A report from Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) last week on women’s participation brought out some pretty silly coverage that allowed the outrage level to get turned up to 11. However, rather than seeking to destroy family life, the report only reflects what has been a long-standing issue for governments across the Western world — how to prevent women from being lost to the workforce after having children.
The OECD report came with a pretty dull headline of Key Issues for Raising Labor Market Participation in Australia.
However, dull headlines do not do much for readership and viewer numbers, so pretty quickly the report was spun into a suggestion that stay-at-home mothers were a drain on the economy.
This hot take allowed people to get nicely outraged because either they or their partner chose to stay home raising their kids, and how dare anyone suggest that is wrong.
The problem is the report was not suggesting that.
What the report addressed is that many women with children have significant barriers to work — such as the cost and lack of access to childcare and long periods out of the workforce — which see such women in effect left behind in their careers despite a generally above-average education attainment.
It also said that Australia’s economy would be improved were we to raise women’s participation in the workforce.
This is hardly revolutionary talk — indeed it has been government policy for nearly half a century, and what is more, it has been successful.
Fifty years ago, little more than a third of all women aged 25 to 64 were in the labor force; now, about three-quarters are. The key issue with raising women’s participation has always been women from the ages of 25 to 35 — that is, the years they are most commonly mothers with young children.
The reason it is such an issue is that it is tougher to return to work than to stay in work, and the big drop-off in women’s participation in their 20s and early 30s flows into lower numbers of women working in their 40s and 50s, and women also working in lower paid jobs.
So it is not just about fewer people working for the economy, it is about the effect leaving the workforce has on women and their families over the course of a life — less income, less superannuation for retirement, less independence.
Things certainly have changed.
In the early 1980s, 70 percent of women in their early 20s were in the workforce, but this fell to 55 percent in their late 20s. Now, the level is relatively flat at about 75 to 77 percent among women from 20 to 55.
However, the OECD report found that while the percentage of men employed in Australia was about the middle of OECD countries, the percentage of women employed was in the bottom third and lower than nations such as Canada, the UK and New Zealand. Curiously, the report also said that while the employment rate of women without children was high relative to the OECD, those with children was rather lower.
So any government seeking to raise the participation rate of women clearly needs to look at mothers rather than try to get more non-parent women working.
The report also found that while two-thirds of women with partners work, the 50 percent of single mothers who work is among the lowest in the OECD.
There is no particular reason why Australia should have such a low level of single mothers in the workforce, and the report merely sought to come up with ways to have Australia more in line with other nations. Suggesting work “coupled with the provision of affordable childcare” for such women is hardly treating stay-at-home mothers with disrespect.
The reality is a vast majority of mothers already do work, and the changes in women’s participation in the workforce can been seen by comparing the life experience of women aged 30, 40, 50 and 60.
A woman born in 1956 was most likely to be working when she was in her 40s — and only 55 percent of her peers were working in their late 20s, compared with about 75 percent of such aged women born 20 years later in 1976.
However, one issue the report has identified is that Australian women are much more likely to work part-time than mothers in other OECD nations.
However, this is not just about mothers, but is a long-term issue in the labor market. While women born after 1956 have been much more likely to be in the workforce than their now 60-year-old colleagues, the likelihood of women working full-time has not improved by similar amounts.
A 40-year-old woman is now as likely to be working full-time as a 40-year-old was 20 years ago. It is part of the broader trend in Australia away from full-time work — and applies to men as well as women.
While the OECD report suggests greater provision of childcare is one way to enable women to gain more hours of work, the trend since the global financial crisis away from full-time jobs suggests the issue might be deeper than just working while raising a child.
The measurement of unpaid childcare and work at home has always been a issue for economists. As the economist Paul Samuelson used to joke, if a man married his maid, then all other things being equal, GDP would fall.
However, the key to talk of improving growth by increasing women’s participation is that unpaid work is either now paid — through things such as paid childcare or a paid cleaner — or that the unpaid work is still done.
Here we come to perhaps the biggest barrier to increasing women’s participation and hours of work — the culture of who does the unpaid work at home.
The 2014 Household, Income and Labor Dynamics in Australia survey found that women do much more of the housework and childcare than men, regardless of whether they earn less, the same or more than their partner.
Perhaps the uncomfortable truth is that one big barrier to mothers working more paid hours is fathers not doing enough unpaid work.
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