Released on Wednesday, the data shows nearly 28 per cent of this group cited a lack of access to early childhood education and care as a barrier to employment, due to spots being booked out or inaccessible to them geographically. And 11.1 per cent said it was too expensive. 

The figures add to the mounting evidence of the “motherhood penalty“, the idea that becoming a mum in Australia comes with a high price for women. Last year, Treasury analysis found that women’s earnings falling by an average of 55 per cent in the first five years of parenthood, while men’s earnings are generally unaffected when they enter parenthood.

The ABS survey asked women with children under 15 what would help them in being able to take on a job. The majority (67.6 per cent) said the strongest incentive is the ability to work part-time hours. Many women also cited the ability to work during school hours and 53 per cent cited the ability to vary start and finish times. 

“These findings tell the story of the juggling act that so many women find themselves trying to balance– one that strikes the right balance between feeling financially stable and pursuing parenthood in a way that works for them,” said Georgie Dent, CEO of The Parenthood.

“Unfortunately, the structure of our society is still set up for an era that no longer exists, when dads worked and mums didn’t.

“In modern Australia it takes two incomes for most families to cover a mortgage or the rent, but it takes affordable early childhood education and outside school hours and care to earn two incomes.” 

Georgie Dent, CEO of The Parenthood

Unlocking $128 billion for the Australian economy

This isn’t just a personal issue either. The systemic barriers holding women back from the workforce are costing the Australian economy $128 billion, according to the Women’s Economic Equality Taskforce. The tasforce released a final report at the end of last year, looking at how much money could be gained with women’s full and equal participation in economic activity. 

“Women’s economic inequality is so normalised that people assume it is a result of women’s choices, but Australia has the most highly educated female labour force in the world,” the Chair of the Women’s Economic Equality Taskforce, Sam Mostyn AO told the National Press Club back in October. 

Considering this high price for the Australian economy, Dent says that “early childhood education and care centres in Australia should be funded by the government as critical infrastructure”. 

“Early childhood education and paid parental leave must be seen as critical infrastructure. You can’t go to work if you don’t have a road to get there. You can’t go to work if you don’t have an affordable and safe place for your kid. These things are synonymous.”

Gender equal parenting

Last month, The Parenthood launched The Dad’s Alliance Action Plan, showing that Australian men also want to see a cultural shift in which childcare and employment policies permit both parents to share the work and care loads. 

To do this, Dent says The Parenthood wants the Government to remove the Activity Test (a highly criticised requirement for parents to access subsidised early childhood education and care), make childcare more affordable for low and middle income families with young children and develop more early learning centres in regional and remote areas. 

“We also want to see an increase to paid parental leave entitlements for both mothers and fathers, so that less parents feel their care and career trajectories are at odds,” says Dent.

The post Caring responsibilities are largest barrier to employment for majority of women, new ABS data finds appeared first on Women's Agenda.

The “motherhood penalty”, an umbrella term coined to encapsulate the myriad of issues that contribute to mothers’ inequality in the workplace, includes: the “chores gap”, i.e. the fact that women shoulder the lion’s share of unpaid care and domestic work, the lack of flexible work or equitable parental leave policies for fathers and mothers to help level that domestic playing field, the lack of access to affordable childcare, and gender-based discrimination, including pregnancy discrimination.

In short, the concept of the motherhood penalty captures all of the issues that have long contributed to a career cliff edge of sorts for too many mothers, forcing them onto a “mummy track” of poorer pay and poorer prospects — if they manage to continue working at all.   

In Australia, that penalty has been deeply entrenched and, according to data, is getting worse. Now, several leading experts are sounding the alarm, telling Women’s Agenda that the perfect storm on all these fronts brought on by COVID-19 could exacerbate the troubling trend.

The motherhood penalty in Australia – entrenched and getting worse

In 2018, Women’s Agenda surveyed all the available gender equality data to surface key trends for a report, Press for (immediate) Progress, and concluded that there was a significant motherhood penalty in Australia — and it was getting worse.

