Feminism is about freedom of choice

In the 21st century, women who run feminist ‘gender equity’ organisations keep their own little secrets.

Fashion designer Carla Zampatti had a live-in nanny while her children were little, but modern working women are rarely as honest. Picture: John Feder/The Australian.

Carla Zampatti was a rare breed. An Italian migrant kid with an adventurous, entrepreneurial spirit, who borrowed $5000 from a cousin, created a brand and then built an empire. Along the way, she personified how to do success with class and grace.

Zampatti draped women in confidence. A cream Zampatti tuxedo suit was sass personified.

Dammit, she was a mother too. The 78-year-old Australian icon, who died far too soon, was a “nonna” to nine grandkids. Was there anything she didn’t do well?

Most mothers are not very good at sharing their secrets about combining work with motherhood. Zampatti shared a few, ­explaining that she managed a stunning career and motherhood by having a live-in nanny during her children’s early days. “It’s not elitism, it’s a necessity,” she said.

Zampatti advised young women to consider the costs of taking time off from a career to raise children.

“By all means, at least if you’re working for a big company, take off two or three months, but longer than that it starts interfering with your career,” she told The Australian’s Megan Lehmann in 2015.

“If a woman does opt to take a longer maternity leave, she must mentally, somehow, stay linked, stay in touch. I think a lot of women lose confidence,” she said.

Zampatti made confident choices about her work and her family. Choices that we rightly celebrate. Just as her clothes spoke to female empowerment, Zampatti’s vibrant life roared women’s liberation.

And if liberation means anything at all, it means that women can and will make all kind of choices about working and motherhood. Some women will choose not to have children, of course. Or maybe that choice is stripped from them by circumstances beyond their control. That’s a really tough one. The full gamut of female ­experiences ought to be captured by feminism.

“If a woman does opt to take a longer maternity leave, she must mentally, somehow, stay linked, stay in touch. I think a lot of women lose confidence.” Picture: iStock

Among those who have kids, some will step away from work for a few weeks, a few months, maybe a year to care for little children. Some will choose to stay at home for many years because demanding little babies grow into demanding teenagers.

Other women will opt for childcare, or a nanny, maybe a live-in nanny, or two of them — one for the weekdays, and another for the weekend. Some will have a husband, a partner, who stays at home.

There is no one-size-fits-all model for women or mothers. And surely, that is the point of a women’s movement. It’s true that feminism has moved on from demonising those women who choose to stay at home with children, as some 1970s feminists did. But we haven’t progressed far enough either.

In the 21st century, women who run “gender equity” organisations keep their own little secrets. They never talk about women who happily choose to stay at home to raise their own kids. It’s always treated as a burden, a sacrifice. These women are treated as victims of societal and structural compulsion rather than free agents.

If the gender activists at Chief Executive Women and the Workplace Gender Equality Agency did include in their rambling analyses of the gender pay gap and gender imbalance women who choose to stay at home with kids, it would unravel parts of their inequity story.

When it comes to the gender pay gap debate, let’s be clear about two facts.

First, if a woman of equal talent and experience receives less pay than a man for the same job on the basis of her sex, that is illegal. Equal pay was cemented into the law back in 1984.

Second, the size of the gender pay gap — measured as the aggregate pay of all women in the workforce compared with the aggregate pay of all men in the workforce — has barely shifted in four decades.

In 1981, the gender pay gap was 23 per cent. By the end of 2019, it was 17 per cent.

Either there are far too many wicked bosses deliberately underpaying women, or truckloads of unconscious bias. Or could there be other reasons too?

For starters, the aggregate measurement is a crock. While measuring pay discrepancies between individuals on a like-for-like basis makes sense, it is dishonest for the WGEA to ­demand that companies analyse “the difference between the average remuneration of women and the average remuneration of men across the whole organisation (or department).”

Crude aggregate numbers have one aim: to produce mischievous and misleading data. Not just about the gender pay gap but also gender balance in the workplace. Raw overall numbers cannot capture the reality of women’s choices to stay at home for a few years to care for children.

Go to the WGEA website. Missing entirely from their “research” about the gender pay gap is the indisputable fact that if a woman takes time away from work for a few years to care for her children, her experience may not mirror that of a man who stayed in the workforce. If more women than men want to stay at home to care for children than men, that affects any aggregate analysis of pay. It also affects superannuation, career advancement and so on.

The women’s movement ought to be honest and confident enough to recognise what most women know and accept: having children is a complicated, exhilarating trade-off made by any parent, mother or father. If more women than men choose not to return to work, then at certain levels within an organisation women are not competing in the same numbers as men. It’s basic maths that ­demanding equal numbers of women and men cements discrimination against men. A woman’s decision to care for her kids doesn’t completely explain gender pay gaps or gender imbalances, but their choices add critical texture to these debates. It’s not just that women cannot have it all. Many don’t want it all.

Yet women who decide to raise their own kids are ignored, infantilised and marginalised by groups such as CEW and WGEA. Why keep these women hidden from view? The only explanation is that it wrecks CEW’s preferred story of inequity.

Last year’s Families Then and Now report by the Australian Institute of Family Studies found that the employment rate for partnered mothers whose youngest child is under 5 has more than ­doubled between 1983 (30 per cent) and 2019 (60 per cent), and almost doubled for single mothers from 19 per cent to 39 per cent over the same period. It pointed to census data showing little change how partnered men work over the past 25 years, with almost 90 per cent working full time.

“Mums are still very much likely to be the primary caregivers,” said the AIFS director Anne Hollonds when the report was released last August.

Maybe most mums want to be the primary caregivers. This choice should be acknowledged and commended in 2021, along with the range of other women’s choices around work and family.

Last year, CEW’s then president Sue Morphet said that the ­answer to 86 per cent of men working full time, compared to only 55 per cent of women, is more government-funded childcare. It’s true that we should work harder to deal with structural barriers that make it hard for mothers to join the ­workforce. But sisters, it’s time to walk and chew gum.

Can we also applaud that, in the face of more opportunities than ever before, many other women — not just rich ones — choose to stay at home, for six months, a few years, or perhaps never returning to work.

When we prize a successful ­career over motherhood, we end up treating time away from work with little kids as a sacrifice. Yet, many women I know, those who have altered the trajectory of their early brilliant careers by raising children, see it as a privilege. A frustrating, bedevilling, delicious and rewarding privilege. Maybe it’s time we admitted the delightful, maddening pleasure of raising our own children.

The newly appointed Minister for Women’s Economic Security, Jane Hume, says one of her key priorities will be the gender pay gap. Interesting.

She can go one of two ways. Surrender to the deceptive measurements put about by the CEW and the WGEA to mimic their misleading narrative of inequity.

Or do something brave and new, such as forging a path for a more inclusive, relevant and intellectually honest feminism that embraces the deeper layers to gender pay gaps and gender imbalances in the workplace. That means including women who make choices to care for children in these ­important conversations.

After all, Zampatti is not the only modern woman who made very confident choices about her work and her family.