to things like behavioural insights beyond the business case argument. Many companies and leaders are on board, but a lot aren’t taking action. That’s who we’ve got to get to.

Policy

The analysis we’ve done with the Bankwest Curtin Economics Centre says that it will take 26 years to get rid of the gender pay gap – way too long! How do we speed up that rate of change? The new generation of employees doesn’t carry the same gender stereotypes. Younger people have a much higher expectation of sharing caring roles and also the concept of flexible work – things that are determinants of a more equitable workplace. The challenge is for everyone else to get on board and catch up. We will see employers who are more enlightened recruiting and retaining the best talent, which hopefully will be a catalyst for others. But we believe there are other things that can be done. I think the power of peer groups is a very strong mechanism for change. It’s an area where we’re going to be doing more with comparisons – league tables of who is doing well – to create aspiration and competition for companies to be seen as the best performers in a range of areas that directly impact on gender equality.

Personal

I’ve had the experience of differing salaries. With one organisation, I recruited a bloke to join me as part of the team. We had a similar set of skills, he was a little more junior. Soon afterwards he gleefully told me that he had negotiated a significantly larger salary than I had. That disparity when I had a little more seniority and I’d facilitated his entry into the organisation, and the glaring difference in the remuneration really grated. I left the organisation soon afterwards: that was only scratching the surface of a very blokey environment.

Anne Henderson
Deputy director, The Sydney Institute

The debate

We’re still debating the same issues we were when I started work, which is going back a half-century – that really does irritate me. If you look at salary scales and boardrooms, there has hardly been any movement of significance for women; why, I don’t know. When it comes to the sort of things young women are now agitating for, I grind my teeth: “Been there, done that!” It’s like hitting your head against a hard surface. I think it’s always going to be the case that women’s interests and endeavours towards careers are going to be different to men, which puts them into brackets that are not as highly paid – nursing and teaching, those nurturing roles. And inevitably women, either by choice or by need, find themselves doing the bulk of the domestic side of a marriage, and men doing the bulk of providing financially. There are cases where that doesn’t happen, but they are rare. I think it would be much better if we paid teachers and nurses much more highly. Childcare and aged-care workers have this grindingly tiring work, and they have to be very skilled. To look after people takes a lot of brain power as well as physical power, but it isn’t rewarded because it’s a mass thing.

Policy

In 1999, my book Getting Even (on female MPs in Australia and New Zealand) was published. It was a terrific moment for women. Labor was getting women in, and the Liberals got that fantastic number of women in because they had a landslide election victory in 1996, and they had been working hard to get women to nominate. The Liberals are slipping right back again. They didn’t keep it up. It’s got to be direct action every generation. Whatever it takes. It doesn’t happen naturally. The blokes have got this thing called testosterone, and it does work!

Personal

I’ve been lucky. I went teaching for 17 years or more and I loved it. It was creative, I could be my own boss to a certain extent and plan inventive things to do with the kids. I left when I was in my 30s, and I got the opportunity to work with my husband Gerard in what became The Sydney Institute. It was a small organisation building itself, and it was fantastic. I’ve met some fascinating people. The hurdles have been managing the home and a professional life. Every woman who has ever worked and had children is in the same boat. When we were in Melbourne, I worked out that the cost of after-school childcare was 50 per cent or more of what I was earning. It comes out of the family budget: half your income goes to childcare. Then that passes, your kids grow up and suddenly life is a little bit easier.

Emma Dawson
Executive director, Per Capita

The debate

The idea that people push about the choices women make is what annoys me the most. Often when you talk about women’s unequal experience of work – the gender pay gap, the higher propensity to work part time and to work in lower-paid industries that are more casualised and less secure – people will say, “Well, women choose to stay home with their children, or they love to work in those sectors that are about care”. Those choices aren’t made in a vacuum. Women make those choices in the context of our economic system, which doesn’t value reproductive labour, whether that’s unpaid work in the home caring for others or paid work in the foundational economy – teaching, education, care, health, food services, retail. All of those foundational jobs are undervalued precisely because they were traditionally women’s unpaid work at home. Women don’t choose to earn less over a lifetime: our economy is established to favour productive labour, or “men’s work”.

Policy

The most obvious one is investing in early childhood education and care, and recognising it as a foundational social infrastructure, and putting more money into care systems generally. We need to go back to the drawing board about how we measure our economy and how we measure our success as a society. It was a deliberate decision by the inventors of GDP not to count women’s unpaid labour, globally. They decided work is not tradeable for money so we won’t include it, and we are living with that hangover nearly a century later. We outsource a lot of what used to be domestic work and the work that women do in the paid labour force is often underpaid because it’s related to that reproductive labour. At Per Capita we talk about it as the foundational economy; these are the foundations of our lives and where so many people work. Around 40 per cent of us, including men, particularly from low socio-economic backgrounds, work in those foundational jobs and the pandemic showed us they’re the ones we can’t do without. Our public policy is directed towards cutting-edge innovation and highly productive industries, which are typically male-dominated sectors. This division of labour – productive labour is worth investment and reproductive labour is not and should be done as cheaply as possible – is a hangover from a 19th-century view of women’s work in the home. We need to reconsider what we value, how our lives are made better, what contributions people make to that, and reward that work. The idea that it’s unskilled labour to be an aged-care worker or a disability support worker is nonsense.

Personal

I’m the child of immigrants from the UK – not as disadvantaged as people from non-English-speaking backgrounds but I didn’t have networks and I didn’t know anyone or how to get into this kind of work. It takes women a lot longer to break that glass ceiling. When I got a job with a government minister, it was advertised in the paper and I went for an interview. I didn’t know anyone in the Labor Party. Working for a minister in the Gillard government when Julia made the misogyny speech was a big moment. As a Gen X woman, if you talked about sexism too much or called out that you were disadvantaged by it, you were accused of playing the gender card. For many younger women that speech came at a critical time in their lives. I was in Parliament House when she made the speech: half the building didn’t get it. I was in my late 30s, and I and a lot of other younger women found it quite electrifying. It was saying: “No, not any more.” This woman is prime minister and she still has to deal with this shit. It’s real. We’ve pretended for so long.