According to the Diversity Council, which regularly produces a report, “She’s Priceless”, looking at the drivers of the gender pay gap, the influence of years not working, i.e. career interruptions (usually related to the birth of children), has more than doubled since the Diversity Council first researched the drivers of the gender pay gap ten years ago.

What’s more, Australia has some of the highest part-time work rates for women in the world, according to the OECD. Only Switzerland and the Netherlands outrank us. The cost of childcare has been outpacing inflation and wage growth, crippling the family budget. Women have typically spent up to twice as much time on unpaid domestic housework and caring as men. And last, but not least, 1 in 2 women report experiencing discrimination while pregnant, on maternity leave or when they return to work.

Over a lifetime, this adds up to the ultimate “motherhood penalty”, with women retiring with on average half the superannuation as men, and older single women the fastest growing group of people falling into homelessness.

Last year, that “cliff edge” was most saliently captured by this graph produced by Dr. Jennifer Baxter of the Australian Institute of Family Studies (reproduced in Annabel Crabb’s Quarterly Essay, Men at Work), which went viral.

Many policy makers and politicians were so concerned about women’s so-called “ economic security”, they repeatedly voiced the need for strategies to address the motherhood penalty related issues that undermine it. In 2018, then Minister for Women Kelly O’Dwyer even launched a Women’s Economic Security Statement. Then the pandemic hit.

The pandemic chore wars

At the start of the pandemic, some voiced fears that it would increase the chores gap, sending women back to the 1950’s. Others expressed hope men and women in heterosexual couples would take the opportunity to “re-set”, with the invisible made visible to a generation of men now forced to work from home. So, what happened?

Several experts set out to find out via two large pandemic time use surveys, and while they have not yet released the full findings, early indications are it won’t be good news.

Melbourne University Sociology Professor Lynn Craig and Dr. Brendan. Churchill, a sociology research fellow, embarked on the Work and Care in the Time of COVID-19 survey, and their initial read of the findings is that women’s burden of caring has increased disproportionately compared to men. Women’s time “actively caring” for loved ones has gone up by not quite two hours, while mens’ has increased by 1 ½ hours. Men are doing more, but not as much as women. When it comes to “actively doing the housework”, though, the additional COVID related burden has been almost exclusively born by women.

It seems that there is something to that recent New York Times headline that quipped, “Gentlemen, start your vacuum cleaners.”

“Women are stretching out their days and doing more,” says Churchill.

“They are being pushed back into home, and they are still doing more in every sense.”

“Government needs to prioritise women and mothers and develop a concerted policy agenda or — in another ten years’ time– we will see another report (from the Diversity Council looking at the drivers of the gender pay gap) showing that the impact of the motherhood penalty has increased,” adds Churchill. “We certainly won’t see that motherhood penalty close; if anything, it will increase.”

At the Australian Institute of Family Studies, Director Anne Hollands and the inestimable Jennifer Baxter (she of viral women’s career cliff edge chart fame), have embarked on the Families in Australia: Life during COVID-19 survey. The full findings will be released within weeks, but their early findings are similar to those of Craig and Churchill.

“Whilst some of us were very excited in the early stages, thinking maybe we might see some re-writing of the rules at home about who does what — I said in an interview, ‘Maybe it takes a pandemic for these things to change’ — the pandemic didn’t do it,” says Holland. “In fact, it’s the opposite. In a time of pandemic, of stress and anxiety, we seem to move backward to gendered norms, like a comfortable pair of shoes.”

“If we’re going to take this seriously, we have to invest now for the long-term benefits,” adds Hollands. “Maybe things have gone back and some women are finding themselves stuck; if that’s the case, it needs to be an issue that’s discussed and policy effort put into addressing it.”

“The economy will suffer in the long run if women find it harder to get back — there is an economic benefit to creating that bridge back,” warns Hollands.

