Peter Dutton wants public sector employees back in the office five days a week. Leaving aside the necessity or even popularity of this campaign promise, the opposition leader has claimed that the move won’t disadvantage women because there are “plenty of job sharing arrangements”.
There are many problems with this claim. But to begin with, it is simply not true. According to the Workplace Gender Equality Agency’s first Scorecard on the Commonwealth Public Sector, 75 per cent of employees in the Commonwealth public sector work full-time, compared to 54 per cent in the private sector. Women are more likely than men to be employed in part-time roles. The rates of manager roles (not even leadership roles) available to part-time employees are similar to the private sector, at eight per cent. That means that there are very few part-time roles available in the public sector and even fewer part-time roles for manager and above.
The situation in the broader workforce is similar. The latest results from WGEA show that while companies are making significant shifts across the board on gender pay gaps and women in leadership, the number of women working part-time remains the same and management roles and higher for part-time workers are persistently stagnant.
So, where are these “plenty of job sharing arrangements,” Mr Dutton?
Katy Gallagher responded that the opposition doesn’t have “women’s interests at heart, they don’t see it as a central economic driver of growth.” She claimed that the opposition have no idea how working families operate – but does the government? Have they consulted the families where one parent (most often the women) has to scale back their workload to manage the family demands, only to find themselves languishing in a role they are overqualified for? Does she know what it’s like to be told by an employer that she will have to take a step down because she “can’t commit”?
Both party’s responses show their complete disconnect with the lives of modern Australians. The struggles that Australians face every day as they decide how to best manage their lives in a time where it feels like every dollar of every pay cheque is spent, and any unexpected event feels existential.
There need to be a suite of options for everyone—not just parents—to be able to better manage the demands of work and life. From working from home, to job-sharing. And these need to be implemented urgently, before we all implode from the stress of just living!
What we’ve learnt from two years of campaigning as a job-sharing candidate for the Senate is that no one receiving the service actually cares how the work is getting done, as long as it is getting done.
No one waiting for their Centrelink payment to come through is thinking, “I wish that person was sitting in an office, not at home in his trackies.” They just want their Centrelink payment to come through.
No veteran seeking mental health support is worried where their counsellor is working from, they are just desperately hoping for some help.
If decision makers were focused less on the inputs and more on the outputs, that is when we would see the meaningful outcomes Australians want to vote for.
And maybe, if Peter Dutton or Katy Gallagher had actually looked at what the workforce was like for modern Australians, they would know that making simple statements like these will help no one.