by Anne Summers
When the Sex Discrimination Act first became law, the Australian Defence Forces (ADF) had successfully sought an exemption enabling it to preclude women from positions defined as combat or combat-related. In order to comply with the legislation, the ADF was obliged to review each and every designation in the three armed services and determine whether it was combat, combat-related or whether they could risk having women perform the task. As head of the Office of the Status of Women at the time, I chaired the interdepartmental committee that was given the responsibility for this review, and was astonished at the resistance to opening up any positions to women displayed by the military members of the committee. We fought tooth and nail for more than a year, but still only succeeded in having 16 300 positions – or around 25 per cent of all ADF positions – declared able to be filled by women.66 These figures made the situation look better for women than in fact was the case, however, since despite a 16 per cent increase in the number of women Defence Force personnel in the first two years of the operation of the Act, by mid-1986 women comprised only 7.9 per cent of the ADF. This was less than the de facto quotas that had been in effect before the Sex Discrimination Act.67
In May 1990, the government decided to open up combat-related, but not combat, positions to women. This decision was prompted partly by principle, the desire to extend opportunities to women, and partly by pragmatism: reviews had revealed a majority of servicewomen to be dissatisfied at being denied promotion because they were excluded by law from gaining the pre-requisite experience.68 If the military wished to attract and retain talented women, it was going to have to address this anomaly, went the argument within the government.69 It seems likely that the military didn’t care one way or another, but the government insisted on progress so that by May 1991, women comprised 12.1 per cent of the ADF.70 In late 1992, Gordon Bilney, then the Minister for Defence, Science and Personnel, announced that some combat positions were to be opened, enabling women to fly combat aircraft and to serve on submarines. Areas of combat involving direct physical contact with the enemy would remain restricted, the minister said, arguing that servicewomen themselves agreed they should not engage in hand-to-hand combat.71 As a result of the decision, 99 per cent of Navy and RAAF positions are now open to women, and over 80 per cent of Army positions (the lower percentage in the Army reflects the higher number of combat positions potentially involving direct combat).
The presence of so many women in the workforce has meant that new codes of conduct between women and men have become necessary. It has become essential to draw up rules about peer relationships and the unacceptability of old-style male predatory sexual behaviour in the workplace. It has also become necessary to develop new language, particularly the term ‘sexual harassment’, to describe such behaviour. It has been depressingly apparent for more than a decade now that many men have resorted to harassment to try to deter women from entering occupations or industries in the past dominated by men. Many women pioneering jobs in such non-traditional areas as the police force, the fire brigade or the water board have had to endure treatment from their male colleagues that was demeaning, insulting, humiliating and often cruel. It is also now against the law but the incidence has, if anything, increased. A 1992 report on sexual harassment in the New South Wales public service found harassment of women to be highest in the police force, with 40 per cent of women officers reporting having been subjected to such treatment.72 But what is cause for even greater concern in the early 1990s is the apparent spread of such harassment to areas such as schools and white-collar workplaces where women have long had a presence and were presumed to have been accepted by their male colleagues. The sharp increase in this sign of resentment against women – even young girls at school – is a nasty and alarming warning that our surge towards true equality still faces many obstacles.
Complaints about sexual harassment constituted the largest category of complaints under the Sex Discrimination Act in the early 1990s, and it was an area nominated by the Lavarch Report as requiring a significant strengthening in the Act. Those recommendations were accepted, and in 1992 the government extended the Act to cover harassment by students against each other or against teachers, and harassment by landlords or other providers of goods and services. It also repealed the provision that required victims to have been disadvantaged by the harassment (for example, to have lost one’s job over it), in addition to having been humiliated, offended or intimidated and for any of these to have been a reasonable response to the behaviour in question.
There is no doubt that women’s participation in all areas of society will never be on terms of true equality while sexual harassment persists. While it is true that some women have been found to have engaged in sexual harassment of men, it is predominantly men who are the perpetrators of such behaviour. But it is unacceptable behaviour whoever initiates it – as was recognised by the Australian Defence Force, which in early 1992 issued an instruction to its members on inappropriate sexual behaviour. Initially this was intended to deal mainly with sexual harassment between members of the opposite sex, but it was extended to include unwelcome approaches to members of the same sex, and became an important part of the justification for the government’s decision in late 1992 to end the ban on gay men and lesbians serving openly in the military. Sexual behaviour of any kind is not appropriate in any workplace, and one of the challenges facing women and men alike as the labour force becomes more and more integrated is to develop ways of working side by side in a cooperative, harmonious and non-intimidating manner. This should not be as difficult as it so far seems to have been, but experience suggests we have a long way to go yet before the right level of professional conduct is achieved.
