The Federal Government’s Jobs and Skills summit is an important opportunity to build back better after the pandemic. But in any reimagining of Australia’s economic future, women and gender equity must be centre stage.
GENVIC has been calling for a gender-equal road to recovery after the historic health and economic shock of the pandemic. This is not a task for polite tinkering. The Jobs summit needs to explore recalibration and redistribution to address systemic gender inequities.
There is a reason why Premier Dan Andrews has announced FREE tertiary degrees for nurses in the state on the eve of the summit. The first Victorian Skills Plan with a gender lens has predicted a shortage in caring professions, like nursing and health care services, within the next three years.
If we are serious about lifting wages, increasing productivity and setting the nation up for a continuing, prosperous future, we must also get serious about the care economy and improving the conditions of women workers.
Gender Equity Victoria has five priorities for jobs and skills. The summit should:
Prepare for a gender-equal jobs and skills strategy
Gender equity should not be a two-page afterthought or addendum to a strategy centred only in building employment pathways for men. Australia’s economic productivity is linked to empowering the underutilised talent of more than half of our population.
Every time a woman reduces her working hours, compromises her career aspirations, or quits working altogether because she can’t balance caring for children and her employment, must be considered a jobs and skills system failure.
Addressing our paid parental leave scheme, our childcare subsidies and early childhood education system, must be core business of the jobs plan.
Plan for an economic future based on a caring economy
There is a reason we are experiencing, teacher, nursing and early childhood educator shortages in Australia.
Caring roles are deeply gender-segregated in Australia. During the pandemic, the high demand for caring work coupled with poor wages and conditions has created a perfect skills shortage storm.
The pandemic demonstrated that care work is essential scaffolding of all economic activity. It needs to be invested in and recompensed accordingly. And that will mean some form of redistribution from the gender discriminatory preferences currently shown in public subsidies to male dominated industries.
The Victorian Skills Authority predicts that the state needs to hire an additional 64,718 health and community workers by 2025 to meet demand. This is double the jobs anticipated for construction and three times more than required in manufacturing. The Victorian Health and Community sector is 75 per cent women. Education and nursing, also feminised industries, are also crying out for new staff. Redistribution to lift care worker income in recognition of the essential role they play in our economy, is vital to the future of all jobs.
Further, ensuring women returning to the paid workforce after taking time away for caring responsibilities do not have their skills and experiences dismissed or discounted by prospective employers is essential to gender economic justice. Opportunities for skills/training is important for everyone, but especially when inefficiencies and inequities in the system have a gender dimension.
The Victorian Skills Plan has dedicated action to bridge the gender gap, prioritising gender impact assessments and gender desegregated data to help the sector plan better for jobs for the future, as well as encouraging partnerships between employers, unions and the Government to increase demand for women workers in non-traditional occupations. Victoria’s landmark Gender Equality Act 2020 has played a significant part in influencing the Victorian Skills Authority’s gender lens. The Commonwealth will also need a National Gender Equality Strategy, with legislative teeth, running parallel to its jobs and skills agenda.
Establish Jobs and Skills Australia with a dedicated unit to drive intersectional gender equity through the national skills system
This unit should be empowered to review and improve gender equity in our training and education provider system, the way that we assess quality, forecast labour needs, evaluate success of our training system and the cultural/policy settings (inclusive of funding, education/training practice and advisory mechanisms).
This unit should also apply a gender lens to skilled migration. Gender discriminatory practices don’t just occur in skill acquisition, but also in skills recognition. How do we recognise the value of the skills and competencies that women possess, especially migrant women who earned their credentials internationally?
Embed principles of shared care at home and for the environment
So much that is wrong in the world has its origins in the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944, when a group of post-war male economists and business leaders arbitrarily decided what should be counted towards Gross Domestic Product.
The exclusion of all forms of care and domestic work, the vast majority of which is done by women, has entrenched gender inequity within our homes and economy.
Victoria’s unpaid care economy has been estimated to be valued at $206B – half of the state’s GDP. To pretend something of this size does not exist in economic terms produces perverse results in our productivity and participation planning. It affects profit and the paid workforce. A new vision of jobs and skills in Australia should make it possible for both men, women and non-binary people to undertake paid work, while sharing the care of loved ones and the home.
Examine the growth of micro-enterprise during the pandemic
Micro-enterprises are a gender equity, self-help solution adopted by Australian women. Faced with workplaces that don’t work for them – inflexible working hours and unequal pay – women have taken employment into their own hands. During the pandemic, entrepreneurial women created thousands of unincorporated, self-employment opportunities to counter job losses.
Imagine if we invested in these women? Suppose that instead of marginalising single mums on benefits, we supported women to work from home, incentivising entrepreneurialism and offering tax breaks and mentoring opportunities to scale up operations. The summit needs to call for more support for microenterprise research and initiatives, like the one envisaged by GENVIC, Fitted for Work and Koorie Women Mean Business, to help women transition from self-employed micro-business to job-creating small to medium enterprises.
There are reasons for hope at the Jobs summit. We are privileged to have two of our board members, economists Dr Angela Jackson and Dr Leonora Risse, in the room offering solutions for the way ahead. We have the fullest confidence in their contributions. And we will be watching if the post-Summit White Paper listens to women’s expertise and their lived experience in the Australian workforce.