Women have gone from holding ground to losing ground

At the start of the year, I was commissioned by this masthead to write a piece looking ahead to the key issues likely to be on the "gender agenda" in 2020. I dutifully asked some of the smartest, most dogged gender equality advocates I know, including Australian Sex Discrimination Commissioner Kate Jenkins and the national feminist icon Anne Summers, for their predictions.

Both told me roughly the same thing. After the previous year had ended with the news that Australia had continued its almost uninterrupted backwards slide in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap rankings, slipping from 15th out of 153 countries in 2006 to 44th in 2019, they were worried. We needed to focus on preserving the gains women had made.

The chasm between women and men persists. Illustration: Matt DavidsonCredit:

Jenkins said that "more than in the past, [we] need to keep holding ground as a top priority – we can’t take anything for granted". Summers agreed: "I just hope that everyone realises that they will have to fight harder than ever in order to gain anything new, as well as to protect what little we have already won."

Now, just past the 2020 mid-year mark, I am struck by how prescient those remarks turned out to be. Who could have anticipated that a pandemic would highlight just how fragile women’s progress is – and how easily it can be set back a generation.

So today I ask, who among us will heed Jenkins' and Summers' call to fight “harder than ever”? Much is at stake.

One of the key issues I touched upon in that piece at the start of the year was women’s economic security. Or to put it more clearly, lack thereof. A not-so-fun fact: women over the age of 55 are the fastest growing portion of the homeless population.

The challenge was deemed so important by the Coalition government that its previous minister for women, Kelly O’Dwyer, launched an entire strategy dedicated to shoring it up in 2018, and a related successor strategy from our current Minister for Women, Marise Payne, was among the matters experts told me was hotly anticipated in 2020.

Certainly, action on that front would be timely. Women’s economic security is greatly imperilled by COVID-19, as Kate Jenkins warned earlier this year, suggesting it was "laying the groundwork for some pretty serious poverty for women".

Women are over-represented among the COVID-19 related job losses, as they are over-represented in the industries most affected and they are more likely to be in part-time or insecure work. Women are also more likely to be working fewer hours as they take on additional unpaid pandemic-related domestic and care work – thus inhibiting their ability to do paid work. And women are raiding their already significantly smaller super accounts to get by, thereby risking their future economic security.

Will those trends drive down women’s workforce participation rates and drive up the “chores gap” – between men and women’s share of the unpaid domestic and caring load – and drive up the gender pay gap? Yes, they will. Will that prove devastating for women’s economic security, as Jenkins suggested? Yes, sadly that’s likely to prove another prescient prediction.

In fact, the gender pay gap has inched up to 14 per cent, figures released on Thursday by the Workplace Gender Equality Agency show. They came with an ominous warning from the agency’s director, Libby Lyons. “Over the period of the GFC, our last economic downturn, the gender pay gap shot up 2 percentage points from 15.6 per cent in November 2007 to 17.6 per cent in November 2009. It took us 10 years to bring that pay gap back down to where it is today,” says Lyons. "We cannot afford to see a repeat of this as we face our first economic recession in almost 30 years. It will be a disaster for the economy and a calamity for Australian women."

We’re clearly losing ground.

So, what has a relatively passive acceptance of these dire realities gotten Australia’s women? This government seems blissfully unaware or completely uninterested, proposing a "blokecovery" to what is clearly a “she-cession”, essentially investing in jobs for the boys in male-dominated industries such as construction.

It is also forging ahead with a "snap-back" to pre-pandemic childcare fees after a brief experiment with the feminist Nirvana of "free" childcare, despite many families having said they will struggle to afford the already extortionately high fees in a recession. Women, it is feared, will drop out of the workforce in large numbers.

And since the pandemic began, just under 5 per cent of Marise Payne’s public tweets, including media statements, have had anything at all to do with women and COVID-19. (I crunched the numbers, analysing all of the minister’s tweets, because that’s how I roll.) What’s more, those relatively few public comments have offered little by way of concrete funding or policy solutions to mitigate the risks of a pandemic-related backwards slide.

For me, the cherry on this sundae of gender equality indifference came earlier this week, when Payne convened an online Women and Jobs Forum to "help boost women’s workforce participation", a deliverable under the 2018 Women’s Economic Security statement.

Despite a press release being issued about the forum, the minister’s office offered scant further details, when I asked, about who was involved and what was discussed. And the minister declined to respond to my question regarding whether, given the gravity of the situation, she felt the way in which this “forum” was conducted offered enough people the opportunity to engage in a vital discussion that affects 50 per cent of the population.

Why so secretive? You would think Australia’s Minister for Women would have enough respect for Australia’s women to have this critical discussion in an open and transparent manner. Does this government take us for fools?

Who can blame them? Unless we collectively pipe up and fight our corner, as Jenkins and Summers so wisely suggested at the start of the year, we can only expect more of the same.

Kristine Ziwica is a regular contributor. She tweets @KZiwica

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