For far too long, women had been constrained in the choices they could make: the length of their schooling, the subjects they took, the limited number of acceptable occupations, the loss of job tenure after marriage in many areas, the mandated lower rates of pay, the expectation of marriage and staying at home after the birth of children.
It was a restrictive and stifling milieu for many women. (Incidentally, I was a net beneficiary of these constraints on women. At my school, which had an all-female teacher workforce, save for the chemistry teacher, we were taught by a cohort of remarkably talented and well-educated women who, in the future, would never consider teaching as a career path. And as I was leaving school, feminism was beginning to achieve widespread social acceptance.)
If we fast-forward to today, there have been massive changes, particularly in terms of women’s participation in the workforce since the mid-1960s. At that time, women made up less than one-third of the workforce; they now make up nearly half.
About three-quarters of couple families with children aged up to 14 years now have two employed parents. Female employment participation rates by age no longer dip during the child-bearing years – the traditional U shape in the graph has disappeared.
To be sure, women with young children, particularly of preschool age, are likelier than other women to work part-time. But the very low workforce participation of women with children under two years that once characterised the Australian labour market has not persisted. It is commonplace for children to be placed in some form of childcare around the age of one, and sometimes earlier.
According to the latest figures, about half of one-year-olds are in childcare that attracts a childcare subsidy. For two-year-olds, the proportion is close to 60 per cent, and for three-year-olds it’s 70 per cent. Most of these tots attend for-profit centres, with community centres accounting for 20 per cent of enrolments. Across the past decade or so, the expansion of the childcare sector has overwhelmingly been through the expansion of private, for-profit centres.
These trends raise the question of whether these outcomes are entirely the result of free choice on the part of hard-pressed mothers. Saddled with high living costs, including servicing a mortgage or paying rent, many mothers of young children have no choice but to return to the workforce to bolster the family’s financial position. Were it not for these financial pressures, there is little doubt some mothers would prefer to stay home to look after little ones for longer.
To my mind, we are a long way from the feminist dream.
It’s not helped by certain advocacy groups pushing parents of young children to re-enter the workforce quickly and outsource their children’s care to others.
The acting chief executive of Parenthood exhorted new mothers to “get off the mat” while playing with their children and return to employment, preferably full-time. The irony of the fact that other women might end up on the mat playing with these same children didn’t occur to her.
There is also the associated fall in the fertility rate that has occurred with these developments. The rate has now dropped to a historic low of 1.5 births per women, which is below the replacement rate of 2.1.
Research undertaken by the e61 Institute has demonstrated that the lesser availability of grandmothers to help with childcare is an important factor driving lower birthrates. Many grandmothers are also living the feminist dream – or not – by remaining in the workforce; they now must wait to turn 67 to access the Age Pension. (The eligibility age used to be 60.)
The report notes that “having a grandmother who qualifies for the pension based on her age increases the likelihood that her daughter will have a child, from 69 per cent to 73.5 per cent, and increases the average number of children per woman from 1.47 to 1.56”.
There is also the issue of how close parents can feasibly live to their own parents.
Centre-based childcare has been in the news lately for all the wrong reasons: the disturbing case in Melbourne in which an alleged serial child abuser has been charged with numerous offences. Across a period of nearly eight years he worked at 20 centres.
His alleged crimes were not picked up because of the regulations pertaining to childcare but indirectly through the dissemination of abhorrent material on the web.
Apart from the fact he worked at a relatively large number of centres, which is a possible red flag, and one centre manager thinking he was a “bit creepy”, there was nothing in the system to prevent this person continuing to work in childcare.
He had regularly passed working with children safety checks. He was responsible for the youngest children from five months to two years – without words and defenceless.
It’s not as if this is an isolated event. Last year, a convicted pedophile who had worked in numerous childcare centres in Queensland was jailed for life.
There are thousands of notifications of inappropriate behaviour each year. Many centres continue to operate on the basis of a “must improve” rating, and many workers are not fully qualified but are working towards qualifications.
There are also serious question marks about the content of training, with insufficient emphasis placed on child safety. Centres are incubators for the spread of infection among the children.
Very many issues arise as a result of these recent disturbing events. The one I want to raise here is the lack of choice for far too many parents who are forced to rely on centre-based childcare. In effect, parents are handing over their children to be cared for by strangers, based on trust. They don’t have time to hang around to ensure staff ratios are being met; they can’t be sure of the intentions of all staff members.
Given the sums of money that are being expended by the federal government on childcare fee subsidies – now $16bn, rising to more than $18.5bn in 2028-29 – it is reasonable to question whether some of this money could be redirected to provide greater choice for parents. For some families, the subsidies are close to $40,000 a year per child.
Many mothers may be happy to take that sum and stay at home with young ones. Given that the government has now abolished the activity test that used to apply to the receipt of fee subsidies, there is no reason this option should not be made available.
Providing tax deductibility for nannies – including a shared nanny model – also should be made available. If this is seen as too generous to high-income earners, a capped rebate for the cost of registered carers is an alternative.
More regulation of childcare centres will be costly and won’t necessarily work. If feminism is to be true to its original objectives, we need a system that allows real choice for women, not just the preferred route of (unionised) centre-based care that the government and advocacy groups prefer.
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Call me old-fashioned but I always thought feminism was about giving women and girls the right to choose. About education pathways, about employment and training, about getting married, about having children, about childcare options.