Tackling gender-based inequality at the nexus of employment, social security, and care: what next for women?
This week, Power to Persuade is featuring articles by forward-thinking experts involved in a recent workshop, Rethinking Welfare and Conditionality in Australia, convened by the Social Security Research Policy and Practice Network - a group of people from universities, advocacy organisations, and community services providers who are focused on achieving a social security system that affords people dignity and economic security. The workshop brought some of Australia’s leading social policy scholars and advocates working at the coalface of social security reform together to examine the impacts of recent policy and service delivery reforms on single parents and their children, unemployed workers, and others subject to mutual obligations and conditionality. More information about the Social Security Research Policy and Practice Network, and links to videos from the workshop, are provided below each article.
Today’s article is based on a panel discussion at the workshop with presenters Dr Zoe Staines (UQ), Associate Professor Elise Klein (ANU) and Dr Dina Bowman (Brotherhood of St Lawrence), exploring persistent gender-based inequities at the intersection of social security, paid employment and care, and strategies to move the dial for women. This post is authored by Dr Zoe Staines, but it captures the ideas and insights of all three panellists.
Despite some advancements over recent decades, gender-based inequality remains stubbornly persistent. Indeed, according to recent OECD data, men across the world continue to earn more than women, are more likely to be in senior positions in firms, are more likely to be high-paying jobs, and tend to own and control more assets. As Australia’s 2022 ‘gender equality scorecard’ shows, the situation is similar here, and outcomes are most dire for single and First Nations women.
Employment is often the main topic of discussion in relation to addressing gender inequality, but it is not the only important factor. This post draws attention to how gender inequality persists not only regarding waged labour, but also at the nexus of social security and care.
What does the employment, social security, and care nexus look like for women?
Women, and particularly single mothers (who account for 79.9% of all single parent households in Australia) and First Nations women, are more likely than men to be trapped in a ‘triple bind’, where employment, care, and social security can have the combined effect of reducing rather than improving economic security and wellbeing (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: The employment, social security, and care ‘nexus’ has disproportionately negative impacts for women, and particularly single and First Nations women
Australian Bureau of Statistics data demonstrate that Australian women overall are now more likely than ever to be employed, though employment rates remain relatively lower than men, and particularly low for First Nations women and single mothers. Women nevertheless continue to undertake disproportionately high rates of reproductive labour and care work, and this is often juggled as a ‘second shift’ alongside employment. First Nations women do more care work, and indeed more diverse forms of care work, than any other group in Australia, meaning that they are even more likely to be severely impacted. Generally, it is also the case that employment fails to be ‘family-friendly’ for parents and carers, meaning they are more likely to either reduce or exit employment as a strategy to manage their multiple roles.
This results in a persistent gender pay gap, which has only decreased marginally (by ~0.17% per year) since 1975, and which means that women earned 22.8% (or -$22.8k AUD) per annum less than men in 2022. It also produces a situation whereby women are more likely than men to draw on social security as a source of income for labour that is not remunerated through employment.
As the latest (June 2022) data from the Australian Department of Social Services show, women account for 64% of all social security recipients on average, and this proportion is much higher for social security payment types related to caring and reproductive labour (e.g., Parenting Payments where women represent 94% of total combined recipients). Additionally, despite only representing ~3% of the population, First Nations peoples make up about 7% of all social security recipients. Because social security payment rates are generally far lower than what can be earned in employment, this means these groups have generally lower incomes and are more likely to live in poverty.
Since the 1980s, Australia has seen a long line of social policy interventions aimed at ‘activating’ primary caregivers – typically mothers – into employment. This has been reflected, for instance, in the development of pre-employment programs for those who receive Parenting Payments, beginning with the Jobs Education Training (JET) program in 1989. Over time, such policies have moved from being voluntary to compulsory, and have overwhelmingly sought to prioritise employment – and indeed, any employment – over supporting care.
This is obvious under the current ParentsNext program, which subjects those receiving Parenting Payments who are also unemployed and have children aged between 9 months and 6 years, to mandatory mutual obligations, apparently to get them ‘work ready’. Participants who fail to meet these obligations can have their Parenting Payment suspended.
CEO of the Council of Single Mothers and their Children, Jenny Davidson, described ParentsNext as “punishing”, “unfair” and as a program that “increases stress and financial difficulty for parents with young children”. A more recent academic study by A/Prof Elise Klein showed that the program made mothers feel stigmatised as “useless… societal lepers”. Indeed, ParentsNext not only fails to make visible and value reproductive labour, but in fact condemns it as less valuable than employment.