Childcare policy out of sync with working family’s new economic reality

In May, before Education Minister Dan Tehan announced the “snap back” to the old childcare system of subsidies following a brief period that saw total fee relief for parents, The Parenthood released a survey of 2280 families indicating that ending the childcare rescue package would force parents in 60 percent of households dependent on that care to reduce work, and it would most likely be mothers who would need to stop or cut back their hours.

“We know that mother’s employment in most families is very strongly dependent on childcare,” says Baxter from AIFS. “That’s how families frame it; around the mother’s employment rather the father’s employment.”

“If families don’t have access to the childcare or can’t afford the childcare that they used to have, for whatever reason to do with the cost of childcare going up or loss in income, it is very likely to have an impact on the mother’s employment,” adds Baxter, who is also leading the Australian Government funded Child Care Package Evaluation monitoring report, which is evaluating the impact of the new childcare package introduced by the Coalition in 2018. The final report is due in 2021.

When the “snap back” was announced two weeks ago, the news about the rolling back of fee relief was accompanied by the surprise announcement that early years educators, primarily female, would be the first, and thus far the only, sector to see their access to the JobKeeper subsidy rescinded.

Lisa Annese, Chief Executive Officer of the Diversity Council, is worried. “I was hopeful when we had that mini experiment waving the cost of childcare to families, that people would see that childcare is a bit of an equaliser,” says Annese. “Unfortunately, I’m disheartened that the lesson appears not to have been learned.”

For Annese, that decision plays into the classic argument some like to use to explain away the gender pay gap, blaming it on women’s “choices”. She fears they will now give that “choices” narrative a pandemic spin. “It doesn’t pay for a lot of families to put their child in an extra day of childcare and return to work, and usually it’s the woman who pays that penalty because she’s often earning less money,” she says.

“Some people will look at that and say she’s making a ‘choice’ not to return,” adds Annese.

“What I say is that this family didn’t have a choice; a real choice would be publicly available childcare that was affordable, high quality, and that was equitably provided across the economy.”

In other parts of the world, childcare and education policy are likewise, notably out of step with the reality of family’s lives. In the US and the UK, for example, there’s a big push to get people back to work and re-open the economy, but in many cases childcare and schools are still closed. It’s not too hard to work out who will pay the price for that dis-connect.

Are pregnant and female employees with caring responsibilities “fair game”?

Two recent pieces, one in the New York Times and one in the Guardian, noted that legal assistance charities and family rights organisations in the US and the UK have seen a considerable surge in calls for assistance, particularly in regards to pregnancy discrimination or caring responsibilities. Those organisations have expressed concern that when we reach a point in this pandemic-related recession where further job losses bite, women with caring responsibilities and/ or pregnant women, who can no longer “hide” their caring responsibilities now that work is Zooming into their homes, will be the first on the block.

Here in Australia, Basic Rights in Queensland, formerly the Queensland Working Women’s Centre, has seen a 30 percent increase in calls for assistance related to the pandemic, according to Director Fiona Hunt, who compiled an exclusive report for Women’s Agenda. And while disability was the single biggest driver of those calls (and Women’s Agenda will explore that issue further) pregnancy discrimination and family responsibilities were the second and third most common reason for calls for assistance.

Those calls included a woman who was stood down from her position with a health service after asking for flexible hours to meet her COVID-19 related caring responsibilities.  Her husband, a shift worker, was still able to attend his workplace, so she requested to split her hours into a morning and evening shift in order to home-school her children. Her request was refused, and she was stood down.

JobWatch, an employment rights legal centre which operates out of Victoria but provides assistance to Victorian, Queensland and Tasmanian workers, has not seen the same increase in calls for assistance related to pregnancy discrimination or caring responsibilities, but Zana Bytheway, the Executive Director, suspects that is due to under-reporting.

“Pregnancy discrimination is a consistent and ongoing problem,” says Bytheway. “Women desperate to keep their jobs in such volatile conditions do not have the time nor the inclination to enquire about their rights, let alone complain about their working conditions,” she adds. “Too much is at stake.”

