Australia’s workforce is almost evenly split between men and women, yet fewer than one in four Australians work in a gender balanced occupation.
But why does it matter? Turns out, it’s bad for workers, businesses and the economy.
In this podcast episode, host Kat Clay is joined by Jessica Geraghty to discuss her latest research on why fixing the gender balance matters.
Transcript
Kat Clay: Australia’s workforce is almost evenly split between men and women, yet fewer than one in four Australians work in a gender balanced occupation. It may seem unsurprising that some jobs are dominated by men or women.
For example, it might not surprise you to know that around 97% of all carpenters are male, or that around 99% of midwives are women.
But why should we care? Well, it turns out it’s bad for workers, businesses, and the economy. I’m Kat Clay and you’re listening to the Grattan Podcast. Here to explain why fixing the workforce gender balance is in everyone’s interest is Senior Associate Jessica Geraghty, who recently published an article in The Conversation on this very topic.
Jess, you’ve been researching the Australian workforce. Is gender segregation in the workplace getting better or worse?
Jessica Geraghty: Gender segregation is improving, but it’s going at a pretty glacial pace. If we go back to 1990 when women were around 42% of the workforce, we see that about 15% of Australians were in a gender balanced occupation. Today that’s around 22%, so less than one in four Australians. And if we look at men specifically, back in 1990, about 52% of men were in a highly male dominated occupation. So that’s an occupation where it was 80% or more male. Today that has declined, but it’s still 41%. So, we are seeing improvements, but they’re pretty slow.
Kat Clay: So, I am curious, in what industries do we see the biggest gender split?
Jessica Geraghty: Yeah, so we can look at it by occupation, but the industry perspective is also quite important. So, about half of Australians work in a gender balanced industry. So, think public administration, retail, professional services. But some of our biggest ones are still quite segregated. So specifically, health and education are both heavily female dominated.
And construction is also male dominated. And of concern for those industries, we see that we’re not really making much progress, but actually they’re getting more segregated over time.
Kat Clay: As I said in the introduction, it’s unsurprising. You know, if you asked anyone, you know what industries you think have a gender imbalance, you’d probably take a guess and say it’s construction um, and potentially education.
But what I really want to know is what is the benefit to improving the gender balance in the workplace?
Jessica Geraghty: It’s a good question, Kat, and we’re not talking about improving the gender balance just because we think it’d be nice to see more men in teaching positions or more women in construction, but we wanna improve it because there’s actually economic benefits to doing so.
So, if we start at the level of the whole economy, we see that productivity and income are lower when men and women are channelled into different jobs. And so, there’s this quite famous paper in the US that looked at economic growth between 1960 and 2010, and they found that about 20 to 40% of that growth was the result of reducing occupational segregation. So specifically, as women and black men started entering these highly skilled occupations.
Reducing occupational segregation was obviously good for those people, but it lifted the economy as a whole as well. There’s also research that suggests that scientific teams and company boards tend to do better when they’re gender balanced. So, they are more innovative, and they have more novel patterns.
And in Australia, there’s some research that suggests that income is lower than it could be because women are underrepresented in entrepreneurial positions. And so, there’s these economy-wide benefits to reducing segregation.
And if we look at businesses, we know that businesses find it harder to fill vacancies for jobs that are segregated and they’re more likely to be in shortage. And so that means that our labour market is less efficient than it could be.
An unemployment is also higher as well. And that makes sense, right? Because businesses are not looking at the full talent pool when they’re trying to fill their jobs.
And then at the level of the individual, so you and I, it’s not a good thing either if we have occupational segregation and so people’s career options are arbitrarily restricted and if they do go into non-traditional roles, they’re at greater risk of facing social stigma or harassment. And it also makes people less resilient to shocks. As an example of that, you might think about a community where there’s a major coal mine or a manufacturing plant that closes down. And in that case, statistically more men would lose jobs than women and even if there are a bunch of unfilled roles in things like health, it might be harder for those displaced workers to move into those kinds of roles.
And so, by reducing gender segregation across the workforce, it’s good for individuals, it’s good for businesses, but it’s good for the economy more broadly.
