BELINDA PROBERT looks at a wide range of policy changes that are affecting

mothers’ participation in the paid workforce, including labour market de-regulation

and workplace ‘reform’ as well as changes in child care funding, and argues for policy

solutions that will redress

the growing polarisation

b e t we e n f a m i l i e s w i t h

plenty of work and those

with none.

asm for identifying and praising ‘family-friendly’employers as harbingers of a bright new future.

The first framework involves looking at thewidest possible policy developments that areshaping the labour force experience of mothers,not just so-called family policy, and the specificproposition that while so much change has been

occurring in a forward looking direction, there hasbeen even more change that is working in the oppo-

site direction, taking us at least one step backward for every one forward. These changes include things like widespread increases in work pressure, and

60 Family Matters No.54 Spring/Summer 1999 Australian Institute of Family Studies

ooking back on the last 30years of policy developmentit is hard not to be impressedby the range of measures nowin place to help women have

families but also remain attached to theworkforce in some way. We have com-munity-based child care, workplacechild care and, increasingly, privatelyprovided child care. Some have briefperiods of paid maternity leave, andmany have longer periods of unpaidleave. We have legislation to prohibitdiscrimination against women, and promote affirmative action in largeworkplaces. We have after-school pro-grams, holiday programs (public andprivate) and, more recently, carers’leave. Mothers of young children havebeen increasing their labour force par-ticipation rate dramatically.

Why then do so many of us feel that, while it is nowindeed possible to be a mother and a worker, this inno sense adds up to a family friendly experience?Why did so many of us laugh hollowly when ex-Premier of Victoria Jeff Kennett recentlyaddressed a private girls’ secondary school aboutthe problem of Australia’s declining birth rate –and is there a connection between these things?

In this article I want to talk about two different(but ultimately related) frameworks within which wemight think about the work-family-mother nexus –frameworks that take us beyond the current enthusi-

A step forward and two back?

LL

in the labour forceMothers Mothers

reduced industrial protection from un-family-friendlyemployment practices.

The second framework is one that gives greaterweight to the subjective experience of mothers, partic-ularly the experience that is so often described as‘juggling’, as though this adequately captured the skillsrequired. This theme is less easily subjected to ‘mea-surement’ than the impact of discrete policy changes.Discussion of this theme tends to run along in a subter-ranean fashion, mainly because it involves a range offeelings, and struggles with contradictory identities formany women, which can only too easily be exploited bymen seeking to preserve the domestic status quo. Thesefeelings range from those lying behind the momentousdecisions of high flying female executives at the peak oftheir career to give it all up for their children (from Pep-siCo Chief Executive Officer to ‘soccer mum’), to thefeeling, commonplace among mothers with little labourmarket experience, that it is all too hard to manage inthe first place – ‘who would look after the kids whenthey’re sick, or in the school holidays?’ (Probert withMacdonald 1995). And in between are all the jugglers,including those who may have partners taking their fairshare of the caring, but who just don’t seem to feel thesame sense of ‘inner conflict’.

et me start with a thought-provoking adver-tisement for weekly boarding run by GeelongGrammar School in July this year. It began:‘The demands on the modern family arebecoming greater every year – making it

harder to find an opportunity for quality family time.’The solution? Turn your child into a day boarder whofinishes at 8.30 pm, or a weekly boarder, or a fullboarder.

I was particularly struck by this advertisement as Ihave been watching with some interest the mushroom-ing of long-hours pre-school centres attached to themajor private schools in the Hawthorn/Kew area. Thesedevelopments seem to me to be aimed at professionaland managerial two-career families, and are part of agrowing market out there for sophisticated forms of‘child care’ that recognise not only that women want tobe in the workforce, but that they want to be in it in away that can no longer be supported by the more com-mon forms o f jugg led care – k indergar tens ,community-based child care centres, grandparents,after school programs, and the front door key for oddoccasions. They are perhaps distinctively Australian inthat they provide an alternative to the housekeepersand nannies found in less egalitarian societies like theUnited States.

The group of women and their families targeted in the Geelong Grammar advertisement constitutes a his-torically new phenomenon – the rise of the dual career family in which the central change is the workcommitment of mothers. Australian women havesecured far fewer of the managerial/ professional/administrative jobs than American women, and are farmore likely to work part-time, but there are nonethe-less enough of them for their needs to be making animpact in the market (O’Connor et al. 1999). Thesewomen have good jobs, with career prospects, high levels of job satisfaction, and remarkably little flexibil-ity at work. ‘Family friendly’ measures such as maternity

leave, workplace child care and carers’ leave are ofminor relevance over the longer term for such women.

