The federal Minister for Family and Community Services, Senator Jocelyn Newman, recently announced the latest figures for female unemployment in Australia were the lowest in a decade. The Australian Bureau of Statistics' (ABS) October Labour Force report put female unemployment at 5.9%, with the seasonally adjusted female paid labour participation rate at 54.9%.
For many who have experienced and seen evidence of the Coalition government's attacks on women workers' living standards, this may come as a bit of a surprise. The phrase "Howard is driving women back into the home" has become well used when describing his anti-women policies. Looking at the figures, though, is it true to say that women are being driven out of the work force?
Research from the Women's Economic Policy Analysis Unit at the Curtin Business School of Curtin University of Technology shows that the participation rate for women has increased during the past decade, with the largest growth in participation for both women and men being for part time work.
According to the ABS wage rates for women in full time work are also up marginally, the May 2000 figures showing that the female/male wage ratio for full time work was 84.2%, up from around 83% at the start of 1996.
Does all this mean that we have got it wrong and that the Coalition is doing the right thing by women after all?
Far from it. It seems the reality for most women is that they just do more. Balancing part-time work while shouldering the bulk of household tasks is the lot of many women who also have children.
The ABS says that in 1997 more than one third of all the married women with children who were working part time were doing so because of either family reasons or problems finding affordable child care. The corresponding figure for married women without children was 2%, while only 4.6% of the married men with children who were working part time gave family and/or child care reasons for their reduced working hours.
There are still many women, however, who are not working but who wish to. In 1998 there were approximately 670,000 women who wanted to work but who were either unemployed or not in the labour market. One third cited the need to care for a dependent child as the primary reason for not working. By contrast, only 3.3% of men not working cited family commitments as the reason for their labour force status.
As cuts are made to child care funding, informal arrangements involving friends and grandparents are becoming more common. Largely it is women coming to the rescue by taking on these extra unpaid tasks.
Cuts to the health system mean that women who work are still caring for children and sick relatives, and are being forced to use more of their own leave entitlements to do so. The privatisation of the care of the elderly, with horror stories in the media about the state of many nursing homes, has increased the pressure on families to care for their own parents, increasing the unpaid workload.
An ABS study of time allocation by married Australians with children in 1997 revealed that married (including de facto) women with children, who are employed full time, spend, on average, approximately five hours per day on activities relating to housework, meal preparation and child care. Men in such family relationships spend, on average 2.9 hours per day on such tasks.
In the ABS report Australian Social Trends 1999, looking at domestic work (even excluding child care and shopping), on average married women spent one hour and 47 minutes more per day on domestic work than their husbands. The ABS pointed out that overall, men work on average longer hours than women, so they would have more time for domestic chores. But even when comparing couples who work similar hours, women still averaged one hour and 16 minutes per day longer on domestic drudgery than their partners. Add in unpaid hours relating to care of children, the sick and the elderly and the difference is even more stark.
BY MARGARET ALLUM