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Meet the Solutionists, with Mark Scott
Season 3, Episode 2 transcript and episode notes
Rae Cooper is Professor of Gender, Work and Employment Relations at the University of Sydney. She says Australia hasn't come nearly far enough in the fight for gender equality at work, and there's a few reasons why.
Work it out – Australia's gender inequality in the workplace
“When I say what I do for a living, most women have a story,” says Rae Cooper. “Women have a way of being able to understand what it is pretty easily. I think men find it a little bit more... academic.”
Rae Cooper is Professor of Gender, Work and Employment Relations at the University of Sydney. She says Australia hasn’t come nearly far enough in the fight for gender equality at work, and there’s a few reasons why.
You’ll also hear how professionals Penny and Glen juggle their careers and families, and how they’ve accessed greater flexibility at work.
Mark Scott 00:01
This podcast is recorded at the University of Sydney's Camperdown campus on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation. They've been discovering and sharing knowledge here for 10s of 1000s of years. I pay my respects to Elders past and present, and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. We've come a long way when it comes to gender equality. Or have we? Some people like to believe we're done, we've achieved equality, and that any differences in pay, opportunities or types of work between men and women come down to something other than their gender. Ray Cooper disagrees, and she's got the data to demonstrate why. Rae Cooper is a leading expert on gender equality in Australia, and she says gender equality at work will achieve happier and healthier working environments for both men and women, and it has the potential to supercharge our society and our economy. I'm Mark Scott, the Vice Chancellor of the University of Sydney, and this is The Solutionists where you meet the minds tackling our greatest challenges. Welcome, Ray. You grew up in a small country town in New South Wales, but your household was a little different to the other households in the town.
Rae Cooper 01:33
How was that? Mark, it was a little bit different. So tiny, little country town, so small that you know, the population sign out the front said 900 and when someone was born, silly WAGs would go and change the number put 901. I'm the eldest of four kids, my mum worked full time all the way through my childhood, which was quite unusual then in the 70s, and it's explained partly by labor market conditions, because she's a nurse and midwife, and there was a big nurse shortage then. And my dad also worked full time. So for most Mark: What did he do? Rae: He worked for the PMG, as it was in telecom. He was a linesman, so they sort of worked opposite shifts. And I've actually come to know that the people who work in emergency services in those kinds of areas actually call that ‘opper shifts’, and that's how some families actually make their work and care work. So he'd go to work at seven, come back at three, and then she would, she'd usually have a baby, because there was four of us, and she'd sleep in the afternoon and then go and do her permanent afternoon or evening shift. So they saw each other for a crossover for a couple of hours, and then went to work. There was no childcare. There was no preschool, until my mother started the preschool in town. So that meant that the gender roles were somewhat different to what my neighbours, who were literally my aunties and their husbands, had in their families, where my dad did the washing and the ironing all the way through the marriage, and he was always there in the afternoon when, you know, he finished work. Mark: Did
Mark Scott 02:55
it feel different? Did it feel like it stood out? Rae: Yeah, absolutely.
Rae Cooper 02:59
My dad used to get teased by sisters for being seen to be hanging their clothes on the line. You know, before he went to work or when he came home. It was we were seeing as outliers. My mum, she loved her job. She trained hard to do it. But also, there were babies who are arriving. She had to be there to deliver them. There's no one else to do it. So it was something that she had a it was a real sense of both work, professional, but also community.
Mark Scott 03:22
Yeah, and what were the seeds of you growing up in that small country town to now being a professor at a big international university.
Rae Cooper 03:31
So I was the first person in my family to complete high school and to go to uni. I've subsequently lots of members of my family, including my mum, have done degrees, but I was the first one, and I, how did I get there? I mean, I guess I was a clever kid. I wasn't the brilliant kid. I was probably the second or third smartest in the class, but I had a bit of cunning to me, I think. But where I was very lucky is my parents, even though they didn't have the opportunity to access higher education, other sorts of training. They really valued education for us, particularly, like I've got two sisters, particularly for us girls, which sadly for me, meant that I got sent to boarding school when I was in year eight. But that was, that was a big deal for my family, you know, that they were not high earners, and they sacrificed a lot to put all their kids through school. And, you know, and it was a big wrench to send kids away to school and do that sort of thing. And I think even though, at the time I probably resented not being at home and being able to live the normal life that my other friends that I grew up with did, I think that set me on the path of thinking about the transformative role that education can play, and it certainly has my education's changed my life. Yeah. Mark: You're very
Mark Scott 04:42
passionate about gender equality. It's where you do such great research. Is it easy to get people to share your enthusiasm around gender equality in the workforce? Do people see the issues the way you see them?