At least two major international studies have cap-tured the complexity of women’s responses to suchmeasures.

The American sociologist Arlie Hochschild (1998)provided us with a wonderfully rich account of whatwas going on in a remarkably ‘family friendly’ US cor-poration where hardly any women seemed to be takingadvantage of the provisions on offer. Her unusual abilityto understand both the realm of work and the realm offamily life allowed her to acknowledge the powerfulattractions of work in the new ‘quality focused’ work-place, and the way some American women refused thedouble burden, not by pulling back from work, but bypulling out of family work. Her description of a youngmother carefully planning to get home after her hus-band as a means of refusing the central emotional roleis compelling.

Judy Wajcman’s (1998) study of senior women man-agers in the United Kingdom also found that hardly anyof them took advantage of ‘family friendly’ policies.Women adapted to the male model of a successful man-ager. They had made ‘a conscious choice not to havechildren or to organise child care and domestic life so asto be able to dedicate themselves to their careers’ (p.82). (And despite this, they still don’t get to the top.)Women managers in this study were more likely to besingle, divorced or separated, and over two thirds ofthem do not have children while the same proportion ofmen do have children living with them.

What is going on here cannot, however, simply bedescribed as a potential grievance for career women, oran experience of deprivation. Women get real pleasurefrom success and power, and from working in intellec-tually challenging mixed sex settings, and work caneasily become the centre of emotional life. Interviews Iconducted last year with young career-oriented womenfound extremely high levels of job satisfaction andambition, with a realistic sense of the absence of chil-dren’s needs from their industries and workplaces. Thesolution? It was hard for most of them to imagine howthey might make space for the kind of focus and timecommitment that they saw as central to good mother-ing. In this, I expect that they are simply increasinglylike their male counterparts who have never had toimagine how to fit these two roles together (Probert andMacdonald 1999).

It might then be argued that for some workingwomen, most social policy aimed at supporting familylife has little relevance. The only shared demand is forsomething they are unlikely to get because otherwomen, and many feminist policy analysts, oppose it onequity grounds – namely, tax deductibility of child carecosts. Occasionally high flying women, generally inlarge law firms, bring anti-discrimination cases whenthey find their clients and work transferred to a malecolleague after taking maternity leave, but having thelaw on your side is small recompense. The obvious fam-ily friendly policies have not affected the behaviour ofmen to any great degree, nor have they changed theworkplace very noticeably.

In a recent provocative review essay, Anne Manne(1999) argues that ‘hyper-capitalism has created eco-nomic conditions inimical to a flourishing family lifeamong the overworked elites and the working poor’.

61Australian Institute of Family Studies Family Matters No.54 Spring/Summer 1999

LL

62 Family Matters No.54 Spring/Summer 1999 Australian Institute of Family Studies

She is responding to a major American study in psy-chology that has provided a reassuring justification forthe growing neglect of children, arguing that the onlysignificant impact on child development comes fromtheir peers. A new child has been invented for thesetimes. ‘One who does not need nurture; does not needparents’ (p. 13).

In Britain, social policy generally is far more sup-portive of parenting and caring work, with moregenerous and less qualified payments for single moth-ers, meaning that they are less likely to fallbelow the poverty line than single mothersin the United States or Australia. At thesame time, Britain is unusual in having abenefit specifically targeted on informal car-ers of people with a disability (O’Connor etal. 1998).

Nonetheless, the same emotional tensionbetween work and mothering exists, but formothers who do not wish to be the kind ofmothers they think their children need, thistension is increasingly resolved by findingthe closest possible substitute in the form ofa trained nanny. A British study of the riseof nannies working for the new dual careerprofessional family suggests that for many ofthese mothers the home is becominganother sphere to be ‘managed’ (Gregsonand Lowe 1994). The most optimisticassessment of these changes comes fromJudy Wajcman (1998: 166) who concludesthat: ‘Managerial women are forging whatmight be thought of as new hybrid forms ofgender identity, in which their subjectivitycentres as much on the workplace as it does for men. Even their participation indomestic labour takes on the character ofmanagement. Investing more of their pur-chasing power and less of their genderidentity in domesticity, these women arechallenging the gender regimes of both theworkplace and the home.’

omen who are managers arenot the only women to find itdifficult to ‘balance’ work andfamily as a result of changes inthe nature of work. A major

national survey of the Australian workforceasked workers about their satisfaction withthe balance between work and family life. Itfound that very significant proportions ofordinary workers think it is getting harderto find a balance, and that this is closelyrelated to increased working hours andincreased work intensification (Morehead et al 1997).