Kat Clay: Yeah, and I think this research ties into a lot of the big conversations Australia is having at the moment around productivity. You know, how do we get more women back into the workforce, especially after having children? How do we increase the productivity there? Because a lot of women are not working as many hours um, after having kids, cause they have childcaring responsibilities. And the other thing that it taps into is that potential um, job displacement as well with AI. So, it’s really important to be having these conversations.
You know, we’ve heard from groups like the WGEA who release the wage gap data every year. That’s been fascinating to have a look at that. What I’m interested in is what impact does this gendered segregation have on pay?
Jessica Geraghty: Yeah, so it is a contributor to the pay gap. And there was some research that KPMG did a couple years ago for the Workplace Gender Equality Agency, and they found that segregation across industries and occupations was responsible for about a quarter of the pay gap. And the way to think about that is that not all industries and occupations are paid the same.
And so, we see that female dominated industries and occupations tend to be paid less, which means that as women are concentrated in those kind of roles and areas. That contributes to the pay gap. And so that is another good reason that improving the gender balance within occupations and industries is a good thing because it will help reduce the gender pay gap.
Kat Clay: We’ve talked a little bit about how the situation is at the moment. It sounds great in theory that we would love more gender equity in the workplace. Um, obviously we’d want more gender equity in pay as well, but of course there are several barriers in the way to achieving this, and one thing I found really fascinating in your article is that gender segregation in Australia has resisted the rapid rise in education for women and the increase in labour force participation rates.
Why is that?
Jessica Geraghty: That’s right Kat. And so, you know, the fact that we’re still seeing this sort of segregation despite the fact that participation and employment of women have increased so significantly tells us that segregation is not the function of an imbalanced workforce, but actually that there’s these broader structural drivers at play.
Now some of those are related to the worker or what the economists might call the supply side. And others are related to employers or, or the demand side. But a lot of these factors as well, they’re interlinked, they’re self-reinforcing, so they can be quite persistent and difficult to shift.
Kat Clay: So, Jess, what are some of the factors here?
Jessica Geraghty: As an example, educational pathways is a key driver of this segregation. So, it doesn’t just start in the workplace when everyone gets jobs, but we see that there is segregation that begins much earlier, and so children as young as five their career aspirations are shaped by gendered ideas of who does what kind of work.
And we see that further along the pathway.
So, men made up about four in five new engineering and IT students um, at university in 2022 compared to just one in four new health and education students. And so, we see that these gendered educational pathways lay the foundations for gendered career pathways.
The uneven allocation of unpaid work is another factor that contributes to segregation.
And so, we see that women do, almost twice as much unpaid work as men, and they do less paid work, which means that their employment opportunities are more constrained. And so, we know that not all firms are, equally likely to offer part-time work or flexible arrangements, for example, which means that burden of unpaid care does limit, women’s employment, opportunities.
There’s a couple of other drivers that I wanted to flag. The first is workplace culture, which is often cited as a barrier to attracting and retaining women in male dominated industries and, and jobs. And it’s not just behaviour like harassment, which can obviously be a problem and is more problematic for women in male dominated , areas, but it’s also things like discriminatory practices in recruitment or, performance evaluation. It’s things like workplaces not offering family friendly policies or penalizing people for taking advantage of those policies.
And the final driver I wanted to point out is low pay in feminized industries.
And that is a barrier to attracting and retaining men in those fields. So, work in areas like care has historically been undervalued because of gender discrimination, and that’s led to low pay poor working conditions and low social status of those jobs.
And so that’s another really important driver of the segregation that we see in our workforce today.
Kat Clay: And we are seeing a lot of those conversations play out as a result of , COVID-19 lockdowns and coming back into the workplace after having those kind of more flexible working conditions, and the research is still being done in this area about whether, how effective at increasing productivity that is, whether, um, flexible working conditions are better for people with disabilities or women, who potentially need that flexibility in order to participate in the workforce.
Critics of this kind of research though, I think would say this is a question for businesses, this isn’t a question for government. It’s up to the business as to whether they, provide these kind of, working conditions that are flexible or perhaps more beneficial for women, it’s up to businesses to ensure they reflect on the gender wage gap. So, I’m wondering what role then do governments have to play in improving the gender balance in these segregated industries?
