Vice-Chancellor's Gender Equality Fund Final Report 2017: Illuminating and Understanding Women's and Men's Experiences Navigating Family Care Responsibilities and Their Academic Careers

The research project arose from the March 2017 meeting of the Vice Chancellor’s Gender Equality Committee. At that meeting there was an agreement that there was an opportunity for the Vice Chancellor to consider an additional project titled: ‘illuminating and interrogating the career experiences and interpretations of academic employees with family responsibilities’. By drawing on the constructs illuminating and interrogating, the present research addresses that part of the research which suggests that the dominant discourses and enacted practices that underpin gender inequities are often hidden, latent and less visible, in part because of ‘recent tendencies towards “gender denial” and suggestions that ‘the problem of gender in organizations has been “solved”’ (Lewis & Simpson 2012, p. 141). Further, the literature suggests that dominant discourses can reproduce a situation where women’s delayed career development and the difficulties some women experience securing, in the case of this research, full-time tenured academic positions are interpreted and constructed as unintentional and natural. Women are often understood or positioned as having different priorities and so their delayed career progression is a consequence of their personnel choices rather than gendered organisational practices. Accordingly, Simpson, Ross-Smith and Lewis (2010) argued that ‘discourses of choice’ can legitimate gendered workplace practices because organisations can ‘absolve themselves of responsibility’ (p. 205) for perceptions of differential career access and development. Further, Tatli, Ozturk and Woo (2017) claim that existing gender inequities and the lack of responsibility for tackling them has been legitimised ‘or rendered invisible through a belief in individual choice as the determining factor of career progression for women’ (p. 407). Thus, ‘blaming the victim’ [women] is a means of avoiding the address of gender inequity and so the practices and interactional dynamics involved in constructing and reproducing inequities are often unacknowledged and passively accepted rather than named and challenged. The timeliness and relevance of the research project is, in part, supported by the suggestion that ‘in university employment, particularly for academic staff ‘a strongly male dominated culture persists in which female academic employees (especially mothers) continue to experience discrimination’ (Strachan et al 2016, p. 44). For many women combining family responsibilities and academic career advancement continues to reflect the proposition, flexibility versus advancement (Valantine & Sandborg 2013). That is, despite robust work life integration policies and corresponding cultural values female academics experience and interpret their take up as limiting rather than advancing their academic careers. The present research is also a broader response to findings emerging from aspects of an ARC Linkage Grant Report titled ‘Gender and Employment Equity: Strategies for Advancement in Australian Universities’ (Strachan et al 2016). While bringing to light issues and complexities relevant to women’s academic careers the study was quantitative in orientation. Moreover, while addressing issues pertinent to family responsibilities and work life balance, the ARC project scope was significantly broader and so exploring women’s and men’s family and academic career experiences while important was one of several other focuses. Further supporting the studies’ emphasis, relevant research suggests that despite the development and implementation of family friendly policies, in contemporary workplaces there are tensions, ambiguities and gaps between policy formulation and enacted workplace practices (Cooper & Baird 2015; McDonald, Townsend & Wharton 2013; Putnam, Myers & Gailliard 2014). Fewer of these and like studies have explored these tensions and gaps in context to university workplaces. According, while policy supporting workplace flexibility remains an ongoing dialogue, a clear concern in these studies has been the dissonance between policy and practice which is a focus of the present study

Gender equity : the Commission's legacy and the challenge for Fair Work Australia

Two labour-market variables, wages and hours, are used to review the gender relations record of the Australian Industrial Relations Commission and its predecessors. This review informs an assessment of what features of Commission practice and capacity should and can be replicated by Fair Work Australia. Arbitration has been most decisive for women in paid work when it has enjoyed national and industry distribution. Advances in equal pay and leave linked to reproduction are two relevant examples, although these advances have been confronted more recently by frailties in federal gender pay equity regulation and policy shifts to enterprise and individual bargaining. The findings suggest an agenda for Fair Work Australia, notwithstanding the possibilities and limitations posed by the Fair Work Act 2009 and the tendency for changes to the gender contract to be highly contested

Accepting mediocrity as progress : gender pay equity and enterprise bargaining

Debates concerning the gender equity claims of enterprise bargaining have taken a particular form. Proponents of decentralised wage-fixing have argued that enterprise bargaining has not disadvantaged women. This claim is supported by reference to the relative stability in gender earnings ratios and the evenness in outcomes for men and women, particularly those in permanent full-time employment, arising from enterprise bargaining agreements. This narrow test of disadvantage obfuscates issues requiring key policy and industrial redress. It is a critique that excludes three key considerations: the equity position of women who remain outside the enterprise bargaining stream; growing income dispersion in Australia, and the prevalence of non-standard employment. Similarly the failure of enterprise bargaining to advance the pay equity position of women significantly beyond the impact of the 1969 and 1972 equal pay decisions is under-explored. Scrutiny of enterprise bargaining provides an opportunity to reaffirm gender (and class) as key analytical tools in enterprise bargaining research and highlights the limitations in the equity benchmarks that are used to appraise enterprise bargaining

Limits and possibilities : rights-based discourses in Australian gender pay equity reform 1969-2007

In 1969 and 1972 Australia adopted a highly distinctive approach to equal pay. Its unusual characteristic lay in its incorporation in Australia's system of wage determination. This reform was advantageous to women in paid work but key ambiguities emerged as to how the right to equal pay would be claimed in areas of highly feminized work. In 1993 the right to equal pay was introduced in statute and conjoined to a test of sex discrimination, a construction that was ineffective, particularly in the context of a decentralizing wages system. State jurisdictions in Australia developed innovative responses to this impasse that were founded on the concept of undervaluation. These approaches addressed a persistent flaw in rights-based approaches, the requirement for women to demonstrate they are the same as men to claim equality. These approaches, although currently proscribed, demonstrated that particular constructions of rights-based discourses can be effective if connected to the underlying dynamics of gender pay inequity and grounded in the instruments of industry and minimum wage determination

What about working women?

