Gender segregation continues to divide the Australian workforce, with women dominating care and education sectors, and men making up most of those in mining and construction.
It’s a problem that’s contributing to the gender pay gap. It’s further cementing already entrenched ideas about which sectors and professions different genders can access and pursue, and creating limitations that can only worsen skill shortages.
Is getting women into male-dominated professions like construction, mining and STEM-related fields, by creating more family-friendly environments, the answer?
Such a shift will certainly help. But so too will placing greater value on sectors that are dominated by women: like nursing, aged care and early childhood education. These workers need more money and more recognition for the work they do. They also need more colleagues, given the chronic skill shortages that are affecting these areas.
How about pursuing ideas to get more boys inspired by such work, and more men crossing into these sectors? An ambition that could work alongside efforts to inspire more girls into STEM, and more women pursuing and staying in STEM-related fields?
Today, the Committee for Economic Development of Australia (CEDA) has called out their concerns about gender segregation, noting a number of key examples, such as where the proportion of women graduating from STEM areas has hardly changed since 2015. As for those that do graduate from such fields, men are more than 1.8 times more likely than women to still be working in STEM five years later.
CEDA is warning that the segregation could further deepen, in its submission to the federal government’s Employment White Paper. As such, it’s made a series of recommendations it believes will help, including pushing for at least 40 per cent female representation on company boards, promoting gender-equal paid parental leave, and promoting hiring practices that screen out personal details in the initial stages.
They see reducing the “motherhood penalty” as a key piece to increasing opportunities for women, noting where women drop out of inflexible workplaces, and citing the shocking stat that a woman’s earnings drop 55 per cent in the first five years of parenting, while an average man’s earning are unaffected. Meanwhile, 99.5 per cent of paid parental leave continues to be taken by mothers.
CEDA has also pushed for a focus on transparency – which could also be a game changer, especially if we could see the public publishing of employer gender pay gaps, and women in STEM programs publishing evaluation data as a condition of their funding (Although on this, Australia’s Women in STEM Ambassador Lisa Harvey-Smith has already released a comprehensive STEM Equity Evaluation Portal in 2022). CEDA has also recommended for the focus on women in STEM programs to shift to mentoring and leadership.
CEDA’s recommendations are an excellent start and could likely make a significant difference – especially when it comes to large employers creating more family-friendly policies in workplaces and encouraging more men to work flexibly, part time, and to take longer stints of paid parental leave.
But the elephant in the room? The poor rates of pay continuing to plague female-dominated workforces – workforces that are typically centred around care and are experiencing significant skill shortages right now. We simply continue to undervalue feminised workforces that happen to centre around the care work that underpins everything else in Australia.
And where are the programs to encourage and mentor men in care roles?
CEDA hints at barriers facing men in care, but is mostly short on making key recommendations to address the issue. It notes a 2022 Australian study that found men receive 50 per cent more callbacks than women for jobs in male-dominated occupations, but then 40 per cent fewer callbacks for roles in female-dominated occupations. It says men are actively discouraged from entering female-dominated industries, like care-related roles, due to negative stereotypes and discrimination from patients and staff. It makes a general note about pursuing anti-discrimination campaigns, “that focus on men and tackle the stereotypical norm that care work is women’s work could have a positive impact”. It also makes a major recommendation around “blind” recruitment practices that can help in removing gender bias across all sectors.
Encouraging more boys and men to pursue careers in care requires a significant cultural shift regarding who is best suited to this work. It requires flexibility, transparency, and gender-neutral paid parental leave, more diverse representation in leadership and across boards and recruitment practices that can help remove discrimination during the early hiring stage.
But the real silver bullet for pursuing more gender diversity in female-dominated care sectors? Ensuring these sectors are valued as they should be, and can therefore offer compelling opportunities for economic security for those pursuing care-related professions and careers.
Key stats from CEDA’s report:
- Female participation has risen by 41 per cent since 1980
- Just 31 per cent of primary temporary migration applications were women
- Women’s earnings drop 55 per cent during their first five years of parenting, while the average man’s earnings remain unaffected.
- 96.6 per cent of childcare workers were women in 2021-22, an actual increase from 1986-87
- Women made up 70 per cent of the Health Care and Social Assistance sector in 2018, up from 77.2 per cent in 1998
- The proportion of women enrolled in STEM-related courses at university has risen just one per cent since 2015 to 35 per cent in 2020
- Men continue to dominate in leadership positions even in female-dominated industries. Women make up 38 per cent of CEOs across female-dominated sectors and 7 per cent of CEOs in male-dominated sectors.