Men and women want respect, security and the ability to manage work and care – but are they getting it?

Australian men are better paid than women even though women have higher education qualifications and “higher rates of skills attainment,” NSWNMA’s annual conference heard.

University of Sydney Professor Rae Cooper AO said women work fewer paid hours than men “partly because they do many more hours of unpaid work at home”.

However, “men’s wages are higher than women’s wages even when we control for things such as the fact that women work tend to work shorter hours and men to tend to work longer hours,” she said.

Prof Cooper, who is founding director of the Australian Centre for Gender Equality and Inclusion at Work, said nursing was “a very feminised sector” of the labour market which is “highly undervalued in terms of the wages that you’re paid and in terms of the quality of the work that you undertake – regardless of the enormous social and economic importance of the work that you perform”.

“If you ask me what the biggest problem is – where is the area we should be concentrating most of our effort – it would be about trying to lift the wages and the job quality in the areas that are highly feminised professions and highly feminised labour markets.”

She described job security as “a really feminised issue in the labour market”.

‘PRECARIOUS WORK IS WOMEN’S WORK’

“Precarious work is women’s work primarily. The majority of people who work on casual contracts or short-term contracts are women.

“That has an impact not just in terms of the money they paid per hour that they’re working, it also has an impact on the extent to which they are invested in by their employers, their value and whether they have a career path.”

Prof  Cooper  said  that  during 25 years of research into gender segregation in the labour market she had seen gender issues become mainstream issues.

“I think one of the reasons it has become quite a central issue when we talk about work/job quality and the nature of careers is because of the great advocacy of unions like the Nurses and Midwives.”

GENDER EQUALITY IS A WORK AND BARGAINING ISSUE

She said gender equality at work was a union issue and an issue in bargaining.

“It completely is an issue in public policy and it should be an issue that governments are looking at in terms of their programs and their expenditures in their budgets.”

She said that in a national survey last year, her centre asked workers under 40 to identify the features of work that would allow them to flourish in their careers.

The top three features identified by both women and men were “A job in which I am treated with respect”, “a secure job” and “a job where I can manage my work and care”.

The survey showed women and men were achieving their aspirations in almost identical proportions.

However, women had higher expectations and therefore failed to meet their goals at a higher rate.

For example, 92 per cent of women and 88 per cent of men said they wanted “a job in which I am treated with respect”.

Only 76 per cent of women and 77 per cent of men said they had such a job.

A LACK OF RESPECT

Prof  Cooper said it was very disturbing that only three quarters of people said they were treated with respect in their workplace.

On job security, 91 per cent of women and 87 per cent of men said they wanted a secure job but only 73 per cent of women and 72 per cent of men had such a job.

The ability to manage work and care revealed the biggest gap between women and men in terms of what they aspire to and what they currently have.

Among survey respondents, 89 per cent of women and 85 per cent of men said they wanted a job that allowed them to manage work and care.

Only 36 per cent of women and 37 per cent of men had achieved that.

In other words, 53 per cent of women and 48 per cent of men had jobs which prevented them from achieving their goal of being able to manage both work and care.

Prof Cooper said the survey also reflected “a rising interest from men around wanting to be able to find ways that they can balance their working lives and their caring lives”.

She said meeting these needs should not been seen as a cost.

“We should be looking at it as an investment in terms of finding ways to boost participation for women, finding ways … to participate in high quality jobs where they are engaged and they want to stay, and having women being able to work more hours in the types of jobs that they want to work in.”