This year marks sixty years since the marriage bar laws were lifted, yet the male breadwinner model they enforced continues to shape Australia’s labour laws.
What does this look like for working women?
It’s an economy that relies on our labour, with bodies that don’t always fit the ‘ideal worker’ norm. It’s carrying and caring for children while employers demand you compete equally with male counterparts; it’s a gender pay gap that reinforces financial inequality, and an overarching expectation of constant availability despite physiological differences that make this unfeasible.
So why are we still operating under a male breadwinner model?
Because the Fair Work Act represents roughly over 100 years of labour laws, where men worked full-time, and women absorbed the unpaid labour of domestic duties. Women’s participation in the workforce has rapidly increased since the 1970s, yet the legal framework governing work has not kept pace with this change. Rather than actively dismantling the assumptions that all workers are ‘ideal workers, ’ women have been left to adapt to a model that was never designed for them. Pregnancy, menstrual conditions and menopause are just some of the circumstances that our current labour laws fail to provide any paid protections for, by the state or employers.
This slow rate of progress is particularly jarring when compared with the marriage bar laws, a set of regulations introduced by the Federal Government in the early twentieth century that required women to resign from their paid employment when they married. These laws remind us that Australia has not been shy of utilising deeply interventionist policies that restrict the operation of capitalism.
Through the marriage bar, the state intentionally structured the boundaries of the labour market along gendered lines, excluding half the population from paid work. These laws served to entrench the male breadwinner model, insulate men from labour competition, and limit women’s autonomy. They were lifted out of economic necessity with labour demand being the catalyst.
From 1966 to 2026, where has policy taken us?
The contradiction today is that the state now appears reluctant to intervene in ways that might constrain profit‑making. Take pregnancy. A pregnant woman is entitled to the same number of personal leave days as her male counterpart. For anyone who has experienced pregnancy, that is plainly inadequate. Medical appointments alone can quickly exhaust available leave, before even accounting for nausea, fatigue and the unpredictable complications that often come with pregnancy.
Expecting pregnant workers to require no more personal leave than men is absurd. State intervention is currently limited to allowing women to commence parental leave early (effectively borrowing from later entitlements) or step away from paid work altogether. This speaks more to limiting an employer’s liability, with the cost borne entirely by women. This example is powerful because it shows that, where clear inequities arise, the state has not intervened adequately, and therefore the law still entrenches a male breadwinner model.
The solution? We need a new Fair Work Act
Much of the Fair Work Act, in its current form, follows a similar pattern. Where accommodations do exist, they are often framed in a discretionary manner giving employers an out under the broad reasoning of ‘business need’. The business need isn’t a new concept; it was used against women in both the Equal Pay Cases of 1969 and 1972, where employers argued they couldn’t afford to pay women the same as men. It’s concerning that women still must hear this excuse from employers, and even more concerning that this model remains state-sanctioned under the Fair Work Act.
Discrimination laws have attempted to address the reality that reproductive health is a structural feature of working life, not simply an external inconvenience. But they cannot, on their own, reshape Australia’s labour system or shift it away from the male breadwinner model.
That task rests with the Fair Work Act, and a government willing to intervene on behalf of women’s economic freedom.