Having children makes men better-thought-of as employees, as we established in earlier chapters. And the corollary belief – that men are better fathers if they are employed full-time – is also quite a powerful motivator. This creates a rather fascinating difference between what we expect of mothers and fathers. Being a good mother is a quality associated with constant presence. Being a good father, in the twenty-first century, still is correlated with being absent for much of a child’s daily life.
Now, I’m not suggesting that before the Industrial Revolution fathers were any kind of model, or that being roped in to do ploughing or chicken-gutting at the age of seven, or dying in freak threshing accidents, was a good thing for children either.
I am just observing that men were removed from the home, effectively, by an immense structural change that overtook the nature of work and production, organising it in vast patterns for the first time.
Some of the patterns are especially elaborate. Look at the professional services industry, for example, where a truly anachronistic method of time management continues to reign supreme.
In Australia, lawyers and accountants in large firms are governed by a system of ‘billable unit’ charging. Their days are divided into six-minute chunks, and each six-minute unit is charged to whichever client is getting the benefit of their attention for that slice of time. A partner – who is very well paid – wins the business and is responsible for the client, but the grunt work is done by junior lawyers or accountants, beavering away at a certain hourly rate, measured out in six-minute chunks.
‘In order for it to work,’ explains Janna Robertson, a partner at KordaMentha, ‘you’ve got to have a partner and – sitting underneath them – a team of juniors whom you’re paying a lot less than you make off them. The more junior people are, the more you make off them.’
That’s the business model, and the model for advancement is equally simple.
‘You get success by having really high billable hours; by getting yourself rostered on to large and profitable jobs, and by making senior people – who make those decisions – like you enough to give you the work.’
Measuring out your time in six-minute units sounds like – and according to many accounts, is – a miserable sort of arrangement. But the most forceful equation here is that hours spent is the primary predictor of advancement. Not value to the client, not efficiency, or innovation, but time spent, with partners functioning as contemporary feudal lords, commanding swathes of overworked and underpaid serfs.
There are chinks appearing in this system, it must be said. New firms that charge a fixed price are springing up, capitalising on the pool of annoyed clients and a workforce of skilled professionals fed up to the back teeth with billable units.
But you can see, in this model, how an employee’s capacity to work long hours is firmly tied to the measure of how competent and successful they are. You can see why a working dad in one of these firms would be loath to take time out to do stuff with his family. You can see why having a wife, in these jobs where working a seventy-hour week is the key to success, might be bloody handy. And you can therefore see why women – who are so much less likely to have a wife, and much more likely to be one – do not wind up getting to the top of these firms at anywhere near the rate that men do.
Like I said: the Industrial Revolution. One of our more influential revolutions. How fascinating to think that machinery could bring about such profound patterns in the way humans think about themselves and their roles. What could possibly change these assumptions and behaviours? Well – can you think of any other vast structural revolutions that might be underway right now?
The digital revolution, a global insurgency still new enough that it has not yet acquired proper noun status, is even now in the process of unpicking some of the patterns that were cemented by its revolutionary predecessor. When men began to travel in great numbers on a daily basis to workplaces containing the tools required for their labours – be they factories or offices – then the forty-hour work week was a sensible and rational response. How could a car worker build cars anywhere but in a car factory? To imagine a working day arranged in any other way was impossible.
But the Australian workforce has been changing for decades now. Manufacturing represents now only 7 per cent of gross domestic product; half of what it was twenty years ago, according to the World Bank.1 The growth of the service economy, coupled with the explosion in communications technology, means that for many workers the orthodox working week doesn’t necessarily make the best sense.
Why spend an hour each way on a bus through choked capital-city traffic to sit in an office doing work you could feasibly do from anywhere? There are many jobs, of course, in which it remains impractical to telecommute; bricks and mortar retail staff, bus drivers, hairdressers, swimming pool attendants, massage therapists, paramedics and police are among the long list of workers for whom not being there in person would be distinctly awkward.