At the Diversity Council, Annese has also not (yet) seen evidence that the pandemic is fuelling discrimination against women on the basis of pregnancy or caring responsibilities, but she agrees we must remain vigulent.

“I don’t know if we can make that direct link yet,” she says. “Simply because you’re a carer, you’re more likely to lose your job; being a carer has led many women to a type of relationship with an employer (highly casualised, in an industry like hospitality and retail, working part-time) that indirectly puts then at risk. “

But Annese has a warning — and a few words of advice — for employers tempted to take advantage of the current situation to declare open season on pregnant or female employees with caring responsibilities: “If they have any level of commitment to equality, equity and gender equality, which many say they do, employers need to have a heightened awareness of who is impacted by their decisions around downsizing or re-structuring.”

“Our research shows that employers who maintain that inclusive mindset will also survive better,” adds Annese. “They’re more likely to solve problems, have a more productive workforce…. all indicators that it’s good from a business and a recovery perspective, even if you don’t believe in the moral argument.”

Whether it’s the need for evidence-based policy, the business case, or the moral argument, or none of the above, that persuades Government and employers to engage with (and address) the deeply concerning likelihood of a pandemic motherhood penalty remains to be seen. Early indications are that we are on the path to a “blockcovery”, despite all evidence of a very gendered, “she-cession”. Some may even go so far as to call it a “mum-cession”.

Kristine Ziwica is a regular contributor. She tweets @KZiwca

This is part one of a series of pieces Kristine Ziwica is producing on how COVID-19 is impacting women in Australia. The series is supported by the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

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Women who return to work after career breaks might feel apprehensive about what’s in store, but they certainly aren’t lacking ambition.

That’s according to findings from our 2019 Ambition Report in partnership with AGSM which showed the majority of women returning to work after time away feel “more ambitious than ever before”.

Indeed, in a survey of more than 1800 women, almost half of respondents returning from a career break (46 per cent) said they were eager to further their leadership career, while 17 per cent reported wanting to change professional direction and 16 per cent cited the desire to start a business.

And yet, despite this lucrative opportunity for employers, the barriers obstructing and preventing women from returning to professional careers after a break, and the longer-term implications including gender diversity imbalances in leadership, remain. It’s something that AGSM recognises and is working hard to combat. Instead of focusing on ways to “fix women” the management school is looking at how they can help to fix the system.

For the second time, AGSM will launch its Career Comeback Program with 30 placements on offer to eligible Australians. This program is designed to support highly qualified people back into the Australian workforce after an extended career break.

Dr Michele Roberts, Academic Director at AGSM, believes the course is one of the first to approach leadership training holistically with an evidence-based approach. “It’s specifically designed to help people who have become isolated from the workforce, by building capability, confidence and connections” she explains.

There are specific program outcomes that will accelerate a career comeback, including increased confidence, a revitalised professional network, re-establishing a career ‘identity’ and executive presence, and identifying and addressing technical skills gaps that may have developed during time out from a professional career.

“The way we look at it, the program is getting women ready,” Roberts says. “We address mindset, because mindset and confidence are significant issues for women who’ve been away from the workforce. And then we talk about narrative, how to use your authentic voice as well as connection, influence and power.”

Addressing self-esteem barriers is central to AGSM’s program, after findings from the 2017 Ambition Report showed that 51 percent of women felt confidence prohibited them from getting ahead in their careers.

“We have a view that rather than telling women that they shouldn’t feel lack of confidence, we try to normalise these feelings,” says Roberts. “Most high achieving people feel apprehensive and under-confident about some of the challenges they take on. We tell leaders that it’s okay to feel that way – acknowledge those feelings for what they are – that you care passionately about this work and these colleagues – then jump in and do it anyway. This is something that leaders can help with, by acknowledging the times when they feel daunted and unprepared for the challenges ahead and how we pushed through them. We can’t change feelings of apprehension, nor do we need to. It’s fine to feel afraid of a challenge and we need to acknowledge this.”

