Not that it’s always acknowledged by women themselves; a younger generation easily slips into victim mode when it comes to issues of promotion and remuneration and parenting.
It’s not that women should be grateful for the changes in attitudes and processes that have transformed their options about careers, but recognising progress is an important step to normalising women’s presence at all levels of the workforce.
Beyond the increased power of women to run the show – something regarded as a biological and intellectual impossibility even 50 years ago – there has been another important shift; women are helping to change attitudes to a work culture that in the West has become increasingly intense in terms of its expectations about effort as well as time spent on the job. To go above and beyond, to give 110 per cent, have been the mantras for many sectors in the past few years.
Women enter the workforce knowing they inevitably will be forced to make choices about life and work that men traditionally have escaped. But across recent decades, as women declined to shoulder the entire weight of family, we have seen men faced with those same choices.
With both partners working, the chances of Dad staying late at the office and avoiding home duties declined dramatically.
Covid-19 provided the coup de grace to old ways of working, shifting attitudes and demands and, it must be said, responses from employers. Technology combined with pressure from women that the men in our society share the load outside work has led to some real change in the relationship between work and home.
Changes to public and private sector rules about parental leave are the most obvious and concrete development of the past couple of years. Finally, we are starting to see a world where men and women will be equal at home as well as at work, with men now, in essence, given permission to take time off for family.
But the really big story about women and work is how much the need to integrate family and caring duties into the world of work is potentially changing how all of us – not just parents – want to integrate paid work into the rest of our lives.
There are plenty of buzz words about this mini-revolution – the Great Resignation, quiet quitting – all indicating that it’s suddenly OK not to be a workaholic.
In Australia, another phrase has entered the lexicon, thanks (interestingly) to a couple of high-profile, career-minded women. “Reasonable hours” does not have the pizzazz of other phrases describing a rejection of the 24/7 workplace. But thanks to Sally Rugg’s case against Monique Ryan and the commonwealth, it’s likely to have as much impact.
The irony is that “reasonable hours” is a pretty old-fashioned concept that basically covers restrictions on the amount of unpaid overtime that an employer can legally demand of a worker.
It’s a concept used by unions in particular to keep bosses in line and prevent worker exploitation. In fact the only case law on the concept, which is enshrined in the Fair Work Act and national employment standards, relates to a case taken by a union on behalf of a meat worker.
“Reasonable hours” is not a phrase used very much in knowledge work or among lawyers or in our big professional service firms where long hours often are regarded as a mark of commitment and a pathway to promotion and the big buck.
Or at least until now. The Rugg-Ryan case – which, as is now well-known, hinges on the intense work culture of Canberra’s Parliament House – has brought the phrase on to the front page.
There’s a long way to run in this case taken by MP Ryan’s former chief of staff, Rugg, but already we are seeing the problem for a government that decided after the election last year just how many workers were really needed for the teals’ operations.
Independent Ryan and her approach to her staff member are under scrutiny in the case before the Federal Court. But the impact of the action is far broader, with questions now being asked (outside the court) about just what our politicians consider a reasonable cop for their staff.
And the case has launched a bigger debate about work and how long we should spend at it.
The idea that some jobs are so sought after and so rewarding that employees are delighted to spend extra hours at work is about to be disrupted by the legal argument over the somewhat subjective idea of what constitutes “unreasonable hours”.
The flow-on effect across other jobs may be not only in back pay but, more important, also in what our society is prepared to accept. It’s a fascinating issue about which just about everyone has a story to tell and an opinion.
And a footnote on International Women’s Day.
Would a male chief of staff have baulked at the hours Rugg allegedly was asked to work? Would a man have decided enough was enough? Probably not, is the answer, given generations of conditioning and assumptions, too, about the work-life balance for men.
Those attitudes are changing, however – in large part because of women. On IWD, it’s time for them to take a bow.
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On International Women’s Day let’s note just how much women have shifted the dial on work. They may have started from behind when they began trying to enter the paid workforce in strength in the 1970s, but increasingly they are calling the shots.