I began work in the 1950s on unequal pay and worked for 42 years, picking up a university education on the way. I have enough to live on in retirement.

I married but had no children as my husband would not guarantee to stay around to help me with a family. Being the eldest of seven I knew how hard life was with not enough money and with children to look after. I could not even contemplate bringing up children on my own as well as working.

At that time the feminist movement begged for child care in work places. I wrote submissions pointing out that, while developers always ensured there was space for parking in any new building, there was no provision for child care.

While child care has improved, women continue to struggle with family and work and look ahead to a threadbare retirement income. All workplaces over a certain number should provide child care to take pressure off all parents. People would want to work there.

I believe that the Federal Parliament, which should be setting an example to all employers, and which sits in a building where over three thousand people work is still without child care facilities.

All the women I know who have young children are exhausted most of the time. Feminism wasn’t about producing overworked women who are expected to bear children and to work as many hours as they can fit in so the family can survive.

I never thought this would be the case - I studied for many years, earned a higher degree, worked overseas and then started my family. It was then that I realised that my children need full-time care and their parents are the best ones to provide it. While breastfeeding, mothers are obviously the best care-providers for their children.

I can’t see how, after this time out of the workforce, my earnings will ever come close to my partner’s. I dread to think of how I will ever manage if I have to rely upon my meagre superannuation contributions in retirement.

As a ‘refugee’ from an alcoholic marriage I rescued myself and my three children nine years ago. My eldest has since gained a degree and a post-grad qualification and has a good public sector position; my middle child is currently in Europe traveling and working, and my youngest is now completing Year 12. I have healthy meaningful relationships with all my children, now, thank God. In the madness of an alcoholic marriage it was not always so.

I had to take out a Violence Restraining Order against my husband in 1999, a most traumatic experience, but it served to protect us from that day. At my wits end as a migrant coping alone, I had given up paid work to work on my marriage – not reciprocated by a partner who was alcohol dependent. So after things came to a head and he was ejected from the family home I managed to obtain part-time work and continued paying the mortgage alone to avoid foreclosure. But that was an unsustainable position and the house had to be sold once settlement was reached, within the year.

I was able to buy a small townhouse nearby so that the children could maintain their education. The eldest was now in 2nd year uni, 2nd child in TAFE and youngest still in primary school. However with 4 in a 3 bedroom home it was untenable. I had by this time gained a full-time job but the salary was mediocre to say the least. My youngest was in private school and I knew the benefits of his remaining there so I made sacrifices.

In the end I had to sell the house – for many reasons. Freeing the finance meant that I could gain a qualification while maintaining a reasonable standard of living for all of us. I could afford school fees and with study and part-time work I could better my own prospects.

I achieved all that I expected. I gained a degree and a secure public sector job with prospects; two children living independently and the last well on his way with clear goals in sight. The down side is that now that I have achieved meaningful employment I am still in rented accommodation with no visible means of regaining a foothold in the property market, especially in Perth.

What irks me most is that, having done the best that I can for my children, having saved society the cost of educating/supporting my children and me, there is no recompense, no assistance. Not only do I not have a home of my own but I am doubly disadvantaged by the system. I do not qualify for the any assistance and to make matters worse, if my eldest joined me in purchasing a property she would lose entitlement to the first home owners grant. Individually neither of us is able to raise funds, together we can, but the system favours couples, not mothers and daughters, not women.

Unless either of us finds a male partner we are sunk – at this moment in time. How awful that in the 21st century we should still be dependent women; its soul destroying to say the least. Where is this Australian egalitarian spirit? Is mateship just for the blokes? Why is institutional/authoritative thinking so restricted that it does not consider ‘other’ (that there are more than two categories of home ownership, first homeowner and other). Is it in a bid to have us conform? How dare we as women think that we can go it alone, without men. Ouch.

I agree with the comment Jaye said about nuclear breadwinner families no longer being accepted so much but people still have an attitude that is centuries old. I’m not of course saying people can’t have their own beliefs but human rights and needs should always come first.

These needs are survival, safety-security, social belonging, esteem, and self-actualisation.

1. SURVIVAL—The survival level consists of the basics we need to sustain life itself; for example, oxygen, food, water, sleep, and relief from pain.

2. SAFETY-SECURITY—The safety-security level involves the need for protection from possible threats, such as violence, disease, or poverty. It also includes the need for the security of an adequate job and money in the bank.

3. SOCIAL-BELONGING—The social, or belonging, level concerns the need to be liked and wanted by family, friends, coworkers, and others with whom we associate.

4. ESTEEM—The esteem level involves our feelings of importance. To satisfy our esteem needs, we must get a feeling of importance from two sources. First, we must have a feeling of importance that comes from within; this feeling is self-esteem. Second, since self-esteem alone will not satisfy our esteem needs, we must feel that other people believe we are important.

