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Gender equality? It's more dream than reality
The Age
Tuesday March 8, 2011
Too many Australian women still earn less than men. INTERNATIONAL Women's Day commemorates a broken promise. A hundred years ago, at the urging of the German socialist Clara Zetkin, the first International Women's Day on March 19, 1911, harked back to the revolutions of 1848 when King Frederick William IV of Prussia had agreed to grant women the vote and then promptly reneged on the agreement. Since 1913 International Women's Day has been celebrated on March 8, and there are rival explanations as to why. But Zetkin's idea remains the template: it is a day on which the world is reminded of the gap between the ideal of gender equality and the realities that many women still experience in their working and domestic lives. The broken promises of men who give only lip service to the ideal are still prominent among the reasons for the gap.As Age senior writer Jo Chandler writes on the opinion page today, in many societies around the world even the lip service is absent, and women cannot aspire to the autonomy and opportunities that their sisters in countries such as Australia take for granted. This is hardly cause for smugness in developed Western societies, for it is often their politics that prevent change in the developing world. In the US, for example, Republicans in Congress want to reimpose the global "gag" rule, which forbade aid to any group, anywhere, that even talks about abortion. The effect of the gag was to restrict severely the work of family planning groups, which is why President Barack Obama lifted it after taking office. But the President's Democratic Party lost its majority in the House of Representatives in last year's elections, and the gag is on the agenda again.In Australia, too, the cause of gender equality is not as secure as might have been imagined under the nation's first female prime minister. At the time of Federation, this country was a pioneer of women's rights: women could vote in national elections from 1902, decades before the same right was extended to women in Britain or the US. But in the course of a century the international scorecard has changed. In December, a survey compiled by a UK group advocating changes in gender roles, the Fatherhood Institute, ranked Australia 17 out of 21 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries for gender equality. The ranking was compiled from 10 criteria, including gender gaps in pay, parental-leave provisions, childcare spending, female workforce participation, and women's representation in parliaments and on company boards. On paid parental leave, Australia ranked second last, and it is unlikely to move much higher now that the federal government's 18-week, minimum-wage leave scheme is in place. The countries at the top of the rankings Sweden, Finland, Norway and Denmark have more generous entitlements.The reality is that although women constitute more than half the population and about 45 per cent of Australia's workforce, they earn about 84 in the full-time male dollar, and about two-thirds of part-time male earnings. Fewer than three in 10 seats in Federal Parliament are held by women, and less than 10 per cent of seats on company boards. And, only 2 per cent of the boards of Australia's top 200 companies are chaired by women.Affirmative action is a much contested notion in Australia, and it is unlikely that the political will exists to follow the example of Norway, which imposes quotas to ensure at least 40 per cent female representation on company boards. Nor is the reluctance to intervene in support of greater equality evident only at board level. It took vigorous lobbying by unions before the Gillard government supported an equal-pay case for workers in the community sector, most of whom are women. Australia may have been a pioneer of women's suffrage, but it is not the land of equal opportunity its citizens imagine it to be.
© 2011 The Age