WORK CHOICES

It's choice, not oppression
14jul04
The Australian

FEMINISM'S winter of discontent is here. Again. The first fortnight in July is partnership time when law firms, accounting firms and other professional firms announce new partners. For time-warped feminists, it's angst-fest time as they pore over the numbers asking why aren't more women making it to the top.

Actually, their wintry discontent is pretty much a year-round affair these days. Discrimination divas have us on a constant drip of complaints about the plight of women in the workplace. Women are not in the workplace in equal numbers to men. Women do not earn the same as men. Women have not risen to the top in equal numbers. It can mean only one thing: women are still victims of a sexist society.

Feminist orthodoxy says the revolution has stalled. Statistics at the starting gate are promising enough. Women pour out of universities in greater numbers than men. But down the track, the picture is apparently bleak. After all, these highly educated women were meant to have taken on the world. Where are they? Very few are judges in our courtrooms, partners in law firms or silks at the bar. Very few are in our boardrooms or running our big companies.

Feminists use raw numbers as evidence of discrimination. Remember these recent headlines? "Women still poorer in economy boom," "Women's pay falls further behind," "Women's wage inequality grows". The stories reported that the wage gap had grown by a further $80 a week; average weekly earnings, including part-time and overtime pay, are $894 for men and $582 for women.

And that means discrimination. Sex Discrimination Commissioner Pru Goward recently told one newspaper that equality will only move from an idea to reality when the pay gap closes. In Britain, the Equal Opportunity Commission uses savvy marketing to get the message across, handing out beer coasters and posters that say: "What's a nice girl like you doing in a pay gap like this?"

Back in Australia, ABC broadcaster Maxine McKew helped lead the discrimination charge: "Here we are, 30 years after the first equal pay case was fought, and the gender gap in average weekly earnings is still substantial. Why in 2004, at a time of record Australian prosperity, is women's work worth less than men's?"

Writing a few days after International Women's Day, hers was a call to arms. "Imagine," she said, "if all 236 female MPs decided to make equal pay a cross-party issue and used their combined strength to make equal pay a reality for Australian working women."

The pay gap is a familiar tale. Canberra University's Centre for Labour Market Research collected figures for its Labour Market for Lawyers Project that reveal that as women embark on a legal career, wages are more or less equal with men. But a wage gap opens up later. When you compare women and men aged 30-34, in 2001, women earned 84 per cent of their male peers. Over time, with each decade, that wage gap increases so that by her 50s, a female lawyer is earning 72 per cent of her male colleagues.

Is the pay gap a case of genuine discrimination or is it dogma? Discrimination depends on details that numbers like these do not provide. Canberra University's associate professor of economics Anne Daly says the numbers reveal nothing about the different areas men and women work in, whether they work in high-fee grossing areas, how committed they are, the hours they work and such. These variables matter when you compare earnings. But we never hear about them when feminists peddle their tale of discrimination woe.

IMAGINE, if all feminists decided to look beyond the raw numbers for the detail, acknowledging, for example, the nuance of women's choices. At May 2004, of 1,026,000 women in the workforce married or partnered with children under the age of 15, 622,000 work part-time and 404,000 work full-time. By contrast, for men in that same category, almost 1.5million work full-time and 93,000 work part-time. Is this evidence of a stalled revolution, of women being excluded from full-time work?

To answer that you need to go behind the raw numbers. In the same labour force survey for May 2004, women working part-time were asked if they wanted to work more hours. An overwhelming majority of women -- by a factor of four to one -- said "No thanks". That may explain why the proportion of women aged 15-64 working full-time has changed very little since the mid 1960s.

British sociologist Catherine Hakim, well known for her research into women's preferences, offers more nuance. Her research reveals that for every woman who regards work as the centrepiece of her life, there are three men. In other words, men and women are not competing in equal numbers because their priorities are different.

Earlier this year The Australian Financial Review magazine, Boss, revealed that overall women work fewer hours than men. It concluded: "As long as that remains true, it means that women's chances of reaching parity in the corner office will remain remote."

In other words, women's preferences for part-time work or just less work or different work than men, with its inevitable consequences for promotion and pay, is a choice, not the result of patriarchal oppression. Of course, feminists will say that sexism is so deeply ingrained that women make these choices without realising they are doing so because of oppression. Quite apart from the breathtaking paternalism at work, the truth is that many women are different to men. Many are happy to put family first, given half the chance.

Some women are storming the barricades to get out of the workplace to raise their own children. It's called the opt-out revolution. Imagine that.