Specifically, 60 per cent of workers say their effort atwork has increased, and this is particularly pronouncedin finance and insurance (remember last year’s storyabout the major bank with millions of dollars of out-standing annual leave entitlements?), and theeducation sector – both areas where very large numbersof women work. It is not surprising that the AustralianCouncil of Trade Unions and a number of specificunions, including my own, the National Tertiary Edu-

cation Union, took up the theme of Work/Life as a majorcampaigning platform in 1999.

Levels of stress and family difficulties are lowest forwomen who work part-time – and this is the solutionthat presents itself with a powerful degree of natural-ism, despite the fact that all the research evidence tellsus that this consigns women to the sidelines in terms ofwork and career. Almost all employment growth in the last decade has been in the form of part-time rather than full-time jobs, and women dominate this

type of employment. However, contrary towhat one might expect – policy develop-ment designed to improve the conditions of part-time work and give it a greateremployee-centred focus – there is strongevidence that the conditions attaching topart-time work are in fact deteriorating.And they are deteriorating in ways thatreduce its ‘family-friendly’ qualities.

The first of the negative factors at work stems from the Hawke/Keating governments’ commitment to enterprisebargaining alongside award regulation ofemployment, and the Howard government’ssubsequent commitment to replacingawards with individual contracts of employ-ment, and its dedication to removing unionsfrom the workplace.

These changes have had a major impacton ‘family-friendly’ employment by de-regu-lating part-time work in such a way thatemployer interests come to the fore (Camp-bell 1993). In recent years, for example,part-time workers are more likely than full-time workers to feel disempowered at work,with full-time workers more likely thanpart-timers to say that they had influenceover their start and finish times (Moreheadet al. 1997). At the same time the most com-mon element in enterprise agreements hasbeen arrangements to vary working hoursmore ‘flexibly’, including major extensionsto the ‘normal span’ of hours during whichemployees can expect to be required atwork.

The Workplace Relations Act also ren-ders women even more vulnerable byprohibiting awards from providing mini-mum or maximum hours for part-timeworkers. These changes, and others relatingto the averaging of hours of work over anextended period, are also found in signifi-cant numbers of the new individual Australian Workplace Agreements. Theyhave been aggressively pushed by the Minis-ter, Peter Reith, as family friendly, but the

reality is that these provisions allow employers tochange hours around on a daily or weekly basis, ratherthan being required to provide regularity. There is noindication that such provisions give the workersinvolved any flexibility at all.

These changes in industrial relations policy, com-bined with a massive expansion of casual employment in Australia, mean that far fewer workers now have regu-lar hours of work, or guaranteed minima. Even wherestrong unions, such as the Finance Sector Union, have

WW

Women are

clearly being

expected to trade

some of the power

and the pleasures

of employment

for the power

and pleasures

of mothering.

Pict

ure:

Don

Why

te

affordable child care. While enterprise bargaining hasbeen promoted as a means by which parents can negotiate locally relevant employment terms, extraor-dinarily few such agreements include any mention ofchild care assistance.

At the same time, as Lee and Strachan (1999) haveargued, further changes introduced by the federalCoalition government have: increased the effective priceof child care and reduced the affordability of formal ser-vices; changed the way assistance is delivered so that

parents carry more of the responsibility thanproviders; and continued to shift the focusonto parents as workers negotiating childcare clauses in enterprise agreements. As aNational Council of Social Service (NSW)survey concluded: ‘The play of market forceshas not provided parents with choices, but ispushing them out of the market altogether’(cited in Lee and Strachan 1999: 91).

Despite the government’s protestations tothe contrary, there can be no doubt thatthese changes have caused parents unwill-ingly to leave the labour force, or to reducetheir use of formal child care and to increasetheir reliance on informal care – includingthat old necessity, the latch-key. The upshotof these changes is that women in full-timework or better paid professional employmentwill be able to meet the rising costs of formalchild care and remain in the labour market,while women with fewer labour marketadvantages will find it harder than in the pastto balance work and family needs.

In this respect we are witnessing a polar-isation of women’s family experiencesaround the extremes of education andincome. As O’Connor et al. (1999: 228) con-clude in their comparative study of genderand social policy in Australia, Canada,Great Britain and the United States: ‘Childcare is one of the most explicit manifesta-tions of the working out of class differencesamong labour force participants and rein-forces the good jobs–bad jobs divisions in allfour countries.’