Rae Cooper 04:54
It depends. Okay, so most women, when we, when I tell them what, what I do for a living have got a story. They immediately tell me a story about what, does it mean you do talk about pay? Does it mean you talk about men getting the promotions? Does it mean you're talking about where women work relative to men? So women have a way being able to understand what it is pretty easily. I think men find it a little bit more academic, just the regular people that you'd meet at a party kind of thing. I think it's changing, though, Mark, so I've noticed, you know, sort of 10 years ago, at a party, being the person who does gender equality, you'd either get the slightly head on the side look, or the eye roll a little bit. But now it's become quite mainstream, which is good, and sadly, there's plenty of work to go around, because there's a lot of evidence, you know, of quite significant gendered inequalities across the career.
Mark Scott 05:46
Does it surprise you that so much of the Australian workforce is still made up of industries dominated by men or women? Rae: Oh, yeah,
Rae Cooper 05:54
I really am, and that's partly because of this story that we've seen in the last generation. You know, when we've seen the opening up of higher education, where girls and women have done what we've told them to do, they've been good girls. They've invested in themselves. They've got credentials. You know, we have one of the most highly educated prime age female labor forces in the OECD. So the rich countries, and yet, our levels of gender segregation, so women working in some sectors, men working in other sectors is at about the same rate as it was when I finished high school in the late 1980s so why hasn't it changed? Because we haven't seen a change in the sectors in which women and men work. It tends to be the areas where women are highly concentrated, health and human services, education. You know, some of those areas around services to community, very highly feminised. Some of the most highly feminised industries and also occupations within them, they tend to be undervalued, and they tend to be low paid. And when you have men concentrated in areas, think about the classic, you know, the tradie, the engineer, the techie, where they're distributed in those areas, they tend to be higher paid. So it's sort of, if you think about that overall distribution, that makes an impact. But also then, if we look at the hierarchical patterns within organisations, men are overrepresented at the top, women overrepresented at the bottom. So the higher higher up, and the better paid a job is, the more likely a man is to hold it, and the converse for women, and then we've also got some of those patterns around women still take most of the care in families. Women in Australia do a lot more of that work than in many other comparable economies. The problem is not that. The problem is that when women step out of the labor market to do extended care and taking a career break, there's a real penalty when they come back, and there's a scarring across the career in terms of their earnings, whereas men, when they become parents, actually seem to get a pay jump. So it's it really kicks in there. So we see gender pay gaps happening through all of the career. But it actually really starts to get a lot worse when we look at the period from the 30s and the 40s.
Penny 08:04
Hi, my name is Penny. I'm an engineer. Engineering, to me, is it's everywhere, and it's a complex problem. I'm constantly learning, constantly learning, constantly asking questions. There's never a right solution. You can always, you know, maybe develop an idea, a better way, or address something in a different way that you didn't think. As part of my engineering role, I spent three or four years out on side in Sydney, at the Northern Beaches hospital, building the road upgrade out the front. And I regularly drive that piece of road. And I think, Oh, wow. I put that pedestrian bridge up. Oh, wow. I know what's behind that retaining wall. Or, oh, someone's graffitied on my bridge. You know, like those things, like, you feel this ownership, and it just makes my heart sing. And I have to say, I'm a bore when I drive my kids through it. When I started as a grad the gender split was pretty even. As my career's progressed, we've all gone different ways. What I've noticed is that the males tend to do like smooth trajectories, so they might just go straight up the traditional ladder, whereas, like myself, I've what I call checker plated all over the place. So I was in one team, and then I wanted to move to another team to learn a new set of skills that coincided with me dropping from full time to part time when I came back after my first child. And so I'm not doing that traditional career ladder climbing. Careers go in waves, kind of like a sine wave, you know, like one person's up at the top and they're taking opportunities and they're driving for promotion and stuff, and the other person just needs to be dealing with the family and survival mode. So my husband, who's also an engineer, is currently heading for a peak in those sine waves that I'd referred to, and I wouldn't say that I’m in a trough, I'm probably just plateau. When we have spoken about the fact that when it's my turn to peak, he will realise that he might need to plateau, and that is a very subconscious decision, because you've only got so much capacity in the week to be able to deal with all of family and all of work and make home a happy place, right? So, yeah, the peaks and troughs again will change, and who knows what opportunities are up next, but that's something to decide when they come.
