Ten years ago, women spent a lot of time trying to 'have it all' — both a rewarding career and a family life. But it's clear now that 'having it all' is impossible and trying to achieve it just leads to stress and burnout.
Women may be capable, especially when it comes to things like multitasking and emotional labour, but they're not superheroes. Some declare it a failure of feminism that this juggle has proved too difficult for most of us, but if we were ever going to have it all, we needed some help to get there (and still do).
That help has been slow in coming. A recent report by AIFS shows that only one in 20 men takes primary parental leave after the birth of a child and very few work part-time. Women continue to take time out of their working lives to care for children while men's careers carry on pretty much the same as they did before.
This expectation that mothers are the default primary carers for children is a contributing factor to poorer outcomes for women such as the gender pay gap (currently standing at 14.1 per cent of full-time earnings) and superannuation balances that are on average 42 per cent lower at retirement than for men.
If we really want to address this gender inequity, we need to make it easy for fathers to take on a larger caregiving role at home.
Employers play an enormous role in this shift. A WGEA insight paper into gender-balanced parental leave argued that employers have a crucial role in normalising fathers' utilisation of parental leave and flexible working to meet caring requirements. Critical to fathers' uptake of parental leave was a supportive workplace culture and leadership support.
Employer-led change is happening. Medibank introduced FamilyFlex in 2018, which swaps leave for 'primary' and 'secondary' carers for a universal policy offering 14 weeks' leave to all parents. 'We want to change the story and provide greater flexibility and participation in carer responsibilities regardless of gender. Parental leave disproportionately affects female employees, and it shouldn't,' Medibank Group Executive of People and Culture Kylie Bishop said at the time.
"Every workplace in the country should be family friendly by default. We're accustomed to mothers working part-time — it should be completely normal for fathers to work part-time too."
From 1 July, law firm Baker McKenzie will offer its employees 18 weeks of leave following the birth or adoption of a child, regardless of whether they are the mother of father. 'Gender-neutral parental leave policies help us move away from "women having babies" to "people raising families",' Anne-Marie Allgrove, chair of Baker McKenzie's Diversity and Inclusion Committee, told Women's Agenda. At Telstra, 16 per cent of all employees who took primary carer parental leave in 2017-18 were men — a considerably higher proportion than the national average at five per cent.
But progress is patchy, even at Telstra, which introduced its All Roles Flex policy in 2014. The number of women who work part-time at Telstra still far outnumbers part-time men: 14.2 per cent of Telstra's female employees work part-time, while men who work part-time are still a rarity, making up just 1.7 per cent of all male employees.
If we want more men to take on a greater role in caregiving, what we need is structural change: universal, use-it-or-lose-it parental leave that is offered to both parents instead of the old primary and secondary caregiver model that entrenches existing limiting gender roles.
Iceland and Sweden, whose parental leave policies include three months of non-transferrable leave allocated to each parent, have the highest percentage of men (45 per cent) receiving government-funded paid parental leave in the OECD. The two countries also have the highest number of days of parental leave used by men: in 2016, 29 per cent and 28 per cent of parental leave days were used by men respectively.
Every workplace in the country should be family friendly by default. We're accustomed to mothers working part-time — it should be completely normal for fathers to work part-time too. Yet research by the University of Plymouth found that men who request flexible work arrangements must contend with the 'fatherhood penalty' — a negative bias that saw their commitment to their career questioned.
The benefits of allowing families to adopt a more gender-balanced approach to parenting aren't just economic. A Swedish study assessing the impact of a law that allowed fathers to take 30 days of leave at any time in the 12 months after birth while the mother was still on maternity leave found that maternal postpartum health was dramatically improved.
According to a report in the New York Times: 'In the first six months postpartum, there was a 26 per cent decrease in anti-anxiety prescriptions compared with mothers who gave birth just before the policy went into effect. There was a 14 per cent reduction in hospitalisations or visits to a specialist, and an 11 per cent decrease in antibiotic prescriptions.'
For the nation's health and economic wellbeing, we should allow parents the leeway to fulfil their family commitments in the workday — after all, happy workers are productive workers.
Nicola Heath is a freelance journalist who writes about the workplace, social affairs, sustainability, and the arts and entertainment. She tweets at @nicoheath.
Main image: Wavebreakmedia / Getty