by Anne Summers
Previously I identified elderly women on pensions as the poorest group; today the proportion of elderly women reliant on the pension has declined from 80 per cent in 1981 to 66 per cent in 1991 (although the decline in men receiving the age pension has been even greater, from 74 to 50 per cent).41 The decline is due to the introduction in 1983 of an income test on pensions for people aged over 70 and, since 1985, an assets test on all pensions as well as improved superannuation coverage – all of which have served to leave in the welfare net people of modest or no means at all beyond the pension. Today we would have to add to those most likely to be poor sole parents, 80 per cent of whom are women, and more than half of whom have no income other than social security benefits.42 In 1991, those on benefits numbered 252 104 with 431 884 children.43 A number of government initiatives have sought to improve the financial standing of single parents: the Child Support Agency has improved the extent and the amount collected from non-custodial parents, schemes like the Jobs, Education and Training (JET) program encourage them to rejoin the workforce and, it is argued, extension of the right to retain fringe benefits for the first 12 (instead of the current six) months of employment would counteract the present workforce disincentive effects of the Sole Parents Pension.
In addition to being financially deprived, single mothers, especially young ones, still encounter immense discrimination and the charge that they are breeding machines, having babies to attract welfare payments. Social attitudes have changed, however; we no longer refer, negatively, to unmarried mothers or call their children illegitimate. As around 40 per cent of all marriages end in divorce, the majority of sole parents with children are likely to have been married at some stage. What is striking is the economic consequences of divorce for women, as compared to men. Women initiate 60 per cent of all divorces, but do so without being necessarily aware of the likely financial impact of the breakup. Research by the Australian Institute of Family Studies into what happens to people after divorce found both partners suffered from the collapse of their domestic economy, but that women suffered the most – and for longer. Men have usually recovered and attained a higher standard of living within three years of separation, while women suffer a ‘severe drop’ that is likely only to be repaired if she can find a new partner.44 But woe betide the sole parent who is discovered to be in a casual relationship with a man while she is in receipt of a pension; whether or not that man contributes to the household finances, if he spends two or more nights with the sole parent, her pension is liable to be terminated.
The income support system is exempt from the operation of the Sex Discrimination Act, with the result that some forms of discrimination against women persist. While it could be argued that women here benefitted from such discriminatory practices as the earlier retirement age (and hence earlier eligibility for the age pension – although in the 1993 Budget the government announced plans to phase in over two decades an equal retiring age for women), and that the Sole Parents Pension enables single mothers to have a degree of financial independence they might not otherwise enjoy, other practices have the opposite effect. One example of this is the continuing practice of treating the family as the income unit when it comes to social security, in contrast to the taxation system where the individual is the unit. The result is that women are excluded from eligibility from certain benefits, such as unemployment benefits, if their husband has more than a token income, forcing them to become financially dependent. For women accustomed to the independence of their own income, such dependency is not especially welcome. (The reverse also applies, with men unable to claim benefits if their wives are earning, but in practice it is usually women who are disadvantaged by this policy.) Although women comprised 35.9 per cent of people unemployed for 26 weeks or less45, only 25 per cent of recipients of unemployment benefits in 1991 were women.46 Budgetary constraints are always cited as the reason for governments being unable to treat married people as individuals under the social security system, but until this can be achieved, women will not achieve full economic independence. The dependent spouse rebate, available to taxpayers who have a non-earning spouse (invariably a wife) has long been attacked by women’s groups for its perpetuation of the concept of dependency and for its implied insult to women in the workforce, who receive no tax recognition of the cost of working.
Women, work and wages
The surest way for women to ensure their economic independence is through employment with adequate remuneration. Even though women have moved from being 29 per cent of the workforce in 1966 to 42 per cent in 1990, and an average of 52 per cent of all women are in paid employment, their opportunities have not blossomed in a corresponding fashion. The many spectacular instances of women doing new or different jobs (‘the first woman mechanic!’, ‘the first woman judge!’, etc.) should not blind us to the fact that for the vast majority of women workers, their employment patterns are predictable and unaltering. The workforce remains segregated by gender with 54.5 per cent of women employed as clerks, salespersons or personal service workers. In contrast, the two largest male occupations – tradesperson and labourer – account for 40.3 per cent of total male employment.47 Women work overwhelmingly in just four industries; fully 75.3 per cent of employed women in 1991 worked in community services; wholesale or retail trade; finance, property and business services; or recreation, personal and other services.48 Men’s workforce experience is somewhat more diverse: around 59 per cent of men work in the top four male employment industries.
