The Australian Family, March 2002, p. 44
Work, Family and Choice
Angela Shanahan is a columnist for The Australian. This is an edited version of a talk she gave in Brisbane on October 31, 2001.
The demographer Peter McDonald of the ANU, who has been in the forefront of discussion about ways to redress the growing imbalance in the age profile of the population, has a big influence on Labor's shadow minister for family services, Wayne Swan, and appears to have achieved guru status at the Australian. He has pointed out that decisions that people make about family are affected by both private and public considerations, because the family as a social institution stradles both worlds. The family is embedded in all other social institutions, and the most important of these are the government and the market. The market economy invests heavily in and rewards individualism, not self-sacrifice and altruism, the lifeblood of the family. This has encouraged an artificial distinction between the private and public spheres when in fact men and women do not live in two separate worlds but in one world whose values clash.
The market doesn't operate coherently with the family, and McDonald argues that only governments can reconcile this dissonance. He argues persuasively for a "new social contract" which allows the free market approach to proceed but provides just rewards to "social reproduction" through the institution of the family.
Well, you might say, that is all very well, but how does it translate in practice? McDonald is a champion of the so-called family-friendly workplace and the conditions that go with it, parental leave, flexible hours and all the other policies that make it easier to combine work and family, as has been the case in Sweden, and some other parts of Scandinavia where until recently the birth-rate seems to have been higher than ours - certainly much higher than in the old Catholic countries, Italy and Spain.
The cornerstone of this argument is the new family, the gender-equity family. The argument seems compelling, and I think has some merit. Give women greater freedom to work - and, one should add, not to work - and they will have more children.
The biggest problem with McDonald's argument is that the Swedish birth-rate on which his argument heavily relies is inconsistent. The birth-rate of 2.2 was a bit of blip in the mid-nineties, and seems to have fallen again. A better example is Norway, which manages replacement. However, Norway is rather a special place. Women in Norway receive a maternity allowance of US$6000 per child for three years after the birth, the same as the state subsidy for a child-care place. If they wish they may transfer it to a child-care centre. But guess what? They don't. They usually keep it and stay home. It was introduced as a health measure, despite feminist opposition, so that babies would be kept at home and breast-fed. Like most of Norway's other very generous social security benefits, it is paid for principally by North Sea oil revenues. The only other country in the Western world to replace itself is the USA, due almost entirely to the efforts of its Mexican immigrant population. Furthermore, the USA has much more generous family tax arrangements.
However, all societies are different and so are the families which constitute those societies. We are not Sweden or Norway (although some social scientists would like us to be) and we're certainly not Italy or Spain, where great change in family life has happened within a relatively short period of time.
Thus one has to ask: Are there really two models of family in Australia? Or is it more realistic to see modern families as in a state of flux, sometimes identifying with the brave new gender-equity world but, in practice - because of the exigencies of child-rearing in a hostile world and because we are moral beings who often make choices independent of the economy or society - living a version of that old breadwinner model?
So, for example, although we talk about fathers being fully active parents, how many when it comes to the crunch are going to be able to take long leave? Most families in fact still rely on one person at least to be working (even if that is sometimes the woman). Where long paternity leave has been part of working conditions, as in Sweden, fathers have rarely taken it (2 per cent in fact). One person working is a basic way of operating the family economy - and that fact, not glass ceilings or gender politics, is the actual reason why there is a persistent gap in the earnings of men and women.
Peter McDonald's thesis that the "gender equity" family is the New Family around which social policy should be built has been vigorously criticised by social researchers Mariah Evans and Jonathan Kelly of International Surveys. McDonald's views (though a valuable and influential part of the population debate), are predicated on the notion that Australian women have a marked attachment to work. However, he has been forced to modify his claims (see People and Place, vol. 9, no. 3, 2001) or at least clarify his arguments.
Evans and Kelly's work has proved not only that actual hours worked after women have children in Australia are quite low, but also that there is a gap between the ideal and actual practice of working women with young children, and in Australia this gap is much wider than some countries - notably the old Eastern bloc and parts of Scandinavia. They published an article in the Social Monitor in October 2000, based on an extended survey of more than 2000 men and women who were asked if they thought it was "morally correct" for mothers to work when children were very small. About 70 per cent thought not. The numbers who thought it was were from countries where the state sponsored child-care and mothers have never had much choice about work, for example Russia, Israel and the former East Germany. (Australian mothers who do work tend to prefer family-based care.) It is certainly not attachment to work that is keeping women in the workforce in these countries!