The wider goal for AGSM in running a program like this, is to try to even up the playing field between working mums and dads—particularly given three in five employed women with a child under five works part time in Australia, compared with less than one in ten fathers. Not only that, but as Roberts notes: “women often report struggling to find meaningful work that is part-time or flexible.”

Employers need to work harder to support women returning to work and assist them in seamlessly securing opportunities that suit their skillsets and aspirations. AGSM hopes its leadership in this arena will serve as the impetus for more employers to follow suit and take action against the considerable setbacks that women face.

As someone with a rich and diverse background in leadership, Roberts also emphasises the importance of finding career sponsors and people in your network who will champion your knowledge and expertise and encourage your pursuits. A cornerstone of this year’s program is to build out continuing mentorship pathways and opportunities to network with alumni and academics.

“We know that encouragement plays a huge role in confidence. Being chosen for an AGSM Career Comeback Scholarship says to these women – ‘we see you and we believe in you’. That’s huge because we all need a champion. We’re working to champion women who feel disconnected from the workforce because they’ve been looking after others. For all those talented women standing outside looking in the glass and wondering how they can ever get in, we are holding the door open for them.”

The bespoke program is designed to get highly qualified people back into the industry after taking leave. It consists of enrolment in an intensive three-day course in Sydney, up to three nights paid accommodation for interstate sponsorship recipients; child care reimbursements of up to $60 per day for the program’s duration; access to an online professional network of peers and business professionals; access to AGSM content and access to tailored career consultations and resources through AGSM’s Career Development Centre.

The Career Comeback program is also in line with AGSM’s long-standing, leadership diversity focus, Roberts says.

“Two years ago, we were at 36% women in our Full-Time MBA program and we were running special outreach programs. We realised this wasn’t working and that we actually needed to fix the system,” she explains.

In the 2020 cohort, AGSM has achieved gender-balance with 50% women in the full-time MBA cohort.

“We achieved this by creating a large number of scholarships just for women, because we know that finance is the biggest obstacle to women studying. We also sought out brilliant women – the best people for the job aren’t always the ones with their hands in the air and we had to seek out brilliant women.  By doing that, we went from 36 percent women to 50 percent women in one year.

“We showed that when you address the problems in the system and stop wasting time trying to address perceived problems with the women, then you can really achieve a huge amount.”

Applications are now open for the AGSM 2019 Career Comeback Sponsorships. You can apply here

The post How to make a comeback after a break from your career appeared first on Women's Agenda.

But what I hadn’t done was given a single thought to my career. Or how to maintain it. Sound familiar?

While on leave, I didn’t do a great job of staying connected to my workplace either. I didn’t realise that it was important and would greatly help with my return. Like most parents on leave, ‘I didn’t know what I didn’t know’.

Fortunately, I had a great boss who looked out for me and made sure that I had a good role to come back to and could work flexibly while I worked out how to juggle a small child and a job.

But here’s the thing—within 11 months of being back at work, I was expecting my second baby and back on parental leave for another 12 months. This time things were different, and much harder returning to work. I’d really lost momentum and it felt like my career had taken a back seat.

Having two children so close together and two consecutive parental leave periods in three years had unfortunately taken its toll. I’d lost my networks, my sponsors, and most people couldn’t remember or cared what I’d achieved at work before having kids. And I didn’t have a clear role to come back to, so I felt like my chances of being made redundant where even higher. Understandably, my confidence was at an all-time low.

So why did it feel so much harder to maintain my career after two children? And what should I have done differently to stop my career tanking like that?

Well, firstly the reason it’s more challenging is because you often don’t have time to rebuild and invest in those work relationships the way you did before you had children. When you return to work the first time, it’s such a big period of adaption on every level. You can feel like you aren’t doing anything particularly well and are literally just keeping your head above water. At the same time, you are super-efficient and have zero time for idle chit chat and socialising. It’s a case of get in, get your stuff done and then fly out the door for pickup. But often those work relationships with colleagues and the more senior people at work suffer as you no longer have the time to spend nurturing them.