Women continue to earn less than men. Women’s full-time average weekly earnings in August 1991 were 85 per cent of men’s, with the ratio dropping to 67 per cent if junior and part-time earnings are also included.49 Although the concept of equal pay for work of equal value was mandated by the then Conciliation and Arbitration Commission in 1972, it has remained an elusive goal for most employed women. There are several reasons: the continuing gender segregation of the workplace, with women and men doing different work which is remunerated differently; the failure of the union movement to bring forward cases to establish the ‘equal value’ of varying skills; the broken employment patterns of most women due to child-bearing and family responsibilities, and their inability to work as much overtime as men; women’s greater propensity to take part-time or casual jobs; and the fact that women are less likely to belong to strong unions capable of negotiating pay equity for them. Women are also less likely than men to receive over-award payments and, where they do, to receive comparable amounts.50
Even women in managerial jobs earn less than their male counterparts, with women in the private sector earning only 72 per cent of men’s salaries, being, therefore, even worse off than public sector women managers, who at least made 87 per cent of male salaries.51 But compared with other countries, there has at least been measurable improvement in the gender pay gap since the 1970s. In some categories of earnings, women make 93 per cent of men’s wages, a statistic that in 1992 earned Australia high praise from the International Labour Organisation. In the US, by contrast, women’s average earnings remain at 70 per cent of men’s; the gender pay gap has not narrowed there as it has in Australia and many European countries52, and few nations can point to a continuing commitment on the part of their national governments to the goal of pay equity. The Australian Government established an Equal Pay Unit within the Department of Industrial Relations in 1990 with a mandate to provide advice to the government, and to increase community awareness of pay equity issues. The early information papers produced by this Unit were impressive, and while a bureaucratic body of this kind cannot move markets, or otherwise intervene to improve women’s pay, its brief to provide material for government submissions to industrial tribunals should ensure that, at least while Labor remains in power, the government will keep the issue of pay equity within its focus.
The longer-term remedy to ensuring women receive equal pay is to provide equal access to education and skills training so that they enter the labour market equipped to compete f
or more skilled, and thus higher-paying, jobs. Progress here seems slow, in part because it takes years to acquire an education and then build up employment experience, but it does appear that the number of women developing such skills is expanding. For instance, since 1987 more women than men have been enrolling in higher education and by 1990 women accounted for 53 per cent of all student enrolments.53
Women students still opt overwhelmingly for the traditional fields of study of education and arts, and are thus not diversifying their opportunities sufficiently, but even here there is some movement. Fifty per cent of women students in 1990 chose education or arts, but that was better than the early 1980s when 70 per cent did. More women are now studying business, science and health and even engineering (where women are now around 10 per cent of all students) and women are more than 50 per cent of law students. Despite these gains we are still not at the point where women feel confident they can embark on any field of university study. The same is true of technical and further education. Although women made up around 45 per cent of all TAFE students in 1989, there were few areas of study where men and women students were equally distributed (in fact, applied science was the only area). Most women were taking business studies, personnel services, industrial services or general studies, while the largest single bloc of male students, almost a quarter of total enrolments, had headed straight for engineering.
While the federal government, via the Department of Employment, Education and Training’s Gender Access and Equity Plan, has a nominal commitment to raising the educational and skill levels of girls and women, it does not appear to be an important national priority. Yet the upgrading of the skills base of the present and future workforce is at least implicitly recognised as a necessary step for Australia to take in order to regain international competitiveness. It should not be difficult for the two goals to be combined under a structural adjustment strategy. A 1991 OECD report on women’s role in the economies of member countries noted that ‘gender segregation creates a major labour market rigidity (and) … is also a source of labour market inequalities’ both of which are bad for women, and bad for the economy.54 The report argued for ‘a new perspective on women as economic actors’, and directly challenged ‘the traditional assumption that equity and efficiency are mutually exclusive outcomes’.55
This is important new thinking, and the kind of perspective that ought to be adopted by the Australian government. I find it extraordinary that, 30 years after women began moving into the paid workforce in massive numbers, it is still necessary to make the case that improving women’s skills and opportunities is not a welfare program but, rather, represents an investment in both the individual (whose life will be enhanced as a result) and our society (which should benefit from adding to the nation’s bank of talent). At the same time, many of the skills women do possess are often undervalued or not remunerated by employers because they are perceived as natural female competencies or domestic tasks that are usually performed free in the home or elsewhere. Women often acquire skills while outside the paid workforce through participation in community organisations and in managing the home but, a government report on the subject showed, ‘… women themselves rarely recognise these skills because they are not acquired within the paid work-force. Yet many women develop technical, management, finance, interpersonal and organizational expertise which is transferable into paid work situations’.56 Nor has sufficient financial recognition been accorded to the additional skills women in traditional occupations such as nursing or secretarial work have had to acquire as a result of changing technologies in these fields.57Secretaries and nurses are now required to be able to understand and operate sophisticated computers and other machines, and to continually upgrade these skills to keep pace with changes in these technologies, but there has not been a commensurate increase in their salaries.