Nor has the presence of so many women in the workforce yet made a marked impact on the way work is structured. The work-place is still mostly organised around employment patterns developed earlier this century when the workforce was overwhelmingly male (with the assumption that each male worker had a domestic support system in the form of a wife), and women have been expected to fit themselves into this pattern and try to reconcile it with their family responsibilities as best they can. Society in general, and employers in particular, have been slow to respond to the human and family needs of people at work. We talk about working mothers but never about working fathers, although increasingly men are almost as likely as women to take time off work for child-related reasons. A study of workers with family responsibilities conducted by the Australian Institute of Family Studies in 1992 found that 71 per cent of mothers and 64 per cent of fathers had taken an average of nine days off work to care for children in the previous 12 months, and that while mothers were more likely to stay home to look after sick children, mothers and fathers were equally likely to stay home during school holidays, to attend school events or take children to medical or dental appointments.73
But it is women who bear most of the burden – the double burden, as it is so aptly called – of domestic responsibilities on top of the hours they spend in the workplace. A survey of how Australians spend their time, conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics in 1987, showed that regardless of income, education, age, social background or employment status, women do twice as much unpaid work – most of it household work – as men.74 While men now do more domestic work (shopping, cooking, cleaning, laundry and so on) than they did in the early 1970s, they still manage to find a great deal more time for leisure activities than women do. It is not surprising, then, that many employed women, especially those with young children, find that constant tiredness and feelings of stress are the counterpoint to the economic and other rewards of having a job. How women actually cope with this workload was described with sardonic humour by Sydney Morning Herald columnist Adele Horin in mid-1992:
all over Australia, mothers with young children work miracles each morning by getting to the office, the factory or the shop by nine o’clock, or even 7.30. If the country were being run with the efficiency these women bring to their early
morning labours, Australia would be an economic tiger, not a sheep. They’ve worked for two to three hours, these unsung heroes of the labour force, by the time the rest of the office walks in. They’ve hung out a load of washing in the dawn light. They’ve covered school books and breastfed babies; cajoled sleepy children out of bed and force-fed them breakfast. They’ve dealt with tantrums and sock fetishes, toddlers who insist on dressing themselves and children who won’t get dressed. They’ve cleaned up kitchens, bathrooms and bedrooms, and finally themselves before flying out the door, entreating their brood to follow. They’ve dropped their charges at schools, kindergartens and child-care centres, negotiated the peak hour, hunted for all-day parking spaces, caught buses, taxis in emergencies, and hit the desk or counter at opening time. Every time I hear politicians exhort Australians to work harder, I think of this female underground toiling invisibly in the gray dawn in order to get to work on time.75
Women with young children constitute the fastest growing section of the labour force; in 1983, 48 per cent of women with children aged under 12 were in the workforce; by 1991, that figure had increased to 63 per cent.76 The revolution in the workplace will not be complete until we find ways to share domestic work more equitably, and to reorganise the workplace (especially hours of work) in ways that are more compatible with the family and personal needs of employees, especially women.
Since the mid-1980s, the federal government has recognised this as an issue requiring legal, financial and educational intervention. Child care, that most basic support service for working parents, and an issue described by Lyndall Ryan as ‘the litmus test of the State’s response to women’s issues’77, has greatly expanded since the early 1980s. Federally subsidised child-care places increased from 46 000 in 1983 to 168 000 in 199178, and during the 1993 federal election campaign Prime Minister Keating undertook to meet total work-related demand for child care by 2001, a promise that also included meeting 84 per cent of demand by 1997. With this pledge, the government finally acknowledged that it has a responsibility to support the family needs of working parents, an attitude that ranks Australian governments (Labor governments, at any rate) among the most progressive in the world on such issues. Similarly, the government has ratified the International Labour Organization’s Convention No. 156, thereby making it an aim of national policy to ‘enable workers with family responsibilities, who are employed or wish to be employed, to do so without discrimination and, as far as possible, without conflict between their employment and their family responsibilities’. This obliges the government to amend, or introduce, laws to facilitate the implementation of the Convention and to provide information to the community on how its objectives can be met. In January 1993, Australia again scored a world first when amendments to the Sex Discrimination Act became operative that outlawed discrimination on the grounds of family responsibilities.
Most employers are still in the dark ages when it comes to responding to the family needs of their workforce, but there are some signs that, at least with large companies, change is beginning. The Affirmative Action Agency each year recognises company initiatives with a series of awards. Among those so honoured in 1991 were programs introduced by IBM to assist female employees with family responsibilities and another to assist women with management potential to undertake training, and a child-care feasibility study among its employees by Nissan Australia.79 More companies need to follow these examples. Other social institutions also need to recognise the new reality of women’s increased and permanent participation in the workforce. For example, school hours are totally incompatible with most people’s hours of employment; they seem to be still arranged around the assumption that women are full-time housewives and mothers able to be home in mid-afternoon when children get out of school. This means parents have to scramble to make arrangements for the care of children after school, while at government level funding is diverted from child care to after-school programs, which, if schools were used more imaginatively, would probably not be needed. School holidays are an additional burden for adults and force the need to make special arrangements on parents whose own holidays do not occur so frequently.
