Yet despite a third of Australians living and working outside major cities, workplace gender strategies often tend to focus on metropolitan corporate workers while the challenges of regional workers are overlooked.
Highlighting how the needs of women in regional areas differ to those in metropolitan areas, Dr Larissa Bamberry, Senior Lecturer at Charles Sturt University, says one example is flexible work. While it is often seen as a key strategy to get more women into the workplace, it is not necessarily a big incentive for regional women.
“The types of jobs that people in regional areas would get generally have a lot more structure to their hours, giving women less autonomy over those hours,” says Dr Bamberry who recently conducted research in the La Trobe Valley in Victoria, which included looking at factors that impinged on women’s work / life balance.
“What we found is that this didn’t add to their work / life stress as it often does in city areas. Women in regional areas found that type of structure useful because it gave them the capacity to plan their lives around it.”
Instead the research found that basic infrastructural challenges such as no public transport and a lack of available childcare were contributing to regional women’s careers languishing.
Furthermore regional women lacking the skillset needed to command higher wages made the trade-off for going back to work much greater for regional women as the cost of childcare often outweighs the money that they can make.
According to Dr Bamberry, up-skilling regional women in industries such as construction, manufacturing or farming as well as stimulating women-dominated industries will help break the “male breadwinner” gender regime underpinning regional labour markets.
“The Government policies are often focused on up-skilling the men in these regional areas – but there needs to be a focus on up-skilling women and recognising the role they play in these regional economies,” says Dr Bamberry, whose research looked into economic restructuring and development in areas such as North West Tasmania, the La Trobe Valley and Geelong.
“We tend not to think, for example, how industries such as education and health help to build a region and these are big industries for women.”
“In Australia for example, health is growing massively with an ageing population. We are going to need aged care and health and we need to value those industries more than we do.”
Distance learning and online education will play a big part in breaking the male breadwinner model in regional areas.
“It’s almost like a vicious cycle – you need to get those skillsets up in order to command higher wages, afford childcare and return to the workforce. If you don’t have good public transport to take you between TAFEs and universities it’s not possible,” she says. “Therefore in regional areas distance education facilitates a lot of women to be able to get their skills up to date and return to work.”
Charles Sturt University is also placing a big focus on regional entrepreneurship to help women develop better entrepreneurial skills, encouraging women to apply what they are learning through workplace learning experiences or assessment tasks that relate directly to their industry.
“This is another way in which a lot of regional women can overcome these barriers to the labour market – by setting up their own business,” says Dr Bamberry.
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