Advances in communications technology, however, have already wrought extraordinary changes in many jobs. Big companies are beginning to experiment with flexible working. Laptops and smartphones mean that office workers are rarely genuinely out of reach.
Higher education has been transformed by technology. Back in the 1990s when I was accruing my HECS debt and spotty academic transcript at the University of Adelaide Law School, attendance was more or less mandatory. If you missed a lecture, or a tutorial, your only option was to try to cadge a set of Penny Wong’s notes (popular on the photocopy black market, owing to her fine brain and neat handwriting). These days, you can download lectures, lecture notes, and reading materials online. There’s none of the lurking about you used to have to do in order to get an audience with a course coordinator; now you can just email them. Students are at liberty to do other things instead, like take on four part-time jobs to defray the escalating cost of their degrees, plus buy off-brand sardines to live on. There’s even a global network of courses called MOOCS – Massive Online Open Courses – which take the idea of democratised, virtual education to its current outer limits of possibility. These phenomena have taken about a hundredth of an evolutionary heartbeat to blossom, and those who have experienced them will never work in the same way that graduates did even a decade ago.
It gives me a chill to think how different my own life would be had I had children ten years earlier. As it is, the ability to watch Parliament live online – not to mention Senate estimates sessions, press conferences and the like – has meant that I can work from practically anywhere. Ten years earlier, I would have been either tied to Parliament House, or doing a different job, or doing no job.
I’m sure there will be heart attacks all round in some quarters when – in time – the suggestion is inevitably made that federal Parliament could meet virtually instead of in person. Can you imagine all the travel costs you’d eliminate, and how the group dynamic inside the big parties would change, if MPs were required to stay in their electorates and advocate from there, rather than busy themselves with factional intrigue in Canberra? I would bet you any money there’d be more women getting involved, too. Obviously, there are also good reasons for not having a virtual Parliament – scrutiny and accountability of the national decision-making process is easier when everybody’s in one place, for example, besides which you’d be instantly murdered by Canberra’s taxi drivers if you ever seriously suggested politicians stayed home – but things are evolving pretty fast.
The past half-century has been a time of extraordinary change for women. Rising levels of education, smaller family sizes, the decline in manufacturing, the rise of the service economy; these are developments that have seen women take on work and accomplishment in a way that has radically changed the expectations we have of ourselves and for ourselves.
The paid work that women do has expanded. But so have the expectations of motherhood. A 2006 study of American women found that modern mothers who work full-time actually spend more hours one-on-one with t
heir children per week than their stay-at-home mothers had in 1976.2 They just feel far more inadequate and guilty.
Men, too, are now expected to be better fathers than their own fathers were: more hands-on, more present, more attentive. But they’re still expected to do all the old stuff too.
I read an interview with the feminist historian Stephanie Coontz in the Atlantic recently, and was struck by one particular passage. ‘In some senses, men are where women were thirty years ago,’ she told the magazine.
Fifty years ago, women were told, This is your place, stay in it. But about thirty years ago, it was, Yes, you can do other things, but you must not compromise your femininity in doing it; you still have to be attractive and sexy. A lot of women have learned that you can throw out the old ideas about what makes you feminine. Men are at the point where they’re beginning to discover that there are things beyond the old notion of masculinity that are rewarding. Yes, intimacy is important. You ought to share housework with your wife. At the same time, they’re being told – and not just by society but by women who subscribe to these conflicting messages about masculinity – that they should be disclosing but not weak. They should be gentle but still willing to kill a mouse. They’re getting these messages that somehow they have to live up to a norm of masculinity that includes all the old protective, provider roles, but also the new ones.3
Being yanked one way and the other by conflicting expectations is not a comfortable place to be. And the emerging stress and strain on fathers – expected at once to be more present for their children, and yet still omnipresent at work – is the belated male version of the ‘having it all’ question.
Perhaps it’s men’s turn now to change. To harness the elemental force of another technology-led revolution that changes the very structure of their lives, and brings with it new ways of measuring what success is, what being a good father is, what being a good worker is.
