ARE WE THERE YET?

Ardyn Bernoth

September 19, 2010 - 3:00AM

I REMEMBER being terribly pleased as my fingers picked at the clunky keyboard. It was the late 1980s and I was a 21-year-old business reporter writing a story about how the workforce was on the brink of a flexibility revolution that would allow men and women to better achieve the soon-to-be-coined mantra, ''work-life balance''.

I saw myself, on a far-off horizon, as a mother and these imminent changes promised to make it much easier for both women and men to combine a career with family life. Perfect.

Fresh from the corridors of Monash University having majored in women's studies, I, like my Doc Marten-wearing, permed-hair sisters, was, if not a poster girl for the feminist movement, a pretty accurate brochure.

I had grown up expecting no less than to be treated equally to men in every area of life. I wanted respect, equal pay and the opportunity to reach as high as I decided to stretch myself up the career ladder.

But 20 years on, the family-friendly corporate nirvana so boldly forecast has not appeared. I, meanwhile, am at home with three young children, having put a full-time career on hold to spend the better part of five years breeding and breastfeeding.

Back in the tutorial rooms of Monash, the director of the Centre for Women's Studies and Gender Research, Dr JaneMaree Maher, confirms bluntly that the structures of many workplaces have not really changed. ''We have to make the combination of a career and home life easier for men and women. There is a lack of willingness from the workplace to do this,'' Maher says.

Transformation in some areas, she says, has been slower than anyone expected.

So, has feminism, which began at the turn of the last century with the suffragettes and continued with the mythical burning of bras in the 1970s, failed in its quest to achieve equality for women?

This is the subject of an Intelligence Squared debate at the Melbourne Town Hall on Wednesday. Those who will argue it has failed can point to some stark statistics.

September 4 was Equal Pay Day in Australia, and figures calculated by the federal government reveal women earn 18 per cent less than men. Pay inequity is getting worse not better and the government acknowledged last year that the main reason for the gap is that women are usually the main care givers for children and dependent adults.

''Women also continue to bear the major responsibility for unpaid domestic work. This means that women bear a double burden, work and caring, that impedes their workforce engagement,'' the Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs report said. This is not where some of Australia's veteran feminists thought we would be some 40 years after the equity battle began.

More than 30 years after she started campaigning, high-profile feminist activist Dr Anne Summers says we are still in the grip of a GFC - Gender Fairness Crisis. She cites what she calls the most startling statistic of all: ''In Australia in 2010, there is a $1 million penalty to being a woman.''

She says research shows that if current earning patterns continue, the average 25-year-old male starting work today would earn $2.4 million over the next 40 years. In contrast, the average 25-year-old female would earn $1.5 million. ''Across the board, women lag when it comes to occupying leadership positions and we are disadvantaged in almost every area of Australian life,'' she says.

Women currently make up 9.8 per cent of directors on the top 200 company boards. The pay differences actually get worse the higher up females haul themselves. A 2006 report from the Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace Agency showed that female chief executive officers only received 67 per cent of male CEOs' salaries, while chief financial officers received just 49 per cent of the salaries of their male counterparts.

Women are still also far more likely to be the victims of sexual attacks in the streets and abuse at home. According to the Gender Equity Stats released by the Sex and Age Discrimination Unit last year, nearly one in five Australian women has experienced sexual violence since the age of 15 (compared to one in 20 men), while one in three Australian women is affected by domestic and family violence. According to the gender stats, 22 per cent of women have experienced sexual harassment (compared with 5 per cent of men), while women are four times more likely to be harassed at work than men.

But to argue that feminism has failed is ludicrous, say all the women, elder and younger, I spoke to for this story. They point to all the things that have been achieved. For instance, in the Mad Men-esque Melbourne of the mid-1960s, women were forced to resign from the public service once they married (this ban was lifted in 1966).

In the early 1970s, women made up just 32.7 per cent of university students and about one-third of the workforce. Women are now in the majority at universities, receiving upwards of 55 per cent of bachelor's degrees, and make up 45 per cent of the workforce.

They were awarded ''equal pay for work of equal value'' in 1969 and federal legislation to ban discrimination on the basis of sex was introduced in 1984.

There are now domestic violence and sexual assault laws, no-fault divorce, unpaid maternity leave (soon to be extended), government-funded childcare facilities and government pensions for single mothers.

Legally, the picture in 2010 is that women have equal rights. But the fight for true equality goes on, says Melbourne feminist and co-author of The Great Feminist Denial, Monica Dux.

''Huge progress has been made but feminism has not yet finished what it set out to do. We are fighting against entrenched economic, social and structural considerations, after all,'' Dux says. ''It was naive to think that all the changes against such entrenched forces would happen overnight.''

Perhaps the most significant victory has been in an arena that can't be measured by statistics - the hearts and minds of young women who grow up considering themselves equal to men, not subordinate as they once did. Women's expectations have radically altered even if the reality of what they experience has not entirely changed.

In the United States, far from debating the ''failure'' of feminism, there is discussion about whether women are becoming the dominant sex.

For the first time in history in the US, women now hold a majority of the nation's jobs. They now earn 60 per cent of master's and bachelor's degrees, half of all law and medical degrees and 42 per cent of MBAs. A cover story by The Atlantic says that of all 15 job categories predicted to grow in the next decade, all but two are occupied primarily by women.

