More schools are talking about four-day weeks for students in Australia, just as more offices are issuing return-to-office mandates, and part time work continues to limit promotion opportunities.
These three trends are at odds with each other, especially as employers and policymakers claim they also want to improve women’s economic security and close leadership gaps by offering more opportunities for promotions.
The part time promotions cliff, along with return to office mandates and shorter school weeks, are converging at a time when parents continue to struggle with the fact the standard 9 to 3 school day comes nowhere close to matching the standard 9 to 5 work day, while four weeks of annual leave is no match for the average 12 weeks of school holidays students receive every year.
The impact of part time work on leadership ambitions is significant, with just seven per cent of people in managerial positions in Australia working part-time, according to WGEA’s Census of almost 5 million workers at employers with more than 100 team members.
The higher you look up the leadership chain, the less likely you are to find people working part time. Just five per cent of Key Management Personnel work part time, and a tiny three per cent of CEOs worked part time during the period analysed.
So it’s clear part time work is still not, unfortunately, much of a path for pursuing management and leadership positions. This is an issue that is particularly problematic when thinking about closing the gender gap on women in leadership positions at these employers, given women account for significantly more part time employees than men.
Now for the added impact of four day school weeks. Will they push more women into part time work, or lengthen the period of time women stay working part time? Or could they ultimately enable more men to work part time and help to remove the “full” and “part” time barriers altogether?
I’m not convinced a four-day school week will do anything more than create yet more unpaid work for women with children and caring responsibilities. And, therefore, further contribute to the motherhood penalty, which already sees a 55 per cent drop in earnings for women in the first five years after having a child, as the Women’s Economic Taskforce recently outlined.
Last week, Queensland’s Department of Education outlined a new plan allowing state primary and secondary schools to run trials of flexible class schedules, including four-day school weeks, to improve teacher wellbeing, enabling more teacher availability and other factors. Four-day school weeks are also being positioned to enable more time for teachers to complete out-of-class work and to position teaching as a more attractive career option, given chronic teacher shortages.
But it’s not all about teacher shortages.
In NSW, a Catholic school in the Southern Highlands has issued an option allowing some students to adopt a four-day in-person school week running from Tuesday to Friday, with Mondays left to “learn from home” for those in years 10 to 12, whose parents give written permission. In this case, teachers must still go to the school campus.
The principal at Chevalier College, Greg Miller, does note describe their plan as being a “four-day school week”, given students will be required to learn on the Monday. He told Sarah Abo on the Today show this morning that there will be “clear parameters about the expectations of students on that day to consolidate learning from the previous week and prepare for earning for the week coming up.”
But regardless of whether the school calls it a “five-day week” or not, to parents of kids at a school deciding to do this it will most likely feel like a “four-day school week”, given kids will be at home on the fifth day, potentially requiring more supervision during those hours.
While these four-day school weeks come as more employers are introducing four-day work weeks, they also come as more employers – including some of the largest employers in Australia – have been issuing return to office mandates, including rules around the number of days team members are expected to be in the office, as well as which days they should be in.
So increasingly, things are looking more and more difficult for parents, and particularly for mothers who continue to take on the bulk of the care and domestic duties, the mental load, and who – as we know – are already overwhelmingly more likely to work part time than men, and are facing the consequences of a lack of promotion and higher earning opportunities as a result.
Increasingly again, we are moving towards further divisions between those who can and can’t work from home, those who can and can’t work four-day weeks, and those who simply don’t have the option to work full time due to their care responsibilities. The idea of “learn from home” days for school students and “four-day school weeks” seems to merely further complicate the situation and add yet more challenges to women.
The principal at Chevalier College in Bowral says their move to have students learning one day from home comes because they are “becoming a future-facing school”.
But I’m not convinced this “future facing” approach can operate without further limiting economic opportunities for women, and therefore sending some factors firmly back into the past.