The other big issue if you have had very little time back at work between children, is that it’s also hard to get many runs on the board from a work perspective. It can often feel like you are in a bit of a ‘work holding pattern’ until you are back on parental leave again.

So what should I have done differently? In hindsight there are actually a lot of things I could have done.

So let me share my top tips:

Take responsibility for your career

It’s your career and no one is going to look after it like you. While all the baby prep is exciting, spend some time also thinking about your career and how you want to maintain it while on leave. This is even more critical if you are planning to have more than one child. It’s much easier to bounce back and pick up where you left off after one round of parental leave, but it’s that much harder the more children you have. The best thing you can do is have a parental leave plan in place every time you go on leave to make sure what you need and want is well communicated with your manager.

Think about your sponsors

Sponsors are those influential people who will go in to bat for you and your career, even when you are on leave. It’s important to have several sponsors who understand your career aspirations and can look out for opportunities that will support your career when you are on leave and returning to work. Have a career plan that you share with your sponsors and keep up contact with them while you are on leave and back at work. It will be well worth the time investment.

Use your Keeping In Touch days when on leave

These are ten days that you can use on the unpaid component of your parental leave period and are paid at your normal pay rate by your employer. These days are designed to help you stay connected with your workplace and you can use them for activities such as attending a team day or a strategy planning day. Used effectively, these days will help your transition back to work and enable you to hit the ground running.

Have a career mindset

Just because you are a parent doesn’t mean that you need to park all of your career aspirations. We see this all the time! Many new parents overwhelmed by their new responsibilities will say things like, ‘I’m just lucky to have a job’. You’ve worked hard to get where you are, and this passive mindset will just stifle all of your career ambitions and limit your progression. It’s also important that when you return to work you maintain your current level, pay and status. This is an entitlement under the Fair Work Act, so don’t settle for a role which is beneath your skills or pre-child career level.

Can your partner share the load?

What parental leave can your partner take to share the caring responsibilities and help support you to return to work? Progressive companies are now starting to offer more generous paid parental leave for partners, so it’s worth looking at what entitlements your partner can access. You could then stagger your leave so that when you are ready to return to work, your partner takes on the primary carer leave. This will not only take the pressure off your return to work, but also help you have much more equality at home by sharing the caring responsibilities.

This first appeared on the Circle In blog and is republished here with permission. 

The post ‘I’d lost my networks, people couldn’t remember what I’d achieved at work’: My reality after baby No. 2 and what I’d do differently appeared first on Women's Agenda.

And did my career go down the toilet? Actually, no it didn’t.

While the motherhood penalty is real and affects women in different ways, for me personally having kids before 30 has boosted my career. Many people have written about the fantastic ‘soft’ skills working mothers bring to the workplace (like time management and people management) but I found a few more unexpected benefits that i’ve outlined below.

These are my experiences only and I appreciate that no new parent’s experiences are the same. Nor do we all have support available (both at home and at work) that enable a career boost after having kids.

Network of mums and dads

I now have a much broader network of amazing friends, colleagues and clients who are also parents of young children. Because I had my kids a bit earlier, many of these parents are 5 to 10 years further ahead of me in their careers and experiences. This has given me a broad network of informal mentors and sponsors to assist me with my career (and who also get the whole working parent thing) and open my mind to new skills and perspectives.

Babies can be great ice breakers

Take your baby to an event or to work and you will have no shortage of people wanting to talk to you. And guess who will seek you out like a heat seeking missile? Women with older or grown up kids – that is, women at the peak of their careers. And when they are happily snuggling your baby, there is your opportunity to drop in your “I have been meaning to ask you….”

People assume I am more experienced

Have you ever walked into a meeting room and your (white, middle-aged male) client  gives you a mildly derisive look when they realise that your (white, middle-aged male) boss won’t be attending? It is so frustrating not to be taken seriously when you look young – and female to boot. Drop in the pre-meeting small talk that you have a toddler and people routinely assume you are at least 5 years older (or perhaps it is just those extra bags around your eyes).