Legal protections
The Sex Discrimination Act became law in 1984. ‘Thousands of women’ since then, according to Quentin Bryce, federal Sex Discrimination Commissioner from 1987 to 1992, ‘have used the Act to seek a remedy when they suffer discrimination. Many women have spoken of the symbolic significance of the Act, of how it stands as a source of courage and support to them when they are treated unfairly …’58 Gauging the effectiveness of the legislation after even a decade of operation is not easy. One measure is the number of people who have complained under the Act. Their number is not large, but it is growing and, perhaps not surprisingly, a majority have been women. In 1990–91, 803 people, 728 of them women, complained, compared with 440 in 1987–88.59 But it may also be the case that the mere existence of the legislation goes a long way towards accomplishing its primary goals, which are ‘to eliminate, so far as is possible, discrimination against persons on the ground of sex, marital status or pregnancy … to eliminate … sexual harassment in the workplace and in educational institutions; and to promote recognition and acceptance within the community of the principle of the equality of men and women’.60 This seemed to be the sentiment of a great many of the submissions to the Lavarch Inquiry in 1991–92. ‘The feeling conveyed by the submissions is that generally speaking many of the more blatant examples of discrimination are no longer in evidence’, the inquiry’s discussion paper stated. ‘For example, advertisements for employment are no longer categorised under sex; women can join most clubs, and educational institutions take care in applying admission criteria that women are not directly discriminated against.’61
The Lavarch Report included a comprehensive review of both the sex discrimination and affirmative action legislation and concluded: ‘While there is still need for further education of [sic] the implications of the legislation, successes to date suggest that it is time aspects of the current Acts be amended to reflect the more sophisticated level of public understanding [of gender-based discrimination]’.62
The report went on to recommend a detailed series of changes, virtually all of which the government later said it was prepared to accept.63 The most significant were the extension of the Sex Discrimination Act to include industrial awards and to cover dismissal on the grounds of family responsibilities, the strengthening of the sexual harassment provisions, and a new power enabling determinations of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (where the Sex Discrimination Commissioner is located) to be enforceable by the Federal Court. The government also agreed to amend the Affirmative Action (Equal Employment Opportunity for Women) Act 1986 to cover voluntary organisations employing more than 100 people (in addition to the private sector companies and educational institutions already covered), and to adopt a policy of contract compliance to ensure that all recipients of government contracts and industry assistance comply with their obligations under the affirmative action law.
The willingness of the federal government to improve and strengthen these laws is heartening because as our understanding of discrimination increases, or as new forms of inequality are identified, different responses may be called for. As well, the philosophical issues underpinning the legislation continue to be debated. Some of these issues, such as the adequacy of the present definition of ‘indirect discrimination’, and the vulnerability of the clause allowing ‘special measures’ to promote women’s equality are too technical to be canvassed in detail here.64 What is relevant for the purposes of this discussion is the political will involved, the extent to which governments recognise the importance of these discrimination issues and the equal opportunity measures designed to counter them, and are prepared to respond when change is deemed necessary. On the record to date, it must be said the political will is present; what is required is perhaps somewhat more aggressive application of these laws and, in the case of affirmative action, greater attention to the quality of the compliance now that most companies covered are fulfilling their obligations to submit annual reports on the steps they are taking to improve opportunities for their female employees. The Affirmative Action Agency took the view in the early years of the legislation that its priority
was to achieve maximum compliance, that is ensure that all institutions covered by the legislation submit their annual reports. Having achieved that, the next step is to begin evaluating the contents of those reports with a view to encouraging employers to accelerate the pace of change.65
The mere existence of anti-discrimination laws has led to the opening up of new areas of employment to women, with perhaps the most spectacular example being the military. There are some people, including many women, who do not feel that such change represents progress; in fact there is a curious symmetry of thinking on this subject between old-fashioned traditionalists and new-fashioned feminists. The former hold to stereotyped notions about women’s place, which they see as being in the home rather than in the trenches, while the latter hold dear the stereotyped notion that women, being intrinsically peace-loving, belong everywhere but the military. Neither view takes into account the desires of thousands of young Australian women who want to join the armed forces and who until very recently were prevented from occupying more than a handful of available jobs. Some of these young women are taken with the idea of being soldiers, or pilots or naval cadets, but most are attracted to the military because it provides them with an income while they acquire skills training they could not otherwise obtain. Indeed, much of the feminist criticism of women in the military is made by women who have the privilege of a university or other higher education, but who apparently have trouble identifying with the trade or technical education aspirations of young women from a different stratum of society.