Even the traditional family form of malebreadwinner and full-time mother is simi-larly under threat from economic pressures.Quite apart from any question of rising con-sumption standards, there has been a dra-matic increase in low-wage work so thatsignificant numbers of families relying onone full-time wage now fall below the povertyline. Without Australia’s highly targeted andrelatively generous social security payments,many single income families would be in direstraits. These same families are also among

the most likely to experience unemployment which isheavily concentrated among the low skilled. The polari-sation of families around the over-worked and the work-less is now well established (Burbidge and Sheehan1999), and has been exacerbated by the increase in sole-parent families. One result of this is the startling fact thatin June 1999 about 850,000 dependent children lived infamilies without a parent in employment (SenatorJocelyn Newman 1999).

63Australian Institute of Family Studies Family Matters No.54 Spring/Summer 1999

succeeded in developing an award that provides some ofthe best family friendly clauses, their ability to see thepolicy implemented has been overwhelmed by sheerwork intensification and the downsizing of the work-force. In many finance sector workplaces the pressure tostay late or to come in on extra days is intense.

There is yet another dimension of concern to the fed-eral government’s industrial relations policy – namely, itsunderlying objective of eliminating trade unions from anactive role in determining employment conditions.Unionised workers are in fact significantlymore likely than non-unionised to haveaccess to a range of family friendly provi-sions, and part-time women workers who arein a union earn 27 per cent more than theirnon-union counterparts. Such an earningsgap is particularly relevant here in the con-text of the changing costs of child care.

We know from innumerable studies thatbeing a part-time employee effectively ren-ders women ineligible for serious training,promotion or career development. Giventhis, women are clearly being expected totrade some of the power and the pleasuresof employment for the power and pleasuresof mothering. Yet this is to suggest that thesetwo elements of women’s or men’s lives arein some way comparable – that they can beweighed up and chosen between.

In reality, most women’s choices in thesematters are extremely constrained. First,men’s working hours are, on average, risingsignificantly (from a base that was alreadyincompatible with major child caring roles),leaving less room than before for householdcompromises. And second, there are still nowidely accessible alternative provisions forthe good care of children that would allowwomen to move beyond ‘juggling’ work andfamily. This is not to suggest that all womenwould prefer to have full-time jobs and seeless of their children! It is to insist on thelack of progress we have made in redesign-ing employment practices to acknowledgeanything other than a traditionally gen-dered workforce. Individual women andmen can choose to adopt the other sex’sgendered role (childless women managersor stay-at-home dads), but the roles them-selves remain unchanged.

l o n g s i d e t h e s e i m p o r t a n tchanges in the industrial rela-tions framework within whichmany parents must negotiateincreasingly varied and variable

working hours, there has been another set of changesthat are likely to work against families in their attemptsto combine work and parenting.

The expansion of good quality community-basedchild care was one of the great achievements of the1970s women’s movement, and subsequent federalLabor governments (Lee and Strachan 1999). Yet hereagain there can be little doubt that recent changes aremaking it harder for women to find appropriate and

AA

Women get real

pleasure from

success and power,

and from working

in intellectually

challenging mixed

sex settings, and

work can easily

become the centre

of emotional life.

Pict

ure:

Don

Why

te

ustralia is not the United States where thereis remarkably little policy support for par-enting as such, and where caregiving isrelegated to the status of a barrier to labourforce participation. Nor is Australia the

United Kingdom where policy tends to promote the tra-ditional gender division of labour within families(O’Connor et al. 1999). At the same time Australiaappears to be moving rapidly away from a Scandina-vian-type philosophy of acknowledging the differentpatterns of work and parenting that best accompanydifferent stages of the family life cycle.

As O’Connor et al. (1999: 230) conclude: ‘The policysolution that moves us closer to gender and class equal-ity is not to retreat to gender difference, understood aspermanent differences between the sexes. Rather, weneed to recognise the linkages between citizens’ diversepositions in the labour market and their varying caringresponsibilities in ways which allow men and women,parents and those without children, and people withdifferent sorts of ties to friends, relatives and neigh-bours to participate as equals in both spheres. This willrequire some greater measure of politically mandatedsocial support than a strict neo-liberal policy permits. Ifthis is not present, we face a continuation, and perhapsa worsening, of the present situation in which thoseadvantaged in labour market terms are the only onesallowed satisfactory solutions to their caregiving needs.’

ReferencesBurbidge, A. & Sheehan, P. (1999), ‘The polarisation of families’,

Paper presented at Victoria University Centre for StrategicEconomic Studies Conference on Earnings Inequality inAustralia, August.

Campbell, I. (1993) ‘Labour market flexibility in Australia: enhanc-ing management prerogative?’, Labour and Industry, vol. 5, no.3, pp. 1-32.