Breathing space

It is so easy to get caught up in your day-to-day work of your job that you can’t always take the necessary step back to think about your broader career goals and develop the other skills that are essential for leadership. Clearly, you don’t need to have a baby to take time off work, but there may be an opportunity to take advantage of being on parental leave to strategically broaden your network, skills and experiences. You can, for example:

• Attend that conference you have always been interested in (but which has always been too difficult to attend when you were working full time) – and unapologetically take your baby (if the organisers have an issue with your plus one, it’s not worth attending).
• Invest in your professional and personal networks – such as making an effort to get to know new mum friends, be a mentor, and get regular coffees with friends and colleagues
• Pick up a related side project – I joined the board of a not-for-profit during parental leave
• Learn! – exercise your intellect by reading widely, taking online courses and discovering new podcasts

Leverage your absence 

Being away from work on parental leave made my boss realise how much I contributed to the team. It seems counter-intuitive, but returning from parental leave was actually the perfect time to angle for a pay rise and a promotion (especially as my role in the team was back filled by a more senior lawyer from another office). I’m certainly not suggesting that you inadequately hand-over you work, but your absence will inevitably leave a ‘gap’ in your team – work-wise, but also culturally.

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Research out today from the Commonwealth Bank reveals that its customers spent 15% more in the lead up to Father’s Day in 2017 than they did in the lead up to Mother’s Day.

Doesn’t really seem all that fair, given mothers already face their own gender pay gap.

Nor does it seem fair given the additional domestic and caring responsibilities women take on at home over their male counterparts, despite the fact mothers are entering the workforce in greater numbers than ever before.

As HILDA research recently found, we’ll be waiting another 30 years before we close the housework gender gap at the current rate of change.

Then there’s the unpaid and unacknowledged emotional labour that women do — and there’s plenty of that occurring in the lead up to Father’s Day.

And what about the hit to their careers that mother’s face? Their diminished spending capacity? Their missing retirement savings and superannuation? The pregnancy discrimination they deal with? The risks to their health and wellbeing? The data is clear, there’s a significant ‘Motherhood Penalty’ in Australia, and it’s getting worse.

Not that spending on gifts can make up for any of these factors.

So what explanation could there be for why we’re spending more on Dads than Mums?

One factor, as evidenced by the Commonwealth customer spending data, is a rise in spending on tech and gadgets for fathers.

Another factor, that wasn’t shared in the CBA report, could be that mothers are increasingly caring less about Mother’s Day and the commercial push to spend and give that comes with it.

They might just be over it.

As Jane Caro recently wrote on Women’s Agenda: “Mothers are among the most discriminated against people on the planet. They work harder, for longer, often in under-valued caring professions where employment is becoming more precarious, but for less pay.”

Making mothers feels special on one day a year is not going to make up for that.

Then there’s the 765,000 Australian families headed by single parents, the majority of whom are female, and the fact they’re often excluded from being celebrated on Mother’s Day.

Of course there could be many reasons why spending patterns vary in the lead up to these parent days. But the Commonwealth Bank’s message with this data is to see it as an important reminder to “keep an eye on spending”.

A good thing to consider if you plan on (or already have) putting in the financial, emotional and physical energy into Father’s Day this weekend.

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Where is the utility in giving a family with a household income in excess of $350K any subsidy for their children to attend childcare? Is this entitlement gone mad? How greedy to expect a handout at that income level.

Perhaps, on an individual level, it may seem that way but it’s the collective consequences of withdrawing help – even to high income families – that I’m concerned with.

I wrote a newspaper column last week on the subject of a family in Victoria who will no longer receive any subsidy for their children to be in care.

They are both engineers and together they earn more than $350K. Without any subsidy – that just last week they were entitled to – they will now pay $800 a week for their son to attend childcare 3 days a week and their daughter to attend before & after school care on the same three days. Until this week that bill was $400.

