Dealing with the responsibilities of childcare remains one of the biggest barriers to women participating fully in the workplace. While there is some progress, there is still a long way to go, writes Claire Stewart.
At 12 weeks old, Theresa Jacques began taking her son Aaron to work. She had been six months’ pregnant when she was head-hunted as the first Australian intensive care specialist for Sydney's St George Hospital.
Across the boardroom table was her male interview panel, the only female a human resources officer in the corner. It was 1989, the blinds were half closed and the sun was right in her eye, and all these men were staring, she recalls. One of them pointed at her belly: “How are you going to manage that?”
"I had rehearsed in my mind all the usual sorts of interview questions … I didn't have an answer for that. So I sort of apologised for being pregnant and promised it wouldn't interfere with my work."
Jacques said she took away a clear message from the interview to be careful about making excuses around childcare. So when her husband was at work teaching, she carried Aaron around ICU with her, handing him to colleagues when she had to attend a patient. Six months later she was made head of department.
That confluence of events should be considered absurd by today's measures, but the massive systemic change needed to make it such hasn't materialised, Melbourne ethicist and author Leslie Cannald says. Tweaks and piecemeal responses like subsidies, or adding an extra childcare centres, or extending hours, distract from the bigger picture.
"We've still got that 1970s thing of looking after children being the woman's job, so if women want to work, what are they going to do about the children."
Rather than framing it as a woman's issue, which by definition marginalises it and makes it less pressing, Cannald says it has to be a tripartite discussion around dividing responsibility between both parents, and the state.
"Ultimately, it's about power and distribution of resources. The reality is that childcare is unpaid work, and it's hard work. And as long as society can keep foisting it off on one half of the population who itself continues to actually take it and see it as some kind of validation of their gender identity, then we're not going to get anywhere,” she says.
"So many men's careers have been based on the woman staying at home. They know it and we know it and they don't want to threaten that … We [females] let that happen."
The solution to bring the systemic change needed, Cannald says, is to get key people to change their language, address the pay gap and remove the (sometimes) subconscious guilt and bias against childcare that colours every discussion about who should look after the kids.
"It's a very Western conversation about the trauma of childcare, and how mother is best and everything else is damaging," she says.
"We've had a whole generation of feminist mums who've done a damn fine job raising their boys to believe they ought to be sharing the unpaid work. [But] nobody male or female wants to wear the cost of it, and at the moment the costs are really quite profound."
Jacques says her husband Kevin helped with much of the care, but his death when the children were eight and 10 meant she could not have survived without au pair services.
"Some people, and some cultures don't like other people minding their kids. That's their call," she says. But with her family in Melbourne she had little choice.
While conflicted feelings and guilt played a minor part, her solution was to ensure she was fully present in the time she had off with her children, creating adventures and travelling together to stay connected. "And reassuring other people that the kids actually do turn out all right."
Jacques, recognised as a Woman of Influence in 2015 in the public policy category, says the solution for her profession is to normalise gender equity by having more female bosses who will (consciously or unconsciously) hire more women, increase paternal leave and implement job sharing instead of part-time work.
She says the medical practice is becoming more welcoming of the idea of families, both through their physical presence at things like national scientific conferences, but also in the number of male doctors taking on care roles. "It's not a lot, but it is more."
"If we had better paternity leave now, it goes towards changing cultural norms. What happens is the men, having the leave, learn to care for a child, and feel more able to share the care going forward. Parenting is teamwork and the way our work environment is, and society is, we're not encouraging teamwork, we're dividing it."
However, the nature of clinical work and the importance of continuity of care for patients makes flexible work a real challenge in medicine irrespective of gender, she says.
"There is a need for more flexibility but if you just go for part-time, you end up having three part-timers off at once. If you had genuine job share, where either one or other person is always there, then that can work. One role, two people."