Mark Scott 10:37
One of the changes that I suppose I've seen through my career is the movement away from mindsets of maternity leave to parental leave, and that a lot of the provisions that are now on offer are on offer to either parent, and flexibility is available to men and women in the workplace. How do you think men view that opportunity of flexibility, and what are you seeing about men's willingness to take up the flexibility, even if it comes at a bit of a career cost?
Rae Cooper 11:06
Yes, well, flexibility, in many cases, not all, is available to both genders, and you know, in lots of organisations, it's available for whatever reason. You know, whether it's parenting or looking after older people, whether it's studying or volunteering, our research shows us from both our national surveys of men and women and our focus groups that we do with men and women, we know that attitudes seem to be changing. So men tell us, particularly younger men, millennials and younger tell us that they really value flexibility, that they really want in their careers to be able to combine work and family, to be able to not have to choose between the two, to not have to work these hyper long hours they tell us that, Mark, but their behavior doesn't match what they're telling us. And so that makes me that's why qualitative research is so important. So that means when we get men into focus groups and talk to them about what they think and what they want, and then what they actually do and where the mismatch is that's when it gets really interesting, because they talk to us about, you know, feeling, even though there's these great policies, that it actually is sometimes very hard as a man to be able to access them, because you're seen as being not serious and not a real man, and not, you know, properly pursuing the masculine career in the way that if a woman asks you, basically, yeah, sure, that's for it's for women, if you like, in the way that we normatively think about it. I think attitudes absolutely have changed. But I think we've got to think about what is it that we could do to be able to facilitate action, to follow the attitude
Mark Scott 12:38
We all got a taste of flexibility during the pandemic Rae: Not all of that was good. Mark: So, so what do we learn from that? Rae: Yeah, well, I think
Rae Cooper 12:45
it depends, right? So it depends on the types of jobs that you're in, but I think for the part of the workforce, you know, it's about 50 percent of Australians are working at home. They're at the peak of the pandemics. I think lots of us, and I think particularly men, had their first taste of actually working from home, and having that ability to spend a bit more time with kids, to be able to do things, you know, do a bit of helping with school and that sort of thing. And as the pandemic receded, you see men talking about not really wanting to go back to what it was before that. I had one group of men in a focus group talking very emotionally, actually, about what the period of the pandemic had meant for them to be able to go and, you know, pick up a kid at three o'clock and bring them home from the school gate, never having to have been able to do that before, and how that had really changed their relationship with kids, changed their relationship with their wife, changed their relationship with their work and wanting to do that, but still feeling the pressure now, so as the screws sort of get put on a little bit more by many employers not all to not have access to that in the same way.
Glen 13:50
Hi, I'm Glen, and I work in communications in the healthcare industry. I'm a new dad to a six-month-old boy. It's been a whirlwind six months, as you can expect, but a really enjoyable one, and something that my wife and I have been waiting a long time for. Our journey's been a little bit of a different one. We were exploring IVF for over five years. So once we found out that we were having a baby, it was, of course, very exciting. So my wife has taken 12 months of parental leave. Our plan is that she'll go back part time at that point, when she goes back to work, I'd like to take more parental leave myself. I have 10 more weeks of parental leave that I can take through my employer, which I'm really looking forward to doing, so I can be that primary caregiver for him for a couple of months. So Friday mornings are pretty exciting, particularly of late, because we've recently started swimming lessons. So what a typical Friday looks like for me is I'll get into the workout a little bit earlier, because at 9:30 or around that I'll sign off and I'll take him to swimming lessons. I'm the only dad in our particular group, and last week, there probably would have been about 15 kids in the center, and there was only one other dad, apart from myself. We sing lots of nursery rhymes that I've got no idea how to remember, so I'm sort of humming along while the other mums are getting it word for word. Their kids are a little bit older, so I'm sure I'll, I'll get there at some point. These moments are things that we waited a long time for, so I couldn't wait to, you know, take him to swimming lessons for the first time. In terms of the actual flexibility for that, I was always confident that I'd receive that, but I think the grounding of that is a good relationship with my manager and my situation, I'd like to think that I've demonstrated that I'll get the job done. So for me, it wasn't a difficult conversation to have flexibility in my life, because it's essential. And if I'm being completely honest, I don't think I could live without that flexibility now, and it's something that, to me, is a non-negotiable when it comes to employment.
