Australia’s working women are productivity gold. Here are five ways to help them thrive
Australian women are weary and whiplashed. Weary from two years of intense unpaid care work, including months of remote schooling their kids, and whiplashed from two severe periods of job and hours loss. As the Covid recovery picks up speed, many women are wondering what work in 2022 might look like. Employers should be too.
Losing more jobs and hours of work than men in the 2020 lockdown, women roared back into paid employment in late 2020 to post a historic 61.9% participation rate in March this year. But it wasn’t too long before Delta emerged, and the 2021 lockdowns hit women even harder: 61.5% of jobs lost between June and October. The question is: will women return to the labour market with the same enthusiasm they demonstrated after the 2020 lockdowns?
Many are exhausted from months of pandemic-induced stress, including uncertainty about the health of family and friends, income loss, intensified care responsibilities and remote schooling. Frontline workers in health, retail and other essential services have been more exposed to the virus and have had to negotiate difficult and frequently changing public health orders and work conditions. Others are dazed by the on-again, off-again nature of their employment under lockdown.
Australia has the most highly educated and skilled prime age female labour force in the OECD. Last month the ABS reported 50% of young women aged 25 to 34 have a university degree. This is productivity gold. Governments and employers are starting to prioritise women’s labour force participation, seeing it as the most effective way to boost productivity and to drive the Covid recovery.
But our labour markets, our employment options and our care systems are not yet fit for purpose.
The pandemic has shone a spotlight on many of the barriers and obstacles that limit women’s ability to take part in work at a level that reflects their skills and aspirations. It has also provided an opportunity to experiment with new ways of working previously thought impossible. With the end of the year upon us, it seems that rather than a “great resignation”, many Australian women are engaging in the “great contemplation” – how to work, care and survive, and perhaps even thrive in 2022?
Rather than put the onus on women to solve this problem, we propose five urgent things that business and governments can do right now to supercharge women’s participation in work in 2022, to build an inclusive recovery that delivers economic security and wellbeing to all.
First, provide the high-quality flexibility that employees want and need to thrive. Employees have been crying out for the high-quality flexible work that makes their job fit with the rest of their lives. Working from home during the pandemic was the first taste many
had of how flexibility might work. Previously some employers have resisted, or their employees have been too afraid to ask.
Lockdown mandated work from home for about one-third of the labour force. The sky did not fall in!
Initial data shows productivity remained high and many workers were more satisfied. But we can’t just assume remote or hybrid working will make work more equitable. Evidence shows that when done poorly, it can embed new gendered inequalities. To avoid this, we need carefully designed highquality flexible options that support all workers to maintain their career development.
Now is the time to be asking employees about the types of flexibility they want to make use of and to put in place the systems and the technology that will make it possible.
Second, build good secure jobs into the organisation, your supply chain and across the economy. Our researchshows that womenwant and need secure and predictable hours to make life work, they want more hours and to work in higher skilled and better paid roles. Yes, they want flexibility, but they want control over the hours they work to schedule essential care support for children or aged parents. Women will flourish in good secure roles.
Third, design mutually supportive work and care systems. When we survey and run focus groups with women, they tell us they struggle to access the high-quality care supports they need to fully take part in work at the level and hours they prefer. Some young women tell us being a working parent looks too hard and had put off or changed their minds altogether about having kids.
Governments and employers wanting to prioritise women’s workforce participation will have to attend to both sides of the work/care equation if they are to improve women’s labour supply and fully access this talent pool.
Care services are essential economic infrastructure, an investment in human capital, in future economic prosperity and community wellbeing.
They also support family formation. Governments that rethink finance and delivery of these essential public goods as part of the Covid recovery will reap significant dividends. Employers who implement generous care policies will too.
Fourth, if you really value women, pay them properly and provide them with a career path. Australia has one of the most gender-segmented labour markets in the OECD. The fact than men dominate in sectors which are more secure and highly paid and women are concentrated in sectors with high levels of insecurity, low pay and poor career paths is one of the reasons for our stubbornly high gender pay gaps. These silos need to be broken open with good jobs, career paths and economic security available for all.
Fifth, we urgently need to build respect for women at work. Women have said “enough” to ongoing harassment, disrespect and violence. Kate Jenkins’ 2020 Respect@Work report and the fierce advocacy of young leaders like Brittany Higgins and Grace Tame have made it clear that bad practice is too common. It hurts those who are targeted, and it damages economic security. Business and political leaders must step up, take responsibility and act. This must happen now.
Action by business and government in these five vital areas will lay the foundation to “build back better” for gender equality in 2022.
• Associate Professor Elizabeth Hill and Professor Rae Cooper are members of the University of Sydney’s gender equality in working life research initiative