Most places of business likewise have hours that create organisational nightmares for working women. While in some cities shopping hours have been extended to evenings and weekends, banks, post offices, motor vehicles registration and driver’s license offices are usually only open during business hours, and rarely at weekends, thus failing to recognise the new reality of women’s work. When the demand is made for flexible hours, job-sharing and similar arrangements, they are often portrayed as benefits for women, to make juggling home and work easier, but it should not just be women who have to make the adjustments.
Working women, especially those who are middle-aged, are increasingly having to deal with caring for elderly parents – often at a time when their own children are still dependent. Women in this so-called sandwich generation face what can be an extremely demanding and stressful responsibility when added to a full-time job, particularly when a parent or child is ill. In the past, it would have been women who carried most of this burden, who were working daughters as well as working mothers, but recent Australian research suggests that today men are just as likely as women to take time off from work to attend the needs of a parent or parent-inlaw.80 Both government policy and a population that is living longer mean caring for ageing parents is going to become a major issue for more and more working people. Government policy on the aged encourages community rather than residential care which, in practice, means families care for their own. We can expect the need to take time off from work for this purpose to increase, and for it to become yet another issue employers need to take into account when addressing the family responsibilities of their employees.
The trade union movement has become more responsive to women workers and their needs, aided in part by the rise to prominence of credible and influential women unionists like Anna Booth in the Textiles, Clothing and Footwear Union and Jennie George, who in 1991 became the first woman assistant secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions. The ACTU aims for women to be 50 per cent of its executive by the year 2000, and during the 1993 federal election it devoted funds and staff power to a special campaign directed at working women. At a time when union membership overall is declining, trade union leaders like Bill Kelty, secretary of the ACTU, have astutely decided to target women, the fastest growing segment of the labour force, in an effort to boost numbers. To achieve this goal it has been necessary to champion policies, such as child care, that women will find attractive and that were not previously on the union movement’s agenda, and to initiate industrial campaigns, such as those for supplementary payments and the Minimum Rates Adjustment process, which have led to increased earnings for low-paid women workers. While some sections of the union movement remain oblivious to the needs of women in the workforce, the willingness of the ACTU and some of the more progressive unions to address these issues is a welcome change.
A colonised sex
A major premise of this book was that women have been subjugated by physical force as well as by the social pressure of the exhortative stereotypes. There is no question that such violence continues today, has seemingly increased and appears to be a direct response on the part of some men to their relative loss of power as women’s opportunities have improved. This is a grim conclusion, but many women consider that there is a direct connection, as the market research report ‘The Women’s View’ prepared for the Office of the Status of Women in 1992 attests. Many of the women interviewed for the report saw recent increases in violence against women as ‘a direct result of the changes in their status in society. Violence is virtually seen as the price paid by women for their new found freedom and independence’.81 This profoundly depressing conclusion was repeated by woman after woman in the research focus groups:
Violence has increased … it’s resentment and confusion about male roles … so they are attacking … maybe me
n need to be taught more to bring their feelings out … a lot of men can’t talk, so they attack, they use the physical … years ago, you had a boyfriend and he protected you, now you have equality, you fight.
Brisbane woman, aged 40–55
The bad side of all this is the violence … the power thing of rape; there is more violence now and it’s very threatening at the moment … it’s all about power … the men are trying to get some of that power back and rape is more about power than sex … they need to hurt someone, to show authority and this is threatening us more and more.
Mackay woman, aged 25–39
The perceptions of these women that violence against women has increased appears to be right. There is no doubt that reporting of violence has increased. For instance, police figures show that the incidence of reported rapes in the early 1990s was more than three times that of 20 years earlier (5.63 per 100 000 population in 1973–74 to 18.28 in 1990–91).82 Does this mean that more rapes are being committed or merely that women are more likely to report assaults than in the past? Have women responded positively to years of feminist argument that victims of such crimes have nothing to be ashamed of, and that changes to the law have made pressing charges less of an ordeal than in the past? We cannot be sure, especially in the absence of a thorough (and long-overdue) national investigation into violence against women. But it does seem that both propositions are true. Women are more likely to report crimes of violence – and are also more likely to disclose past episodes of sexual violence such as incest or other forms of child sexual abuse. But it also appears that violence against women has risen, perhaps quite dramatically.