“From the early months of the Covid pandemic women have borne the brunt of the economic consequences of the pandemic, largely through their roles as paid and unpaid carers,” Australia’s finance minister and newly minted minister for women, Katy Gallagher, reminded us just last week at the G20 Women’s Summit. “We cannot waste this opportunity to learn from the experience of Covid and shape the care economy for the better in the future.”
Had I attended the summit, I probably would have risen to my feet to hoot and holler in fierce agreement. Gallagher and I have common cause. That same insight – that we have a rare and urgent opportunity for a reimagining for women at work, after the turmoil of the pandemic years and a decade of stasis on the gender equality front here in Australia – is also at the heart of my new book, Leaning Out.
In one chapter I take to task the so-called “career feminists” who have dominated mainstream feminist discourse for the last decade with their “lean-in” mantras and “power posing”, while largely ignoring the low pay and poor conditions of the army of carers whose work literally made their work possible. How about some good old-fashioned solidarity?
And I highlight how career feminists’ narrow understanding of “the problem” of gender inequality – their belief that individual women lack confidence and simply need to be empowered – prevented us from collectively tackling the broader structural issues that really underpin women’s inequality at work and home, as well as their economic insecurity.
These are the kinds of things that languished by the side of feminism’s high-speed motorway that delivered some women to their destination while leaving many others behind.
The pandemic – which has exposed the fragile state of our care infrastructure and prompted a mass exodus of truly essential paid (albeit low paid) care workers while also burdening women with more unpaid care work at home – has led to a breakthrough: the dawn of a new era of “care feminism”.
Our new government seems to have gotten the memo, but I know all too well that these moments can be squandered. I’ve been around a while, and I’ve seen it before.
Also last week, I read a powerful op-ed written by Ai-jen Poo in the New York Times entitled “How Long Will the US Continue to Disrespect Its Caregivers?” Poo is the president of the National Domestic Workers Alliance and author of the seminal care feminist book The Age of Dignity: Preparing for the Elder Boom in a Changing America.
Poo tells a similar story to the one I chart in my book: how the pandemic has led to a breakthrough where broader society seems – at long last – prepared to value the unpaid and paid care work (mostly women) do and tackle critically important issues to do with so-called “care infrastructure”, including paid family leave and the wages of our essential care workers.
Valuing care and investing in care infrastructure was a central part of Biden’s “build back better” agenda. It is also one of the key priorities on the agenda at this week’s jobs and skills summit in Australia.
It was, therefore, deeply disappointing to read in Poo’s op-ed that it was this aspect of Biden’s “build back better” agenda that was ultimately jettisoned when the package was recently passed through Congress. Poo writes about this with no small amount of heartbreak on visible display.
My message for like-minded care feminists in Australia is that we mustn’t let the same thing happen here.
I could see a scenario where – post-pandemic and saddled with debt – the necessary investments in Australia’s early education and care, the boost in pay for the mostly women in care, and the need for parental leave reform are all deemed too expensive and put back on the shelf “for later”.
I’ve already observed that our new social services minister, Amanda Rishworth, seems reluctant to pursue the necessary parental leave reform in the short term, and when the treasurer, Jim Chalmers, was asked on RN Breakfast last week if he would consider bringing forward childcare reform he cited the budget and the trillion dollars of debt.
I’ve also seen this before. Over a decade ago, when I was the head of media at the UK’s Equality and Human Rights Commission, I developed a campaign for parental leave equality. The final report, Working Better, charted a phased and costed process to parental leave equality, acknowledging that women would never have equality at work unless men were empowered to pick up more of the slack at home.
Sadly, in the time between the commission announcing the campaign in 2008 and the final report in 2009, the global financial crisis hit and the plan was deemed too expensive in the current circumstances and put back on the shelf for another day, leading to a “lost decade” on parental leave reform in the UK, alongside devastating austerity budgets that added insult to injury by disproportionately negatively impacting women.
I am powerfully determined not to see this repeated. I, likewise, do not wish to pen a heartbroken op-ed similar to that of Poo in a few months’ time bemoaning how we have wasted a historic opportunity.
Now is the time to leverage the lessons of the pandemic in Australia. If not now, I fear the answer will be never.