When it turned out that Kate had a permanent aversion to bottles of any kind, we racked our brains to think of ways to get milk into her as an alternative to the most obvious way. Reader: there is no other way to tell you this. For a time, I jellied my own breastmilk so she could eat it off a spoon. (Sorry. I hope you’re still there.)
Women swap stories like this all the time. In the modern pentathlon that is wifeless working, tales of debacle are hard currency. And I will happily confess that for all my periodic wife envy, I would not like to miss out on that debacle. It feels messy and alive and real. It makes for excellent comedy. And as much as the juggling life is not easy, I think it’s a tragedy – a proper tragedy – that men are encouraged to miss out on it, every day. It feels like a universe of experience from which fathers are disproportionately excluded, and that’s a sad thing.
I wrote this book because, in our long and vexed national discussion about gender and work, it feels to me that we miss something quite big. We focus our attention on who wins and loses at work, but we don’t join it up with what’s happening at home.
As long as we assume women are the only losers in this situation, nothing will change. Because the truth is that everybody loses in a system like this. Women who feel hard done by, men who feel trapped at work, children who don’t see enough of their fathers.
Australia’s twenty-eighth prime minister, Tony Abbott, took office in 2013 promising to help marginalised Australians, including ‘women struggling to combine career and family’.9 (He was immediately as good as his word, appointing a Cabinet that did not create work–family issues for a single Coalition woman.) His words were meant honourably. But this shouldn’t be a struggle for women. It should be a struggle for people.
1
AWFUL MEN, HOPELESS WOMEN
At a media Christmas party in 2011, I found myself in an especially happy state; just convivial enough to approach a very senior colleague from a rival media company to address a question that had long been troubling me.
‘Tell me,’ I inquired, with a smile to indicate that I came in peace (it was an ABC party, and my target was in hostile territory). ‘Why is it that there are so few women in your opinion pages?’
It wasn’t an attack – I did genuinely wonder – and to his credit, he replied honestly.
‘Yes, there aren’t enough,’ he said. ‘The thing is, we really struggle to find female columnists. I’m a firm believer that women are equal; it’s just that they haven’t really been equal for long enough to create a pool of women who have the breadth of experience to write really authoritative columns on the subjects we cover in our opinion page.’
We looked at each other for a bit; I digesting his answer, he no doubt waiting for me to throw my glass of riesling at him.
I didn’t do that. And I don’t name him here because I liked the fact that he answered genuinely, rather than trying to fob me off by listing the handful of women who in fact appear regularly on the bloke-infested opinion page in question.
But his response told me a couple of things. One – he probably hadn’t been asked the question many times. Two – these things are incredibly subjective, even in the most visible of workplaces. When I looked at his publication, I saw a sea of male faces so comprehensive as to seem weird. When he looked at his publication, he saw a field of excellence to which – owing to a certain regrettable tardiness in the natural evolution of things – only a few women at this stage qualified for admission, notwithstanding the warmly accepted principle that in all general respects blokes and chicks should be equal.
This is not an uncommon crossroads for men and women to find themselves loitering awkwardly upon. Why aren’t there more female CEOs? Why aren’t there more women on boards? Why aren’t there more women in Cabinet?
These questions surface with all the rehearsed and seasonal regularity of a Nativity play. Some report will come out confirming that there are more ASX companies with communications directors who are left-handed than there are organisations with a majority of women on their boards. A brief round of national hand-wringing may then ensue.
Someone will say, ‘The problem is, there just aren’t enough women with experience. Things will straighten out once equality works its way through the system.’ Someone else will say, ‘Are you kidding? Why don’t we just introduce a damn quota system and fix it?’ And then someone else will say: ‘Because it’s unfair. Horrible to imagine perfectly good blokes being thrown over for token women who will no doubt be annoyed to be picked for their gender rather than on merit.’ And then some footballer will be caught injecting horse blood or something, and we will all move on to the next subject.
The ‘experience’ thing comes up again and again. And folded into the experience argument is the notion that things will get better, gradually, as that lovely equality just oozes its way through the system, with women steadily getting more excellent and men finally declaring, ‘Whoa, ladies! Point taken! Help yourselves to half this loot!’
But how much does ‘lack of experience’ actually explain, anyway?
For example, let’s look at the gender pay gap in Australia. Women constitute almost half of the workforce, but get paid on average 17 per cent less than men.1 Now, there are plenty of people who will tell you that the pay gap is imaginary – that women are paid less because they tend to take lower-paid jobs, because they move in and out of the work force, or because they have fewer qualifications, or less experience. The thing is, when researchers – and there is plenty of research on this particular topic – dig down and compare male and female workers with comparable levels of experience and qualifications, there remains a stubborn 60 per cent or so of the gender pay gap which cannot be explained by anything apart from the presence or absence of certain dangly bits.2
And though we think of the gender pay gap – or I always have, at any rate – as a sort of blanket layer of disadvantage, a generalised GST-style penalty that is lopped off as soon as you get to the pay window and they realise you’re a chick – the truth is it doesn’t work like that at all. Actually, the gender gap is much smaller among lower-paid workers, and much bigger among the higher-paid.