Gregson, N. and Lowe M. (1994), Servicing the Middle Classes,Routledge, London.

Hochschild, A. (1998), The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Homeand Home Becomes Work, Owl Books, New York

Lee, J. & Strachan, G. (1999), ‘Who’s minding the baby now? Childcare under the Howard government’, Labour and Industry, vol.9, no. 2.

Manne, A. (1999), ‘Peer power’, Australian Review of Books, May.Morehead, A. et al. (1997), Changes at Work: The 1995 Workplace

Industrial Relations Survey, Longman, Melbourne.Newman, Senator Jocelyn (1999), ‘The challenge of welfare depen-

dency in the 21st century: Discussion Paper’, Canberra.O’Connor, J., Orloff, A. & Shaver, S. (1999), States, Markets,

Families: Gender, Liberalism and Social Policy in Australia,Canada, Great Britain and the United States, CambridgeUniversity Press, Melbourne.

Probert, B. with Macdonald, F. (1995), The Work Generation: Workand Identity in the Nineties, Brotherhood of St Laurence,Melbourne.

Probert, B. & Macdonald, F. (1999), ‘Young women: poles of experi-ence in work and parenting’, Australia’s Young Adults: TheDeepening Divide, Dusseldorp Skills Forum, Sydney.

Wajcman, J. (1998), Managing Like A Man, Allen & Unwin,Sydney.

64 Family Matters No.54 Spring/Summer 1999 Australian Institute of Family Studies

nder these circumstances, not only is theexperience of mothering becoming highly differentiated, but so too are the experiencesof pre-school children. Does this matter?And what are we to conclude from all this?

The first point I would like to make is that it is impos-sible to assess the progress being made in allowingparents to both work and parent in ways that do notrequire long-term sacrifices without looking to a widerange of policy portfolios, covering not only traditionalfamily support services but also the increasingly criticalindustrial relations framework.

This is not to suggest that plus ca change, plus c’estla meme chose, for many women with families todaylead lives of enhanced possibilities and wider experi-ences as a result of the policy pressures that thewomen’s movement (in all its varied dimensions) hasorchestrated over the last 30 years. But it would seemto be time for more critical reflection – partly becauseso many recent achievements are being underminedby federal government policy shifts in a variety of port-folios, many of which combine to push the family backinto the private sphere.

Women, we are told, may ‘choose’ between variousquantities of work and mothering; women can negotiatewith their employers about the terms of the new ‘flexi-bility’. Yet it is equally clear that in Australia the policygains that have been won (in child care, for example) can quite easily be lost since they have not been converted into citizenship rights. If women are to continue to be asked to ‘weigh up’ family life againstworking life, despite the fact that they are to a largeextent incommensurable experiences and identities,then it is hard to escape the narrow framework of exist-ing policy debate.

And changes and divergences in women’s experienceof work may cause them to weigh up family and worklife quite differently, leading at one extreme to the well-established phenomenon of a declining birth rateamong women with tertiary qualifications. And this ispartly the result of a substantial failure of the imagina-tion and the policy development process to movebeyond a family-as-deficit model at work.

In other words, policy measures designed to givewomen equal access to employment opportunities continue to construct women as in need of special measures to overcome their handicaps (from maternityleave to rooms for expressing breast milk). They areincreasingly only available as the result of negotiationor ‘bargaining’, either at the individual or enterpriselevel, to be won or lost or traded against other employ-ment conditions. Under these circumstances womenare still being compared unfavourably to men in theworkplace.

Most striking of all, in fact, is the almost totalabsence of policy designed to help fathers balance workand family life, despite the evidence that they are find-ing this balance increasingly hard to achieve (Moreheadet al. 1997). Despite individual high profile men likeDaniel Petrie (the much lauded ex-head of MicrosoftAustralia) who have liberated themselves from work tofind more time for their families, there is no such gen-eral trend among fathers. Indeed, it is precisely theintractable nature of men’s attachment to work thatmakes Petrie so visible and his account of putting hischildren before his career a marketable publication.

AAUU

Belinda Probert is Professor of Sociology at RMIT Universityand Director of the Centre for Applied Social Research. Hercurrent research is looking at changes in the nature of men’sand women’s work and family roles between the 1950s andthe 1990s. She is the author of several books which focus onwomen’s employment experiences including Working Life:Arguments about Work in Australian Society, and PinkCollar Blues: Work, Gender and Technology, as well asnumerous chapters and articles on the subject of the currentrestructuring of work and employment.