It's Over to You
Sex Discrimination
It's Over to You
Pru Goward Federal Sex Discrimination Commissioner, Lone Fathers Conference, Main Committee Room Parliament House, Canberra, Thursday 23 June 2005 1.30pm
It's a great honour to be with you all today.
We all know why we're here today. You're here because men aren't seeing enough of their children, that after divorce they're lone fathers if they're lucky and cheque books on legs if things turn out badly. Sadly, there are some men who just disappear as dads altogether.
You're here because men are angry, fed up and ready for action.
This leaves why am I here? We'll get to that in a moment.
What I am not here to do is provide a free analysis of the Family Law Act and the Child Support Agency; other speakers have covered those topics extensively already.
Let me start by saying you're not the only frustrated ones. Women are often frustrated that men don't spend enough time with their children- only usually when they're still together. And therein lies the problem. The angers are not in alignment.
It's about time men got angry about it. Revolutions begin when people get angry, get talking, get to know it's not just them, it's the system- and then they start to agitate for change.
At least that's how the last wave of the women's movement started after the war!
But while anger might be where it starts, it's not where it ends, it certainly doesn't solve the problem.
And that's what I would like to talk about today, about the revolution begun by women but that can only be ended by men and women together.
Let's go back to the issue of lone fatherhood.
The problem does not start at divorce. It starts at the birth of your child, when the mother takes time off work to care for the baby, or maybe decides to leave work altogether, and you take two days of your annual leave when she comes home from hospital because your company doesn't offer paid parental leave and there's a mortgage to pay.
Of course the reason mothers get maternity leave and sometimes paid maternity leave is that women have spent twenty years agitating for it and other workplace supports like part-time work that make it possible for them to both mother and work.
Each little girl progresses from dolls to boyfriends and then on to real life babies, confident not only that she will she be the centre-piece of her family, but that she must be. She is brought up knowing that caring for children and for the elderly is HER responsibility.
It means that family-friendly provisions are called '"women's business'" and considered a bit of a nuisance by employers but generally at least tolerated for women- if not for men.
Of course it often goes back before child birth to the decisions men and women make about careers, with women choosing jobs that will fit with kids and the unpaid work, men choosing jobs that will maximise the family's income.
Perhaps it's also about all the talking women do about their feelings and other people's feelings and their interest in taking care of the emotional stuff while he learns how to service a car.
In other words, long before the divorce, men and women have lived very different lives and played very different roles in their children's lives. No wonder the Courts treat them differently. The problem is not created or solved by divorce.
None of this is anyone's fault, it is just men, women and society doing what's traditionally been expected of them.
But it's not quite as it was a half a century ago. Since then women have got themselves educated and into the workforce, they're earning money and enjoying more economic and social independence than their mothers could have dreamt about.
And men have enjoyed the fruits of that; not only the higher family living standards but the expectation that they will play a greater hands-on role than their fathers did. Men started going to the birth of the baby as a matter of course in the 1970s, the average amount of time men spend playing with their children has risen by fifty minutes a day in the past ten years alone, men regularly complain that their jobs and their working conditions stop them spending enough time with their families.
Nobody could say we've got equality yet, for a number of reasons.
Women would point to the low numbers in leadership positions and to their lower earnings, which culminate, sadly, in aged poverty.
While many men take the highway to retirement, with superannuation entitlements earned from being in full time work for forty years, for women, it's a very different story.
Already old women are two and a half times as likely to live in poverty in their old age as old men. By the year 2019, the Association of Super Funds Australia estimates women will have accumulated, on average, half the retirement savings of men, despite recent changes to superannuation law.
Bearing in mind that women live seven years longer, this is a long time to live poor, especially since health costs often make our last fifteen years the most expensive. And it's happened because women have half the working life of men- they spend their other half caring for children and their extended families. Our children and extended families.
For men, the story's not over either- not only is family life still a struggle for many of them, not only are their choices severely constrained by their commitment to being the breadwinner, but they don't live as long and the male death rate, especially before the age of 55, is scandalously higher than for women- as it has always been.
More than three times more men than women die before they are thirty five. Three times!!!
This is after the birth defects and in vitro abnormalities are accounted for, which again, are more prevalent in male neonatals.
For men in their prime years of work and fatherhood, there are still more than twice as many men dying as women. Even amongst the fifty some-things, there are twice as many men dying as women. It is not until people are over 70 that more women die than men, clearly because there aren't many men left.
But yes, times have been changing. On the surface it might appear that the changes have all been about women- but of course, you can't do that without also affecting men.
From the moment the contraceptive pill became available in 1961 and Prime Minister John Gorton allowed married women to work in the public service eight years later, the revolution was on.