''Yes, women still do most of the childcare. And yes, the upper reaches of society are still dominated by men. But given the power of the forces pushing the economy, this setup feels like the last gasp of a dying age rather than the permanent establishment,'' the story contends. ''For years, women's progress has been cast as a struggle for equality. What if equality isn't the end point? What if modern, post-industrial society is simply better suited to women?''

An article in The Economist two years ago, looking at these same social forces - including the fact that men are more likely to drop out of school, be prescribed mood-managing drugs and be consigned to special education classes - concluded that ''the long-term result seems unavoidable: men are becoming ever more marginalised, while women are taking over the commanding heights of wealth and power''.

In Australia, we have just (begrudgingly) elected a woman to the highest post in our land, a move that will illustrate to young women in particular that there is no upper limit on what they can aspire to, says Nina Funnell, a young feminist campaigner who sits on the NSW Rape Crisis Centre board and the Premier's Council on Preventing Violence Against Women. ''But there is no way people should look at the fact we have a female prime minister and say we have achieved equality; we can all pack up and go home,'' Funnell says.

The fact is childbirth changes everything. Women can now return to full-time work but that will usually necessitate full-time childcare of some sort, which often devours much of their pay. If they try to combine mothering and working, as so many women want to do, they're likely to find it is harder now than it was 20 years ago, says Women's Electoral Lobby chairwoman Eva Cox.

That is because both parenting and work have become more intense, Cox says. ''Parents are more anxious, there seems to be more demands placed on them while, at the same time, the workplace has become more macho, people are working longer hours and you are rewarded for being a workaholic,'' Cox says. Women in some of the most highly regarded professions still find it very hard to access part-time work.

In retrospect, fixing the legal inequities between men and women was the easy bit, Cox says. ''Workplace culture and social culture has actually moved in the opposite direction.''

As Summer says, ''the workplace has been slow to recognise that its workers are also parents''.

Wendy McCarthy, who runs corporate advisory company McCarthy Mentoring, says she believes workplaces are slowly changing. ''Companies are hiring the best and brightest from university, and these are often women. It will become too expensive to let these women go when the time comes for them to have children, so they are starting to look at changing the way their workplaces are designed,'' McCarthy says.

CHILDCARE, Cox and Summers say, is crucial. It needs to be cheaper and directly funded by the government (instead of reimbursing parents part of their private childcare fees) so that childcare centres are not run as profit-making entities, as many are, Cox says.

Summers says the federal government should reinstate its childcare program and build the remaining 222 promised centres (earlier this year, the government abandoned its 2007 election pledge to build 260 childcare centres after completing only 38).

Contrary to views that Gen Y women are either not concerned with feminist issues any more (some considering the battle for equality already won), or do not identify themselves as feminists, Funnell and Dux say the past few years has seen a rise in activity and debate among young women.

''I am sick and tired of hearing that young women are not feminists any more,'' Funnell says. ''There is a really robust community in Australia of young women fighting for things they believe need to be changed.''

For Gen Y feminists, childcare and violence against women remain key topics. Funnell points to a study of year 10 girls showing that of those who were sexually active, one in three said they had experienced ''unwanted'' sex.

But a new issue is the rise of raunch culture - the increasing sexualisation or ''pornification'' of society, particularly children, through the mass media.

While older feminists such as Eva Cox are suspicious that the backlash against raunch culture has a whiff of moral conservatism about it or is overstated, others are concerned that women's sexuality has been twisted into a new stereotype that women must conform to.

Women have always been judged and valued by how they look, but this has intensified in recent years and is now focused on much younger women, says Dux. So while Gen Y have been taught they are equal, they are also being bombarded with messages that they should look and act a certain way in order to be popular or successful.

Funnell says there is huge pressure on young women to conform to the highly sexualised images being plastered across all media by stick-thin models with big breasts and other airbrushed celebrities.

In her recent book, Living Dolls: The return of Sexism, Natasha Walter says that being sexy is ''almost a constant imperative'' for a generation of young women and that plastic surgery is becoming a ''strategy towards self-perfection'', prompting one in four girls in Britain to consider plastic surgery by the age of 16 (according to a 2006 survey).

In Australia, there are increasing numbers of women seeking labia reconstruction (1160 in 2008-09), with some saying they want to look more like soft porn images, most of which are digitally altered anyway.

''We need to be careful in our reaction to the raunch culture debate,'' says Funnell. ''If women choose to wear low-cut tops and short skirts and take up pole dancing because this is how they like to express themselves, that is fine. We need to scrutinise not the behaviour but the motivations. If they are doing it for men's approval and acceptance, then that is concerning.''

So, has feminism failed? Yes, no, it's complicated. Feminists once believed women could have it all, but perhaps it's more realistic to believe, as our Governor-General Quentin Bryce says, that women can have it all, just not all at once. For now.

The Age is a sponsor of Intelligence Squared Debate: Feminism Has Failed, which will be held at the Melbourne Town Hall on Wednesday, 6.30pm-8.30pm, 9094 7800, wheelercentre.com.

This story was found at: http://www.theage.com.au/national/are-we-there-yet-20100918-15haq.htm