Mark Scott 16:07
We've got some professions out there where the heroic endeavor is the length of ours. You know, they go all day, well into the night, weekends. You think of investment banking, perhaps some of the management consultancy firms, some of the top-tier law firms. Not a lot of flexibility there. Do you see some of those industries where they know they want to cultivate great talent and keep great talent that have been unable to change their spots?
Rae Cooper 16:35
Yeah, it's kind of like a case of, you know, the spirit is willing, the flesh is weak. You know, like they desperately know that many of these big investors, for example, I've done a bit of work in that sector, know that they want and they need women to be on their teams and in their senior teams, because they know it makes them better employers, makes them perform better. And they know that this is very important to them. And they're also getting a lot of pressure from outside, from their stakeholders, around how they should perform in terms of their own workforce. They're doing some inventive things around increasing the number of women that they're recruiting in post-graduation. They're offering paid parental leave to on an equitable basis to men and women. But they're still losing people. It's like a pipe that, you know, people are sort of bleeding out of. I think what many of those sectors aren't biting the bullet on is thinking creatively about hours Mark: Because finally,
Mark Scott 17:24
it's the hours. If you have a two-year-old, you may have gone back to work, but if the expectation is 15-16, hours a day to pass muster at the firm, almost impossible.
Rae Cooper 17:36
And as you're single and you have no children, or you have the capacity to have living staff at home, or you're lucky, like many people do, to have a grandmother a grandfather who's helping out, it's impossible, I think, for mums of young children to do that, and I think it's increasingly impossible for dads of young children to do that. It's not sustainable. It's not good for gender equality, but it's also not very good for people in terms of sustainability and careers or wellbeing, so I think that the hours issue is something we really have to crack, and it is a particular problem in those very male dominated sectors, whether you're looking at investment or you're looking at mining. The most highly male dominated, or also the sectors that have the highest weekly hours of work. Mark: Yeah, you
Mark Scott 18:16
talked about, you know, first in family, first woman in family, to go to university. And I think there are many contemporaries of ours, the women would be in exactly that circumstance, and the career options that have opened up for them have been vast with this generation. Now their children are coming through. What are younger generations looking at in terms of workforce culture, and particularly young women, you know, what are they going to tolerate in the workforce?
Rae Cooper 18:46
Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, I find this next, this latest generation of young women who we have in our classrooms right now. You know, like the in their 20s, I find them just such an interesting cohort. They are highly educated, they're very ambitious. They're also very, very socially minded, and they've got lots of interest across many sort of social justice questions. They've got a real kind of sense of forging their way in the world. But they also, I don't think they're going to put up with as much crap as my generation did at work. They sort of have a lower level of tolerance for dismissive, discriminatory behavior. And they do, I think they do feminism a bit differently to the way that my generation, you know, and you know our parents generation did in that they're, they're out and proud, and they're loud about it, they don't hide it, and they're, I think it's going to make for some big changes in organisations actually. Mark: So is that something
Mark Scott 19:40
that they're going to be more likely to call it out loudly in the workplace, rather than quietly, I think, disappear from the workplace?
Rae Cooper 19:46
I think so. Yeah, I think they're much more articulate and bolshy and loud about some of these things than I ever was. And you know, as you know, I'm a fairly motivated person around some of these issues, so I find them quite inspiring. And I think that leaders of organisations really need to start to think about how they're going to how they're going to deal with that, because if you've got a level of tolerance that's basically zero around discrimination and disrespect, then you got to get rid of it.
Mark Scott 20:13
One of the challenges young women can face in the workplace is sexual harassment. You know, research would suggest that, you know, more than a quarter of women in the workplace have recently experienced sexual harassment at work. You recently did research on young women in the retail sector, which was shocking, though perhaps not surprising. What did you find?
Rae Cooper 20:35
Well, we found that it's not one quarter. It was one in two of all women under 25 said that they'd experienced sexual harassmen Mark: In retail. Rae: In retail, yeah, and just keeping in mind, Mark, that that sample didn't include under eighteens, 50 percent of that cohort, which is a very large group in retail, had had that experience both from peers and more senior people, but also from customers. And that's a very, very significant challenge in that sector. And I tell you, we did many, many focus groups with retail workers as well, and it's quite distressing for them. And it is has major impacts on health and wellbeing. It has big impacts on turnover and intention to quit. And it's, you know, pretty horrible, horrible experience for people to go through. And you wonder where an 18 year old young woman goes when they face that problem. What also worries me is that's their it's the first job of about 50 percent of people who enter the labor market, and I think that sets them up for their expectations longer term, about what they should expect to receive in the way of treatment at work. I think one thing that came out of that research was we worked quite closely with some of the employers and with the union that represents those workers, and they're currently now trying to design up some different approaches to how we might deal with this. And I don't know if you know, but currently we have this new positive duty in the workplace where employers have this have a responsibility to head discrimination and sexual harassment off before it happens, rather than dealing with it after. We know we've had an incident. So I think there's a lot of thinking going on in lots of sectors, but in areas like this, where you've got very, very, very high rates of sexual harassment, I think there's a lot of thinking to go on.
