Women – the great illusion that we are invisible

Women & the

Virginia Mansel Lees, La Trobe University

Bluestocking Week is always a time for us to re-connect with our roots and to think about the women who went before us and the difficulties they faced in being able to access a university education. For many, their finished work was taken from them and credited to their male counterparts, which must have been so frustrating. Even with this being an artefact of higher education they never gave up.

I am immensely proud of what they did, it created a lasting legacy for all of us. I am a first in family that happily was able to access higher education because of the Whitlam changes to fees – an unintended consequence that still brings a smile to my face.

The panel for our Bluestocking Week event was stimulating and hearing of the research being undertaken around all aspects of women in the workforce was certainly thought-provoking. So much has been done with so much still to be changed would be the take-out from the panellists’ combined discussion.

Perhaps most telling was the underrepresentation of women because of the continued occupational and industry segregation our country faces. Even more irritating is that, although Australia in 2020 had the highest representation of women in the labour market, it did not mean what it could/should have and demonstrates that we have a long way to go before there is parity for women so they do not have to engage in precarious and/or low paid work.

When will we experience the world of work where there would be mandated ways in which family, caring responsibilities become an integral part of the working day and not an add on at the behest of a benevolent employer?

We know that women’s work is double that of men in the usual course of life, then along came COVID-19, and women’s work doubled again. Hard to imagine that is even possible, but it is and that in and of itself demonstrates that women provide the ‘glue’ that holds so much of our society together. The number of students that I teach who dropped subjects so they could continue their caring responsibilities as well as add new and more problematic elements to their lives was really noticeable. Again, it will be women who will take longer to complete their qualifications and continue to be engaged in lower paid work with fewer opportunities.

As unionists we must ensure that this does not mean that our students are unable to graduate. Graduation will offer them both opportunities, as well as certainty in their working lives, and we must make every effort to support them through challenging university hierarchies to take account of their circumstances.

Throughout the pandemic women have been (as they always do) diversifying their talents to ensure that everything continues to run as smoothly as is possible. Disappointingly, women again are missing out as many areas that are considered women’s work have not been allowed to open back up so they can begin to operate.

Once again men’s work has been opened up disproportionately to that of women. This simply is unacceptable, how will there ever be significant change to the lives of working women, when even a pandemic was able to close the door on them? What all of this does is to drive inequality, that entrenches disadvantage for those already in the workforce and ensures that those wanting to enter face a series of barriers (mostly artificial) that won’t go away.

For young women hope for a future in which they are able to determine where and how they work must seem unattainable. As our panellists pointed out, the future of work is consistently framed around the use of robots and never around women and work. The next part of our struggle must then focus on how we can have women work front and centre, so that our combined invisibility takes a permanent back seat. Join us to stop the illusion that we do not exist in the eyes of those who make decisions about us, not for or with us. In union we will fight. United we will win.