When Melbourne University researcher Deborah Cobb-Clark and her colleague Juan Barón examined in close detail the pay discrepancies between private sector employees, they found that the gap between low-paid men and low-paid women was about 8 per cent, which could indeed be explained away by productivity factors, experience and so on. But up among the high-income earners, the lawyers and executives, the pay gap blew out to 28 per cent, and only about a quarter of that could be explained by anything other than gender.3
As Catherine Fox dryly observed, after a long passage in her book Seven Myths about Women and Work in which she canvassed all the other potential contributing factors considered and dismissed by researchers looking at this area: ‘The most important element in equalising the differential is for a woman to become a man.’4
The higher up the food chain you go as a woman, therefore, not only does it become more likely that you will be paid less than the identically qualified chap who sits opposite you, but it simultaneously becomes less likely that that disparity will be explicable on any other grounds apart from the fact that you are a dame and he is a fella. Now – this bunching-up of the gender pay gap towards the top of the tree does make a certain rudimentary amount of horse sense. Lower-paid people are more likely to be on bands or awards, which are visible to everybody and from which formal bias should long ago have been eliminated. But higher wages are far less likely to be accountable in the same way – the better paid you get, the more likely that your salary becomes a ‘package’, with all sorts of bonuses and fringe benefits that are the discretionary gift of employers and not necessarily handed out in an equal way.
‘I don’t know what they get paid. They don’t know what I get paid,’ wrote Sunrise presenter Natalie Barr of her male colleagues in her widely circulated 2014 column advising women to ‘stop blaming men’ for the
ir failures in the workplace.5 She is correct – at her level in her industry, contracts are top secret. But I’d bet that if Ms Barr and her male colleagues played a little show-and-tell, she’d be more surprised than they would be.
The high-paid bracket is the cohort to which – the argument has regularly been made – the pipeline of qualified and ‘experienced’ women, flowing through university degrees and middle management and then triumphantly into senior executive positions, would eventually deliver equality, like the floodwaters arriving at the Serengeti Plain.
But that’s not what’s happened. The surge of women into tertiary qualifications has happened, all right. For nearly two decades now, women have graduated from university in greater numbers than men. They took the lead in 1985, and now represent 60 per cent of graduates.6 And women persist strongly to a certain point about halfway up the professional ladder, constituting 45 per cent of middle managers.7 But they only occupy 10 per cent of executive positions. And only 2 to 3 per cent of CEO positions in the ASX200, depending on whether Gail Kelly is on holidays or not.8
This is what University of Queensland researcher Terrance Fitzsimmons calls the ‘Stupid Curve’ – the arc described by the numbers of women as they swan-dive away to virtually nothing when plotted against seniority in the workplace. The Stupid Curve is the visual representation of all the education, work and experience that women en masse collect up until a certain point, whereupon much of it seems just to evaporate, or at least run out of north-ward puff.
Meaning – and this is amusing, in a despairing sort of a way – that the problem really isn’t, at heart, that there aren’t enough experienced women around; it’s that very few enterprises seem capable of capitalising fully on all the experience that’s currently going to waste.
And it’s an extraordinarily expensive piece of wastefulness. Not only the cost of teaching and training all those women, but the productivity forgone. When Goldman Sachs and JBWere teamed up in 2009 to investigate the cost to Australia of women’s under-representation, they worked out that if women’s workforce participation rates became more like men’s, it would add 11 per cent to gross domestic product.9 Think of an Australia with a whole extra mining sector added on. That’s what we’re missing out on.
Australian working women get a rougher deal than many of their colleagues in comparable Western economies; we rank 24th in the world for pay equality, and are nowhere near the top ten, which is dominated of course by Euro-smoothies like Iceland, Sweden, Norway and Switzerland.10 According to the World Economic Forum, countries where the gender gap has been all but eliminated also tend to do better economically overall – although that reasoning seems a little clunky in the case of the world number one, Iceland; possibly a statistical aberration brought on by excessive consumption of fermented shark meat.
Being undervalued is a pricey business for women personally, too. Thanks to the magic made available to us by the University of Canberra’s National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling (NATSEM), we can actually predict and compare the likely parallel courses of men and women just starting out on their careers today. Let’s take a woman, and make her twenty-five years old and give her a postgraduate education. Let’s call her ‘Jane’. If she works for forty years, Jane is likely – if things go according to the average experience – to earn a lifetime total of $2.49 million. But if you take a second graduate, and call him ‘Jeff’, and give him exactly the same qualifications as Jane and bless him with the same degree of averageness, he ends his forty-year career with a lifetime total of $3.78 million.11 That amounts to, as Anne Summers pointed out in her book The Misogyny Factor, ‘a million dollar penalty for being a young woman in Australia today’.12
Over the decades that have elapsed since anyone started caring to any noticeable extent, the question of why women don’t get to the top so much has collected a sprawling tangle of answers.