According to the most reliable studies, firstly one from the Institute of Family Studies in 1998 and the most recent by Melbourne University's Institute of Applied Economics and Social Research published in the Social Monitor, the preference for most Australian mothers with children under five was overwhelmingly either to be at home (again 70 per cent) or to opt for part-time work. The amount of work they wanted and the balance between full-time and part-time shifted - sensibly enough - according to the age of the youngest child. This then is what Australian women want.
Australian women with small children exhibit no attachment to work. According to the research of Mariah Evans published recently in People and Place, about 53 per cent of mothers with small children do end up working by the time their children turn five (although most of this is part-time) but over 70 per cent thought they shouldn't work, and only 2 per cent wanted full-time work. This shows a gap between the professed ideal and actual practice which should make us ask whether mothers are being forced to work when their children are young. We should be wary of policies based on theories which assume that because mothers are working they want to.
Of course the general public couldn't care less about research, but they have to live with the policy results. The gender-equity theories are gradually filtering through layers of academia and journalism and finally onto the television, where they will doubtless acquire the status of holy writ to be avidly espoused by politicians and bureaucrats. Once upon a time the gospels changed the world; now this stuff is supposed to.
However, family life isn't just about economic necessity. As I said before, we often make decisions for reasons which have nothing to do with economics or the social norms.
As many of you might remember Tim Fischer resigned from the second-to-top job in the country to spend more time with his wife and children. But if Tim Fischer had been a woman the universal admiration for his sacrifice might have been different. Witness the controversies over the resignation in 1998 of one of Coca Cola's top executives who wanted to spend more time with her children, and more recently Jackie Kelly's decision to relinquish her ministerial portfolio in favour of her second child. Feminists saw these as acts of treachery. Eva Cox said the Prime Minister should make Jackie Kelly stay in the ministry.
This attitude is a product of an unimaginative and mechanistic ideology which attempts to stifle what most mothers and fathers actually feel about their children. Children shape and define their parents' lives and personalities almost as much as we do theirs. Parenting, mothering in particular, requires a subtle intuitiveness for which there can never be adequate preparation in any job. Above all it requires time, often time to do "nothing" - but time spent thus is considered wasted in the world of paid work.
So it is the question of time that is crucial to the continuing debate about the balance between work and family for both sexes. Until recently there was only one debate dominated by the feminist perspective and that was the question of who was to look after children while their mother was working. That debate goes on.. Generally the only solution offered is more child-care, but another more radical idea is an equitable sharing of the roles of parents. Although predictably, unable to relinquish their adversarial role, feminists tend to blame absent fathers, not absent mothers, it is true that for most working women notions of shared parenting are remote from their lives. Most of the group a friend of mine describes as "born-again mothers", and just about all of the advocates of "born-again" fatherhood, lead comfortable lives with the flexibility to arrange their circumstances. However, for all parents, more equitable workplace conditions - extended parental leave, leave provisions for sick children and above all, more secure part-time work for women - would be of great benefit to the family. Furthermore, they would produce a double benefit: for in giving children back to their mothers we would likewise give them back to their fathers.
Although the birth-rate is in decline, the unprecedented amount of discussion surrounding these issues has been, I think, a healthy sign. People are worried, and both sides of politics have finally decided to get serious about population and family policies. Parents are beginning to disentangle themselves from the web of doctrinaire ideology that has dictated family policy for a generation, searching their hearts for the meaning of their parenthood, and that is a good thing. Increasingly mothers are scoffing at the notion that they are "home-based carers" on a par with a good nanny, and fathers are asking themselves if they are merely money-making machines. Even my own frenetic spouse, who often gives me the impression that he thinks marital communication means the invention of the mobile telephone, realises that it is time that is the important and essential element of life for parents and children. Children have a right to their parents and parents have a right to one another.
But no matter how we pigeonhole Australian families, the decisions that people make about family life can never be made in a complete moral vacuum. Men and women do what they do for reasons often ill-defined, subtle and unable to be articulated. That is why I believe that sterile sociological and economic arguments linking family formation and the falling birth-rate with the effect of the government and market sometimes miss the point. Families are not always the neatly planned logical constructs we would like them to be, as I well know. Perhaps the biggest problem confronting modern families in a society that has sidelined God is the level of control we expect to have. Recently I wrote this in the Australian:
"children ... are the biggest gamble that can confront us. We want the certainty of their love, because we know we will love them and we try to bypass nature - not simply to plan their arrival, but increasingly to ensure their physical perfection, thus trying to lower the odds in our favour as much as possible."
But we forget that those odds against failure and unhappiness don't really exist. Or do we forget? I suspect that deep down we know there is no certainty with children and that the ultra-rationalist view is wrong. As the great Pascal famously wrote, "The heart has its reasons that reason cannot know."