Mark Scott 22:18
So what conversations have you been having with employers that are trying to break out of the entrenched thinking. What industries have you seen real positive change in?
Rae Cooper 22:29
Look, I think it's pretty hard to isolate a particular industry, but interestingly, like some of those sectors that have some of the worst problems in terms of lack of, you know, a diverse workforce, or lack of representation of women in senior roles, seem to be those that are being the most motivated to take action. So I think that's kind of interesting. I think some of the organisations that are sort of mid pack, you know, they sort of vaguely look equitable, you know, in terms of workforce, but less so in terms of the, you know, hierarchy, they're less motivated. They find it less urgent. So in fact, I'm seeing some of the more interesting ways of thinking that this is a problem that needs to be dealt with urgently in organisations, like in the resources sector, and like in areas such as investment, in areas like tech. Thankfully, we're also seeing some action, I think, from government as well around some of these issues. So there's been, you know, a lot of thinking from state and federal governments and investment in pathways and mechanisms that we might be able to build the supply of, you know, talented women coming into some of these sectors as well. And alongside that, I think we need to be really aware that the institutional investors are really starting to ask some very serious questions about performance on gender equality. So we have a lot of money in super funds, and they are very, very motivated around who they invest in, how they manage particular assets, and what they expect in terms of performance in those organisations. So yes, quite a bit of activity going on. But I'd say there's also is a lot of shady hollows too, Mark, there's a lot of organisations that are still in denial that this is a problem for them, or a problem at all, and not a lot of action going on in some places.
Mark Scott 24:16
Your daughter's now in her early 20s. What do you hope for her across her career and the workplaces that she might encounter?
Rae Cooper 24:23
See, I've also got an 18-year-old boy mark, so I have 20-year-old girl and an 18-year-old boy. And this might sound a bit dreamy, but I really hope that both of them get to do what they want to do in their careers. I mean, I hope none of them have to put up with garbage employers who treat them poorly. I hope they don't have to put up with any of that violence and harassment that so many people experience at work. But I also hope they don't end up being cruel by gender roles and norms around what they should be doing on the basis of whether they're a man or a woman, I want them both to have lovely families and great careers and happy lives so. So, yeah, in the same way, I think I'm very ambitious for them to do all of that equally.
Mark Scott 25:10
I'm Mark Scott, the Vice Chancellor of the University of Sydney, and that's Professor Ray Cooper, the Director of the Australian Center for Gender Equality and Inclusion at Work. If you're interested in learning more about how we can improve the way we work, you'll enjoy our episode about collaboration across divides. What
Kate Harrison Brennan 25:35
I saw in early days for me in politics was this ability of someone like Julie Gillard as Prime Minister, Prime Minister, after having worked across some 17 days to bring people together and form government, have a deep interest in what motivates people, and a willingness to actually get in the room and negotiate. And I think that that's foundational, to actually be able to bring people together, a sense of what is it that defines them, what's distinctive, and how might you find common ground between them? That's the basis of it all.
Mark Scott 26:04
Scroll back in your podcast app to find it and follow the podcast so you don't miss an episode, and our thanks to Glen and Penny for sharing their stories. The Solutionist is a podcast from the University of Sydney produced by Deadset studios. This episode was recorded at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences media room, and our thanks to the technical staff here.
The Solutionists is podcast from the University of Sydney, produced by Deadset Studios. Keep up to date with The Solutionists by following @sydney_uni on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
This episode was produced by Liam Riordan with sound design by Jeremy Wilmot and field sound recording by Harry Hughes. Executive producer is Madeleine Hawcroft. Executive editors are Kellie Riordan, Jen Peterson-Ward, and Mark Scott. Strategist is Ann Chesterman. Thanks to the technical staff at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Media Room.
This podcast was recorded on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation. For thousands of years, across innumerable generations, knowledge has been taught, shared and exchanged here. We pay respect to Elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.