5. SELF-ACTUALIZATION—Self-actualization is the full realization of our own potential. Simply stated, that means we know our limits and try to perform, within those limits, to our full potential. These five levels of needs are acted out in behaviors. You, as a leader, with an understanding of these needs, can help your people satisfy their needs and be more successful..

With the way our current society is, for women it’s obvious the safety-security need isn’t being met enough and so as a result the needs that follow that one also suffer. So why isn’t the government doing enough? The government needs to
meet human needs FIRST before bringing a religion into it.

The truth of the pay gap is in the detail, which is why it is notoriously rare to find cases of prosecuted wage discrimination based on gender.

Single dads need help for creating a retirement fund, and I hope we can be considered equally with needy women on this count.

Thank you

Paul.

Most mothers demand a work-life balance by working part-time or not at all in paid, “work-work”.

Meanwhile, while mum is holding the baby, Dad is left carrying the mortgage! Tragically, most men are forced to INCREASE their working hours when they become fathers. The fact that they put up with the extra hours with little complaint doesn’t make it ‘fair’, or that they want to.

According to the ABS, Australian dads work 5hrs a day longer then mothers in paid “work-work”. Is that fair? 5hrs-a-day is a lot of housework!

Work-life balance?
Dads struggle to maintain a work-sleep balance!

PAY
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All these extra hours of work, for all these years, mean that dads end up earning more… you have to get the experience before you get the promotion.

For the same work and for the same experience, women get paid MORE than men. For example before most people start a family, young women get paid more per hour than young men.

Women’s hourly pay rates only drop below men’s when woman’s average wage is diluted by those women who work part-time or don’t work at all for many years.

Dirty, Dangerous and Remote
——————————————
Should a brick layer be paid more than a secretary? Working in insecure, contract hours (no leave), outdoors in dirty and dangerous conditions? Yes, he should be paid more.

What about a miner in remote WA? Or a garbage collector? Pub security ‘bouncer’ struggling with brawling drunks?

Here’s a test, next time you are up at 3am, look around and see who is working? Male security, male taxi drivers, male road wokers, male long-dstance truckies, and prostitutes. All equally dreadfull jobs, all well paid - and nearly all men’s jobs.

That’s why men earn more - they work harder, longer, sacrifice themselves by long hours and in dirty, dangerous or remote jobs…

If you control for lifetime total hours worked, and industry (eg mining vs hospitality), women earn more than men. That’s discrimination against men!

www.fathers4equality-australia.org

That leads to my first suggestion: that the “equal opportunity” commission remove unnecessary gender bias from its target questions.

That suggestion made, I would like to make brief mention of my situation which I believe represents a growing constituency. I am a full-time single dad of two children. I live on the poverty line and rely on parenting payments and part-time work to get food onto the table, pay rent, etc. The primary problem I’m facing is sourcing enough part-time work while my kids are at school, which I’m finding very hard. I presently do about 10hrs a week gardening work, but require more and am finding many employers are preferring to hire childless part-time workers. On top of this Centerlink is pressuring me to get 15hrs a week paid work, which I simply can’t find. So it would be helpful if something was done to give single “parents” more opportunities to access part-time work….. maybe some kind of preferential system?

Please begin considering males in your equal-opportunity questions.

Thank you,

Sincerely,

Paul

I find it very heartbreaking to hear stories of women from earlier generations whose husbands denied them access to their (the husband’s) superannuation, at the time of divorce. I am almost unable to comprehend this. I am sure not many men behaved in this way toward their wives or their children.

When I hear and consider the changes to women’s roles since the second world war, I am in total admiration of women who have children. Women’s roles have totally diversified and yet my experience and observation is that men in Australia, are not allowed to participate in the diversification of their roles (I am thinking here of the male primary school teacher who was refused permission to work part time to help raise his children). When I hear of women who are mothers and are working, I am in awe. I think modern women are under enormous pressure to work outside the home and yet simultaneously, do practical and emotional caring of their family networks.

I am in the process of gradually separating myself from the consumerist, materialist ideology that I have unconsciously absorbed over my lifetime in Australia. The fact that our society regards the nurturing of relationships (childrearing, or looking after elderly parents) as empty of value because the activity does not generate money, is a position that now totally disgusts me. And the fact that I once held this position myself is also distressing to me. Australia’s attitude toward child rearing is very evident in the salaries and status it accords to child care workers.

I very much support pressure on government to move away from the dominant model of full time work with 4 weeks annual leave, which seems to me to be based on the 1950s model of working man who has a dependent wife to take care of his children and his mother and anyone else who might need human care and comfort.

I apologise for mixing up two different positions here: support for modifying and updating employment practices for both men and women versus a personal journey I am on, to ensure that my life does not revolve around consuming more and more disposable goods which are un-necessary.

Thank you very much for undertaking the listening tour.