In a sense we're half way across the divide separating the old roles of men and women from the roles expected in the new world.
We are half way through the revolution that has seen women move from the kitchen into the workforce.
We are not there yet, we are just about half way across.
We are in fact in the deepest, most dangerous part of the river and we are in danger of drowning. We are bitching and griping and blaming each other for the predicament we are in when what we need to do is'�to get a move on and finish the journey.
I am not here to tell men what a bad job you have been doing.'� I know that not only would it not work, but it would not be fair to tell you that men are responsible for a system within which they are stuck, any more than it is fair to blame women for being in the same position.
Quite frankly, in society today, many women feel that they cop the blame whatever choice they make - they are bludging if they stay at home when their children are young, they are selfish if they go to work, if they have a child before they're twenty one and unpartnered then they're sexually immoral and if they leave their children then they're the scarlet woman. There's plenty of blame to go around all of us.
So let's forget blame and look at how we can manage the rest of the equality revolution so that our families are happy and secure and that each of us feels treasured and respected.
If women want to do better in their retirement, if women want to improve their representation in public life, if women want to be economically independent, then they can't get any further without you.
Likewise, if men want more time with their children, more time to put into their relationships and the chance of living longer, they can't do any more without women.
Because although governments and employers can do so much- and have already gone part of the way- to make the work life balance more bearable, there are some places they cannot reach; the personal spaces of our unpaid lives. The time we spend with each other when we are not working.
We need to agree to share the care. Not when it's too late and life's a mess, but from the beginning. Share care for the children, our elderly parents, the dog, the housework.
Many of you would be familiar with the time use figures- that men do much more paid work, women do more unpaid. That women do 70% of the housework, 91% of the primary caring for elderly parents, most of the child care. They have work place arrangements ranging from casual part time to take home lap tops and teleworking to help them manage but it is also true that working mothers have less child-free leisure time and less sleep than anyone else.
Men have access to many of these arrangements too, but generally don't use them. Because the boss won't like it, because it means being relegated to the never-to-be promoted track, because co-workers don't approve, because they need the overtime.
That's a pity, because giving time to children, family and keeping the house clean and organised not only builds strong relationships that last even beyond divorce, it brings a sense of belonging and contentment that might even keep men alive for longer.
One of the saddest figures I've seen is the rising rate of suicide among men over 65. Unlike women, old men are more likely to commit suicide than middle-aged men. Surely this is about the essential loneliness of men when they are alone, the difficulty they find running their households and building a social life when their female partners have predeceased them?1
But men doing more of the caring also means freeing up women to do more paid work, provide for their own retirement, make a greater contribution to the family's living standard and take the pressure off men to be the family's provider.
In all of this, it means women and men having more or less the same choices, which is what equality is about.
Today, the equality revolution is being aided and abetted by the ageing of Australia.
In two ways- first, all we baby boomers are rapidly ageing and about to enter retirement'�..and we now have to fund it ourselves. So super matters to all of us.
That means work matters to all of us, including that half of women in the work force who are currently working part time and not accumulating any.
There is nothing quite like life on an old age pension for the last and often the most expensive years of our lives. Since there are fewer younger workers to replace us, the Government needs older people to keep working- and this means more older people working and for longer. Men but also women, who currently retire at 55 in large numbers.
But it's also true that future tax payers need us to keep working so we are not the enormous drain on public funds we will be if we all continue to retire in our late fifties to rely on tax-payer funded benefits and free medical and hospital services. And the longer we work, the more we can put away for our retirement.
So far so good- except that at the same time our parents are also ageing and need our care, as they always have. We no sooner see our children through school and college when we find ourselves having to care for our ageing parents.
That's why they call women the jam in the sandwich- squished between children and aged care, struggling to find the time to continue in paid work and save for their own old-age.
Perhaps this explains why so few women in Australia work past the age of 55, compared with women in Europe or the UK or the US.
And women, understandably, will be reluctant to do more than 50-50. They will certainly baulk at caring for their husband's or partner's parents as well as their own.
Which means that one way or another, the pressure will be on men to provide that care- to either take part-time jobs or negotiate family-friendly flexibilities so they can give their parents time when they need it, rather than rely on partners to stop working and take it on.
In other words while once sharing the care might have been about children and mothers, it is now about whole families stretched over the life cycle- and it needs commitment from all of us, men and women.
This makes getting to the other side of the divide, finishing the journey, an imperative. For equality and for the greater national good. It is no accident that the two are connected.
We are at the point where feminism meets the men's movement.
It is in everyone's interests to join forces, it is your turn, it is over to you.