Jessica Geraghty: Yeah, look, it’s certainly the case that some of the levers are in the hands of businesses. So, when it comes to workplace culture, for example, it is up to businesses to ensure that they have appropriate policies in place, that their recruitment, performance evaluation processes aren’t inadvertently limiting the careers of women or people with disability.
As you said, Kat. The rise in flexible work was really important for opening the door to women and people with disability in certain jobs. So, people who previously hadn’t been able to work in those kinds of areas. And so those kinds of things are definitely the responsibility of businesses, but the government does have a few really important levers and probably the most direct one is pay in feminized industries, which tend to be government funded. We’ve seen the government commit quite significant funding to lift wages in some of those areas, such as childcare and aged care, which were very low paid and had been for a long time.
That’s really good. That should help improve the ability of those industries to attract more workers, both men and women. But there’s other things they can be doing as well around improving working conditions in the, in those spaces.
But I think one of the really important things or one of the really important drivers of segregation as well, is gender norms and changing gender norms around who does what work.
Gender norms are widespread. They’re influenced by families, by schools, by workplaces, but they are also influenced by government and government policies. And so, there’s things that governments can do to try and shift gender norms too.
Kat Clay: Yeah, so that is the perfect time for me to ask what other policies can help shift these gender norms?
Jessica Geraghty: So, one of the biggest opportunities for governments to reshape gender norms comes from making that uneven distribution of unpaid care more equitable between men and women. And specifically, I’m thinking when it comes to caring for children. And so, there’s quite strong evidence that more gender equal, uptake of parental leave leads to more gender equal attitudes for adults and for their children as well. And it supports a more even distribution of that unpaid care work over time. And so, in Australia, we have, four weeks of parental leave that can only be used by fathers, or partners, in what’s called a use it or lose it component.
And that is a really important step to encourage more men to take on more of that caring work. And evidence suggests that specific model with a use it or lose it component, really works both in the short term and the long term. But again, that’s not something that governments alone can tackle.
And so, we are seeing more and more businesses offering parental leave in addition to the government scheme. But that’s far from universal.
And there do seem to be some barriers to men taking the leave, whether that’s practical, but certainly cultural. And so, there’s more work to do still by governments, but also, across society to normalize, men providing care for their children.
Kat Clay: Yeah, and it’s fascinating to me that one of the things that often gets said to women when they’re having children is you’ll never regret the time you spend with them when they’re young. But you know, it’s something potentially we have to start saying to dads and partners as well. And hopefully we are seeing a little bit of that shift happen.
Grattan has been advocating for this change, and this for a long time. We had a report called Dad Days, which you can read on our website that did advocate for a lot of these recommendations.
But I’m wondering, is it possible for Australia to change? Progress feels slow, and these gender norms feel so entrenched in our culture.
Jessica Geraghty: Yeah, I mean. if we look at the improvement in the gender balance, in different occupations since sort of the late eighties, we see that a bit over half of that has come about because occupations have been improving their gender balance, maybe not by a lot, but they have been improving and so I think that gives us some cause, for optimism that these things can change. I think another reason as well is if we look internationally, we see that gender segregation is common around the world, but there’s variation in which gender dominates a particular job. And so, what that tells me is that there’s no inherent reason that men must perform job X and women must perform job y.
So, I think that should be reason to be optimistic. There’s also some research that suggests that jobs reach, tipping points where, you know, the female share, for example, of a job will increase slowly, slowly, slowly, and then it will accelerate. And so perhaps that’s something that we’ll see over time.
So, I do think, Kat, that there is reason to be optimistic that we can shift the dial. We might not see those results in 12 months’ time, but over time and through a range of policies, we can start to shift people’s outlook and their views around who does what kind of work. And so, I think it’s totally reasonable to expect that future generations will have a different perspective of what’s possible for them in the world of work.
Kat Clay: Thank you so much, Jess, for sharing your insight with us today. If you’d like to read her article and dive further into the research behind it, I’ll put a link in the show notes below. You can also find all of our research for free online at grattan.edu.au. Please take care and thanks so much for listening.