I don’t want to oversimplify this. Technology doesn’t solve all our problems. And to a significant extent, it can create new problems too: workers who never stop working, whose smartphones make them available for duty twenty-four hours a day. But if I’ve become convinced by anything over the course of writing this book, it’s that it often takes an external event for an average man to change his behaviour. Perhaps it’s a recession. Perhaps it’s being made redundant. Perhaps it’s having a mentor or a boss who demonstrates that it’s acceptable to work flexibly. Perhaps it’s a wholesale disruptive technological revolution; who knows?
The certainty is this: as long as we continue to study, debate and agonise about what happens at work as if it is an entirely independent sphere from what happens at home, then we shall get no farther. For years, we have argued about quotas and affirmative action and all the ancillary techniques to move women up through leadership ranks, but we’ve taken our eyes off the other half of the equation. In focusing so hard on encouraging women to lean in, we’ve neglected to convince men of their entitlement to lean out once in a while. The men who already do – who have the confidence to stare down the expectations of them that lace invisibly but unmistakeably through the world of work – will perhaps be the advance riders of change.
Perhaps the last half-century, this window of history over which women changed significantly and men hardly at all, will be viewed as a brief window of awkward evolutionary adolescence. Like one of those old fossils of creatures caught in that embarrassing interregnum between fishdom and swamp-thingdom, and immortalised in primordial mud for the interest of archaeologists some 200 million years hence.
Perhaps, in our ferociously joined-up new world, in which unthinkable volumes of information and intelligence are available from anywhere at a keystroke, we will finally realise that the worlds of home and work can’t make sense until you look at them side by side. That a drought in one place creates a drought in the other. And that rain is good for everyone.
REFERENCES
Introduction: The Wife Drought
1. Australian Bureau of Statistics 2011, Census of Population and Housing, ABS, Canberra, 2011, analysis provided by Jennifer Baxter, Australian Institute of Family Studies
2. Ibid.
3. Fitzsimmons, Terrance William, ‘Navigating CEO appointments: do Australia’s top male and female CEOs differ in how they made it to the top?’ PhD Thesis, UQ Business School, University of Queensland, 2011
4. Ibid., p. 205
5. Baxter, Jennifer, ‘Parents Working Out Work’, Australian Family Trends No. 1, Australian Institute of Family Studies, April 2013, at http://www.aifs.gov.au/institute/pubs/factssheets/2013/
familytrends/aft1/
6. Australian Bureau of Statistics 2009, Australian Social Trends – Trends In Household Work, cat. no. 4102.0, ABS, Canberra, March 2009
7. OECD Factbook 2014: Economic, Environmental and Social Statistics, OECD Publishing, 2014 doi: 10.1787/factbook-2014-en
8. Baxter, Jennifer, ‘Parents Working Out Work’
9. http://www.pm.gov.au/media/2013-09-18/remarks-swearing-first-abbott-government, 18 September 2013
Chapter 1: Awful Men, Hopeless Women
1. Workplace Gender Equality Agency, Gender workplace statistics at a glance, May 2014, at https://www.wgea.gov.au/sites/default/files/Stats_at_a_glance.pdf
2. Fox, Catherine, Seven Myths About Women and Work, NewSouth Publishing, Sydney, 2012, p. 51
3. Barón, Juan D. and Cobb-Clark, Deborah A. ‘Occupational Segregation and the Gender Wage Gap in Private- and Public-Sector Employment: A Distributional Analysis’, Economic Record, vol. 86, no. 273, June, 2010, 227–246 http://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/34818/1/571633919.pdf
4. Fox, Catherine, Seven Myths About Women and Work, p. 57
5. Barr, Natalie ‘Working women must stop blaming men for their troubles, says Sunrise presenter Natalie Barr who has “never been discriminated against”’, Daily Telegraph, 20 March 2014, at http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/opinion/working-women-must-stop-blaming-men-for-their-troubles-says-sunrise-presenter-natalie-barr-who-has-never-been-discriminated-against/story-fni0cwl5-1226859496003
