Fed up with the chore wars, grumpy women are now politically dangerous

Little known fact: women are five times as grumpy about domestic inequality now than they were before the pandemic. And after the May election, we all know grumpy women can be politically dangerous.

And gee, it’s been a grim couple of weeks for the women of Australia. A spate of new reports has painted a depressing picture of the lack of progress on two important KPIs in the ongoing battle for gender equality: the gender pay gap and the so-called chores gap, which is the unequal division of unpaid care and labour in heterosexual couples.

Illustration: Matt DavidsonCredit:

But do not despair! We could be on the cusp of a significant breakthrough. I know the suspense is killing you, and I’ll duly get to why there’s cause for optimism. But first, let me walk you through the doom and gloom.

It’s important we’re all on the same page, understand the significance of what’s at stake here and, most importantly, why it’s now or never for the new Labor government to tackle these issues at the jobs summit in September. The new Minister for Women, Katy Gallagher, has rightly promised making workplaces fairer and safer for women will be high on the agenda.

At the end of June, the Workplace Gender Equality Agency released “bleak” (according to the headline in The Sydney Morning Herald) new data indicating women still consistently earn less than men in every age bracket and the gender pay gap widens substantially when women turn 35, with women earning $7.78 for every $10 earned by their male counterparts. Hmm, I wonder why that might be?

That same week, new census data showed, yet again, that women are doing many more hours of unpaid care and housework per week than men. As Leah Ruppanner, professor of sociology at the University of Melbourne, wrote in The Conversation: “In the 15 years since the Australian census started collecting unpaid housework time, women are shown to do more than men. Every. Single. Time.”

Then, the start of last week saw the publication of a new report by Treasury economists Natasha Bradshaw and Elif Bahar, which found that Australian women face a decade-long “motherhood penalty” on their incomes, earning on average less than half of their pre-birth wage in the first five years after childbirth. What’s more, Australian women pay a larger “motherhood penalty” than women in other developed countries.

Had enough? I’m not done yet.

On Wednesday, a new report from The Diversity Council Australia and KPMG, She’s Price(d)less, looked at the drivers of the gender pay gap and found that gender discrimination remains the single biggest driver of the gender pay gap.

The thing is, the two issues, the gender pay gap and the chores gap, are inextricably linked. The chores gap and the impact the need to provide unpaid care for children and family has on a woman’s ability to work and earn is a key driver of the gender pay gap, in particular via that so-called “motherhood penalty”. In fact, it accounts for 33 per cent of it, according to the latest She’s Priceless report.

The good news is that in an increasingly polarised world, the importance of so-called domestic democracy in underpinning gender equality is one issue that most people seem to agree on.

The OECD has called the unequal distribution of unpaid labour the most important gender equality issue of our time (emphasis mine). In a survey conducted by Women Deliver ahead of the 2021 Generation Equality Forum – a global gathering for gender equality convened by UN Women – the “unequal distribution of unpaid care, domestic work, and parental responsibilities” was cited by respondents as the first or second biggest cause of gender inequality in 13 of the 17 countries surveyed.

So what’s needed?

Yes, more genuinely flexible workplace practices that benefit men and women and challenge the “ideal worker″⁣ trope, usually a man with a wife at home who can subscribe to the culture of presenteeism that’s rewarded with better pay and promotions.

And yes, early years education and care that’s both affordable and accessible, something the new Albanese government has already firmly committed to.

But we also need to reform Australia’s now decade-old parental leave policy, which is one of the most unequal in the world in terms of the time offered to men and women. Until recently, Australia’s paid parental leave still encouraged a single “primary carer” who was eligible for 18 weeks at minimum wage. The vast majority of that leave (99.5 per cent) was, therefore, taken by mothers who were deemed the primary carer. Fathers only got two weeks of dedicated partner leave, again paid at minimum wage.

In short, the scheme set the “normative” standard that it is women who care and men who work.

So if you’re reading this Katy Gallagher, parental leave reform must also be at the very top of the jobs summit agenda, alongside workplace flexibility and the cost and accessibility of early years education and care. We will need to do several things – and here’s the important part, at the same time – to crack this. Or we’ll just see another cascade of reports chronicling the same doom and gloom in a few years’ time.

But don’t just take my word for it.

According to research from Professor Lyn Craig and Brendan Churchill at the University of Melbourne, the percentage of mothers who reported that they were “extremely” dissatisfied with how they divided their time between paid work and unpaid work increased from just over 5 per cent before the pandemic to 24 per cent, and a third of mothers now felt they were doing “much more” than their “fair share″⁣ of housework and unpaid care.

Illustration: Reg LynchCredit: The Sun-Herald

I repeat: Women are five times as grumpy about the chore wars than they were before the pandemic.

So, failure to tackle parental leave reform alongside other reforms at the jobs summit will not only mean that those other reforms are less likely to prove effective, it could also prove politically dangerous. As I said, grumpy women were rather influential at the last election.

Kristine Ziwica is a regular contributor. Her book on the impact of the pandemic on women at work and how we can create a fairer future, Leaning Out, will be published by Hardie Grant in September. She tweets @KZiwica