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WORKFORCE
So despite a positive leadership trajectory in Australia, you found that women’ s work in this country is also largely characterised by being part time? That’ s right. One of the key differences between working women in Australia and working women in the US is women in the US are much more likely to work full time. Women in Australia are much more likely to work either part time or in casual employment. That’ s particularly the case when Australian women have preschool-age children.
You’ ve got to think about what the drivers are behind that, because it’ s quite complicated. I suspect that in the US you’ ll see that the attachment of pensions and healthcare funding for employees and their families to full-time permanent jobs has quite an impact in terms of women keeping full-time permanent jobs, and seeking them out even when they have small children.
Obviously, in Australia we have a different situation in terms of healthcare minimum leave standards, which are at a higher level than in the US. In Australia, women – particularly those with young kids – [ are more likely to ] work less than full time and in some respects you can say, OK, because that allows women to have the capacity to combine their working lives with their family lives. But we’ ve also got to have a bit of a sceptical eye to that and the impact across the career as well; part-time work has a scarring effect on wages, not just at the time that it’ s earned, but it seems to have a scarring effect across the career. Even when someone transitions back into full-time work.
That can lead to impacts in terms of retirement income savings, and poverty in older women.
Does this also contribute to the 30 per cent gender pay gap in Australia? In aggregate, the gender pay gap in Australia and US is the same, at about 18 per cent. That’ s all jobs, all employees, across the board. In both economies, it’ s hovered between 15 per cent and 21 per cent for the last 20 years, and is not moving despite lots and lots of conversations and lots and lots of research.
We see the largest gaps in areas such as health and social assistance, and in finance. In Australia, the gap there is about 30 per cent between men’ s and women’ s earnings.
In different occupations and in different sectors, the question is not so much whether there is a gap, but how big the gap is. Best case for women in both countries is a gap of about 7 per cent. That’ s in areas such as the direct employees of government: police, firefighting, those kind of areas. The worst statistics are for managers, which you’ d assume are high-status jobs associated with high training and higher earnings; you see that the gap can be as high as about 50 per cent among managers.
There’ s a real spread across different sectors and occupations, but there’ s a gap every time you look.
How could you apply the findings of this report to the academic workforce? In the labour force in both Australia and the US, women are the people who predominate in precarious employment, and make up the bulk of those who are earning the lowest wages. If we envision a pyramid that represents the lowest-paid jobs to the highest paid, at the bottom are the more precarious jobs around sessional and contract employment in universities. And the majority of people who take up those roles in universities are women.
There has also been some research looking at higher education, such as by my colleague professor Glenda Strachan at Griffith
University, and Dr Robyn May. They suggest that where we look at things such as performance pay, or‘ merit-based’ pay within universities, women are not rewarded to the same extent as their male academic colleagues. That relates to a gender gap.
One of the critical things is even though many Australian women are quite interested in working in non-full time, more flexible jobs – particularly when they have acute care needs – there’ s a lack of supply of good quality part-time jobs or flexible jobs. The choice is [ often ] between longer hours job and a precarious role. In our sector and across all sectors, there’ s a real under-supply of jobs that allow women to work at their skill level and also on a flexible basis when they require that as a part of their family lives.
Were there any suggestions in your report that Australia could implement to close the gender gap? Yes. It’ s a complex problem that’ s driven by so many different areas in the world. I want to emphasise that there is no one fix.
Many of the problems here are driven within families. That relates to things like the inequitable share of the care load in the home, where women shoulder the majority of that burden. It’ s around the policies that government put in place and the ways in which that affects the labour market. It’ s also around the ways in which organisations are structured, the ways they value jobs, the ways their policies interact with their practices. We need action at all three levels. Government needs to have a keen eye as to whether their policies are working-women friendly. We have come some way in Australia in the last five years. We’ ve moved from being one of the two outliers in terms of not having a national paid parental leave scheme. Now America is the only outlier. The Labor government introduced that, effective from January 1, 2011. We also have a reasonably strong minimum-standards framework.
Those are just a couple of examples, but we need vigilance around those sorts of innovations when we put them in place. Things like making sure that [ we resist ] proposals we have at the moment around winding back access to paid parental leave from government in organisations that already provide paid parental leave. [ We need to ] strongly resist moving down that path.
That affects us in higher education, because the sector was one of the first movers in terms of bargained and strong paid parental leave for staff. Under the current proposals, which are sitting in the Senate at the moment, staff’ s access to the national scheme would be removed because of the availability of paid parental leave in the workplace.
Government needs to take a good look at the implications, intended or unintended, of the policy making and implementation.
In the case of businesses, there are many different things they can do. I’ d say one critical one would be to look at having transparency and ensuring a bias-free approach to things such as pay and promotions, and ensuring that where bonuses and discretionary payments are made, there are gender-neutral measures put on that. Also, make sure that when decisions are made, they are disclosed to staff and potential staff.
There is also strong evidence that making flexibility in employment mainstream is critical for gender equality. That means not just moving to casualised or part-time employment for women when they have young children, but adopting an approach where flexible employment is available to all staff regardless of the issue or the motivator.
That means that women can access it, but men can access it, too. That’ s a critical part of solving this problem for us. ■
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