6. Fagg, Jenny and Hellicar, Meredith and Sanders, Melanie and Zehner, David, ‘Creating a positive cycle: critical steps to achieving gender parity in Australia’, Bain Report, 6 February 2013 at http://www.bain.com/offices/australia/en_us/
publications/creating-a-positive-cycle.aspx
7. Fitzsimmons, Terrance William, ‘Navigating CEO appointments: do Australia’s top male and female CEOs differ in how they made it to the top?’ PhD Thesis, UQ Business School, University of Queensland, p. 2
8. Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace Agency (EOWA), ‘Australian Census of Women in Leadership’, 2012, at https://www.wgea.gov.au/lead/australian-census-women-leadership
9. Toohey, Tim and Colosimo, David and Boak, Andrew and Goldman Sachs JBWere, ‘Australia’s hidden resource: the economic case for increasing female participation’, Goldman Sachs JBWere Investment Research, Melbourne, 2009
10. World Economic Forum, ‘The Global Gender Gap Report’, 2013, at http://www.weforum.org/reports/global-gender-gap-report-2013
11. Cassells, Rebecca and Duncan, Alan and Abello, Annie and D’Souza, Gabriela and Nepal, Binod, ‘AMP.NATSEM Income and Wealth Report Issue 32 – Smart Australians: Education and Innovation in Australia’, National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling, University of Canberra, October 2012 at http://www.natsem.canberra.edu.au/publications/?publication=ampnatsem-income-and-wealth-report-issue-32-smart-australians-education-and-innovation-in-australia
12. Summers, Anne, The Misogyny Factor, NewSouth Publishing, Sydney, 2013, p. 54
13. Fitzsimmons, Terrance William, ‘Navigating CEO appointments’, p. 156
14. Biernat, M., Manis, M., and Nelson, T. F. (1991), ‘Comparison and expectancy processes in human judgment’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 61, 203–211
15. Uhlmann, Eric Luis and Cohen, Geoffrey L., ‘Constructed Criteria: Redefining Merit to
Justify Discrimination’, Psychological Science, June 2005, 16, pp. 474–480, doi:10.1111/j.0956-7976.2005.01559.x
16. Furnham, Adrian, ‘Self-estimates of intelligence: culture and gender difference in self and other estimates of both general (g) and multiple intelligences’, Personality and Individual Differences, vol. 31, no. 8, December 2001, 1381–1405 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/
article/pii/S0191886900002324
17. Financial Services Institute of Australasia (FINSIA), ‘Significance of the Gender Divide in Financial Services’, 2012
18. Sandberg, Sheryl, Lean In, Random House, New York, 2013
19. Kay, Katty and Shipman, Claire, ‘The Confidence Gap’, The Atlantic, 14 April 2014 at http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/04/the-confidence-gap/359815/
20. Swaine, Jon, ‘Hillary Clinton advises women to take criticism “seriously but not personally”’, 14 February 2014, at http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/13/hillary-clinton-melinda-gates-women-criticism
21. Babcock, Linda and Laschever, Sara, Women Don’t Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide, Bantam Books, New York, 2007
22. Frankel, Lois P., Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office: 101 Unconscious Mistakes Women Make That Sabotage Their Careers, Business Plus, 2004, p. 80
23. Sandberg, Sheryl, Lean In, p. 63
24. Galinsky, Ellen and Salmond, Kimberlee and Bond, James T. and Brumit, Marcia Kropf and Moore, Meredith and Harrington, Brad, ‘Leaders in a Global Economy: A Study of Executive Women and Men’, Families and Work Institute, Catalyst, Boston College Center for Work and Family, 2003 at http://www.catalyst.org/knowledge/leaders-global-economy-study-executive-women-and-men
25. Australian Bureau of Statistics 2011, Census of Population and Housing, ABS, Canberra, 2011, analysis provided by Jennifer Baxter, Australian Institute of Family Studies
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