They are extensive and time-consuming, and if you listen to enough daytime radio and read enough management journals you will hear them all in the fullness of time: Male bosses are sexist. Women don’t want the top jobs. Men are naturally more ambitious. Men promote men. Women have kids and drop out. Men are better at self-promotion. Women aren’t aggressive enough. Workplaces are structured to suit men. Women are no good at leadership – look at Julia Gillard. Men think they know everything – look at Kevin Rudd. Women aren’t good enough for the first eleven – just ask Tony Abbott.
If you take all these arguments, theories, studies, hypotheses, things you saw on the Internet and everything starting with ‘I’m not sexist but’ and threw them into a giant cement mixer and tumbled them free of their outer casings of assumptions and prejudices, you would find that they can be sorted into two broad categories, which I – for convenience – will call ‘men are awful’ and ‘women are hopeless’.
The first group of reasons centre formally around the fact that the decision about whether or not women proceed to the upper echelons of any power structure is still usually decided by men, and informally around the further suspicion that men are awful.
For instance: men are awful because they hire other men. This can happen subconsciously. Men who have advanced happily up the career ladder tend to assume – perfectly understandably, I suppose – that the things that made them successful are the things that will make others successful too. So if working sixteen-hour days or having a top-down management style has got them to the top, chances are they will count these traits as important for success, discounting other traits as less important.
When Terrance Fitzsimmons interviewed dozens of Australian CEOs and company directors for his 2011 doctoral thesis on gender differences in leadership, he asked them what they looked for when recruiting leaders. Fitzsimmons had read all the reams of corporate bumf about numbers of men and women and seniority and salary gaps and diversity programmes and so on, but he was more interested in the human story: how senior executives are actually chosen, and why. Here’s the assessment of one board chair, whom Fitzsimmons asked to describe an ideal chief executive:
In all our chief executives, we tend to look for supermen, and no wonder we want some guy who wears his underpants on the outside, because he’s got to be in charge of operational detail, he’s got to be a good operations man who delivers on time and on budget, but equally we want people with a strategic vision, we want people to have an idea about where the business is going and we want people who, if they aren’t charismatic leaders, then at least are deeply respected leaders so that people follow them.13
Now, that board chair might very well, if asked, have claimed to head an organisation that was ‘passionate about gender equality’ and about ‘helping every employee to make a full and satisfying contribution’. But if, when you picture a CEO, that CEO is a ‘good operations man’, then chances are your CEO is also going to be a man, full stop.
Fitzsimmons’ thesis is full of truly fascinating insights into the women who become CEOs, compared to the men who do. He found a considerable difference in the kinds of childhoods female and male CEOs had had. Almost all of the male leaders, for instance, had had stay-at-home mothers, comfortable and affluent childhoods, and every single one of them had played football. All but two had captained their teams. The 31 female CEOs, however, had had very different paths to success. Half of them had had working mothers. Many had experienced childhood disruptions – divorce, parental death or illness, repeated uprooting or other circumstances that obliged them to take on adult responsibilities earlier than might otherwise have been the case.
Of special interest to Fitzsimmons was the exact process by which corporate leaders actually achieved advancement. ‘Track record’ – experience – was extremely important, he found. But the standards for assessing ‘track record’, or taking a leap of judgement on a candidate who could go either way, are not always clear. Senior executive vacancies are not compulsorily advertised in a way that would invite a full range of applicants.
Fitzsimmons observed that
‘when no formal process exists, people fall back on stereotypes and personal biases in decision-making, which often results in homo-social reproduction’. Homo-social reproduction sounds like some thing of which Cory Bernadi would instinctively disapprove, but turns out to mean people promoting people who remind them of themselves.
If a group of people go through their careers meeting only board members who are male, then at some deep and automatic level they will think of board members as male. In this environment, board members who are women are an exception. Meredith Hellicar, a long-standing Australian senior executive and board regular, recalls: ‘Another woman and I were on a board together for a number of years. We looked nothing alike; she was short, and I’m tall. She had an elfin face and dark hair. I was blonde. And yet several of the male directors quite often mixed us up. Was it that we were just “the women” in their minds?’
It is perfectly possible for a man to behave this way while feeling genuinely supportive of the idea that women are equal, and believing absolutely that he is making appointments on merit. It is not impossible to see a man who generally promotes men appear smilingly on the flyleaf of the company’s Gender Equality Report. Not impossible at all, because the human brain is not famously good at self-awareness. Even when we think we are being scrupulously fair, our assumptions have a way of seeping into the decisions that we make.
Sex Discrimination Commissioner Elizabeth Broderick – as part of her Male Champions of Change campaign – has worked with dozens of Australia’s most senior CEOs, chairmen and bureaucrats to help them recognise the subterranean assumptions within their own organisations. Many of them were stunned – after learning about unconscious bias – to discover the implicit attitudes they never knew they had.
‘It’s so interesting to see how their conversation and action has evolved over the last three years,’ says Broderick. ‘They now call out each other’s biases when they hear them, and when they get a glimpse of their own it pulls them up and helps them understand that even well intentioned individuals make invalid assumptions about women and work.’
The Wife Drought Page 3