Comment: Taxes that deter mothers from working are unfair | @georgiedent https://t.co/sDxENtZ9DT

— The Sydney Morning Herald (@smh) July 1, 2018

The premise of my piece was not “Woe is this poor family struggling to make ends meet’, nor was that my subject’s line of thinking.

Even still I knew the matter was unlikely to be warmly received. ‘Welfare’ for the wealthy doesn’t exactly tug on any heart strings and who could possibly disagree that government assistance ought to go to those most in need? How could anyone credibly suggest that a family earning more than $350K is a family in need?

So why, then, did I even write it? Why, then, do I believe there is any case for subsidising childcare for even ‘wealthy’ women?

The answer is because there is already a significant ‘motherhood penalty‘ that Australian women with children wear and anything that compounds it and further deters women from working is problematic.

The motherhood penalty describes the combined impact of the gender pay gap growing after women take time out of work to have children and their diminished earning capacity and opportunities for career progression over the course of their lives.

The motherhood penalty sees women discriminated against either during their pregnancy, maternity leave or return to work.

It sees mothers getting paid less and getting penalised for working flexibly or part-time.

Having children in Australia effectively puts women on a different track from their male peers which ensures the  “male breadwinner” model, an amazingly resilient and stubborn phenomenon in Australia, continues to flourish.

A recent study led by the University of Queensland’s Professor Janeen Baxter concluded Australia has a “much stronger” male breadwinner culture than many other comparable nations, including the US.

The data says it all: There’s a significant ‘motherhood penalty’ in Australia & it's getting worse. Here's what @KZiwica learnt looking over a mountain of #genderequality research https://t.co/JvvbQP1peY

— Women's Agenda (@WomensAgenda) April 5, 2018

As Kristine Ziwica observed earlier this year far from shrinking the motherhood penalty is only getting worse for Australian women.

And over the course of their lives this penalty comes at a very significant cost: financial insecurity and vulnerability. And this isn’t hypothetical: the dismal average superannuation balances of women compared to men is alarming.  So too is the fact women over 50 are the fastest growing group of homeless people in Australia.

But homelessness is hardly going to be an issue for a family earning $350K a year is it? Well perhaps not but the impact of a woman taking time off work – for any length of time – on her financial independence and security is real.

The collective impact of many women working less or not at all is also real.

One female engineer reducing her work hours or cutting back her days might not, in itself, spell disaster but when it’s part of a trend, when it’s several female engineers and lawyers and accountants, it does cause problems.

The childcare changes that have come into effect are estimated to adversely effect almost 300,000 families.  Some of those are excluded from subsidised care on account of not meeting the activity test but many are caught by the means-test.

To be caught by the means-test they either earn a lot themselves, have a partner in a lucrative vocation or they both earn a well-above average salary. In two of these scenarios at least it’s likely the women are highly-skilled and potentially quite senior.

So when those women step back or scale down their work it means the leadership pipelines in all those fields and companies are less populated with women. It means more workplaces aren’t able to offer senior female role-models to challenge the enduring stereotype about leaders being male. It means younger men and women are denied the opportunity to see different ways of leading and living.

How much mothers work is directly influenced by how much childcare costs: we know that and the fact that in an ideal world the impact would be gender-neutral and influence dads in the same way doesn’t make it so. Dads do not base their capacity for work on the cost or availability of childcare to the extent mums do.

Far more dads work full-time than mums do. That means when we consider a means-test on childcare from the joint earnings it is, very often, the dad who is the main breadwinner and the mum is the ‘subsidiary’ earner.

In that instance, when the cost of childcare is so significant, who is more likely to give up, or wind back, their paid work?  It is often the mum which just perpetuates the male-breadwinner cycle, which in turn perpetuates the various dynamics that enable the motherhood penalty to flourish.

The means-test on childcare is not a problem because it’s inherently unfair or unjust. It’s flawed because it further entrenches an already insidious structural problem for Australian mothers.

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