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Equal remuneration and the Social and Community Services case : progress or diversion on the road to pay equity?

The first major test of the equal remuneration order provisions in Pt 2-7 of the Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth) delivered significant wage increases for the mostly female workforce in the social and community services sector. Fair Work Australia emphasised the breadth of the provisions compared to previous federal legislation and embraced key parts of the reasoning adopted by state tribunals in assessing a tack of equal remuneration. However, it stopped short of fully endorsing their approach and declined to articulate any principles to guide the conduct and determination of future cases. It also appeared to insist on a degree of precision as to the extent of gender-based undervaluation that might be difficult for future claimants to meet. Its two major decisions in the case, which ultimately revealed a significant difference of opinion between members of the Full Bench that heard it, are marked by inconsistencies and uncertainties that have left the pursuit of gender pay equity on a precarious footing

A new dawn for pay equity? : developing an equal remuneration principle under the Fair Work Act

The Rudd/Gillard Government has announced its intention to support submissions to Fair Work Australia (FWA) for the development of an equal remuneration principle (ERP), in the context of a test case involving social and community workers. This follows a series of successful proceedings under pay equity laws in New South Wales and Queensland. The Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth) adopts a broader approach to the issue than previous federal provisions, though it does not go as far as the state regimes in mandating equal remuneration. Nevertheless, while there is no imperative for FWA to adopt an ERP, there are distinct advantages in adopting this course, particularly if the Principle gives explicit focus to the issue of undervaluation as the means of assessing whether the objective of equal remuneration has been met

Gender pay equity

The persistent gender pay gap is an important driver of the current wages crisis in Australia. The gender pay gap is the difference between women’s and men’s earnings, expressed as a percentage of men’s earnings. In 2018, the gender pay gap sat at 14.6%, only slightly improved from the early 2000s. Gender pay gap data based on AWOTE are the most commonly used metrics in Australia to measure progress towards gender pay equity, which is when women and men receive equal pay for work of equal or comparable value. However, this measure of the pay gap compares the ordinary time weekly earnings of men and women in full-time jobs only. It hides the gendered access to wage and benefit topups on ordinary time weekly earnings reflected in total full-time earnings. The full-time data also shed little light on the gender pay gap for almost half of Australia’s working women, who work part-time and are not included in this metric. When we include average weekly earnings (AWE) for all workers, both full-time and part-time, the gender pay gap in 2017 rises to 32.4%. This high figure underscores women’s significantly lower earnings relative to men’s in Australia, which have ramifications for lifetime earnings, superannuation earnings and security in retirement

Shall I compare thee to a fitter and turner? : the role of comparators in pay equity regulation

In the second major test of the equal remuneration provisions of the Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth), the Fair Work Commission has rejected the reasoning previously relied upon by Fair Work Australia to deliver significant wage increases to the social and community services sector. In a preliminary ruling in a case involving the early childhood education and care sector, the commission has determined that applications lodged under Part 2-7 of the Act may no longer rely on gender-based undervaluation as a means of demonstrating that the objective of equal remuneration for men and women workers is not met. Applications must reference a comparator which must be of the opposite gender. For an order to be made in favour of a group of female employees, an applicant must now identify a group of male employees, doing work of equal or comparable value, who are receiving higher remuneration. This latest decision continues a longstanding and peripatetic contest, evident in Australian and international jurisdictions, about whether comparative and opposed assessments are required in the pursuit of pay equity. Rather than requiring equality for women to be claimed against a masculinised benchmark, we argue that undervaluation needs to form the cornerstone of any meaningful approach to addressing equal remuneration

Wage-setting and gender pay equality in Australia : advances, retreats and future prospects

This article re-examines the main principle applied in the pursuit of gender equality in Australian wage-setting systems (equal remuneration for work of equal value) through the lens of a typology of contrasting approaches to gender (and overall) wage equality. It focuses on landmark legislative initiatives and cases over four epochs in Australian wage-setting history, from the first national equal pay case in 1969 to current provisions under the Fair Work Act. Our analysis indicates that there is no guarantee of a progressive trajectory, from narrowly conceived strategies that limit comparisons to the same work, through the revaluation of female-dominated work, to a more comprehensive approach capable of redressing systemic disadvantage. Rather, the Australian pattern has been one of advances, retreats and constantly changing barriers. We argue that although the principle of equal remuneration for work of equal value has potential to challenge the reproduction of gender inequalities within wage-setting systems, this is highly contingent on the strategies in place and ultimately requires recognition that wage disparities reflect the accumulation of structural inequalities and gendered practices