Conversely, even where women do wish to move back into employment, the social security system can also penalise them. For example, Parenting Payment and Family Tax Benefit create high effective marginal tax rates (EMTRs) on second income earners. This has led to families facing EMTRs of 80%, compared to the statutory marginal tax rate of 47%, creating an in-built barrier to work; again, particularly for women.
So, what next for women?
One step that would greatly assist in addressing gender-based inequalities that occur at the nexus of employment, social security, and care, is to replace compulsory mutual obligations embedded in social security programs (like ParentsNext) with voluntary, high-quality, and long-term pre-employment support for women who choose to move back into employment. Such programs would need to be gender aware and culturally safe, as well as able to respond to local community knowledge and needs. This would mean that women themselves would have greater control over when, where, and how to balance reproductive care labour with employment, enabling them to do so in ways that best suit their needs and reduce risks to their economic security.
Policy reform is also urgently needed to address systematic and structural barriers to employment. For instance, these must (at the very least) strive to create employment that is more inviting for women who are also balancing care work, increase the amounts that people on working-age social security payments can earn from employment before their income support is reduced, and introduce universal access to quality childcare and early learning. For First Nations women in particular, workplace racism must also be urgently addressed as a significant barrier to employment.
In a more general sense, however, and as writers like Kathi Weeks, Nancy Fraser, and Carol Bacchi have long pointed to, these kinds of interventions do not tackle the root cause of the problem: patriarchal capitalism does not make visible nor value/remunerate women’s reproductive care labour in the first place. Indeed, it is not that women are inactive, unproductive, or unskilled, but instead that the forms of productivity they often undertake are simply not seen.
Socialist feminist writer, Nicole Aschoff, argues that a feminism worth fighting for “is one that struggles against … capitali[sm]” (emphasis added), and as bell hooks, Moreton-Robinson and others have also repeatedly pointed to, one that is also anti-racist. That is, as opposed to the ‘lean in’ emphases of liberal feminism that seek to subsume women into capitalism, an anti-capitalist (or indeed, socialist) and anti-racist feminism sees gender inequality and colonial oppression as part of the inherent architecture of capitalism itself. Because these oppressions are woven into the fabric of capitalism, particularly in how the capitalist wage-labour system dismisses reproductive labour, they cannot be overcome by simply aiming for employment or wage parity. Instead, we must pursue strategies (and indeed, perhaps entirely different institutional structures) that (re)centre and fundamentally value care (see Figure 2).
Figure 2: Moving from the residualisation of care, to the (re)centring of care
In this regard, the above strategies to make capitalism (including its welfare arm) fairer might be best seen as stepping-stone approaches. At the very least, more substantial changes such as introducing a basic income offer an avenue within capitalism to ensure that the important work of caring is supported and does not result in economic insecurity and dire poverty (although this is contingent, of course, on the rate at which basic income is paid). Whether or not this is sufficient, or whether something more radical is needed, must be a focus of continued discussion and debate if we are to address the root causes of persistent gender-based inequalities into the future, rather than just seeking band-aid fixes.
About the author:
Dr Zoe Staines is an ARC DECRA Senior Research Fellow at the School of Social Science, University of Queensland.
Links to videos from the workshop:
· Opening and panel on welfare-care-nexus - https://youtu.be/anHNZfzLV6U
· Stigma in welfare policy and practice - https://youtu.be/r0MuLc4gyqo
· Panel on employment services and welfare-to-work - https://youtu.be/cLbY50m5JRM
· Closing discussion - https://youtu.be/7JyAHjN0DMA
About the Social Security Research Policy and Practice Network:
The Social Security Research Policy and Practice Network is a group of over 30 people from universities, advocacy organisations, and community services providers who are focused on achieving a social security system that affords people dignity and economic security. Its members include representatives from the Brotherhood of St Laurence, the Australian Council of Social Services, Family Care, and the Anti-Poverty Centre as well as researchers from the University of Melbourne, Monash University, RMIT, Swinburne University, the Australian National University, Sydney University, the University of New South Wales, and the University of Queensland – all of whom work on the impacts of welfare conditionality on people’s lives and the frontline delivery of programs. The network formed in 2018 following the visit of Prof Sharon Wright (University of Glasgow) from the UK Welfare Conditionality project to Australia, and it has previously organised streams of the Australian Social Policy Conference.
Content moderator Dr Sue Olney