The Misogyny Factor

It is Australia Day, 2013. This is the day when the nation puts itself on show, puffs out its chest and says: this is who we are. It is a day of citizenship ceremonies, when recent arrivals officially join our ranks, a day when we have barbecues and parties and all kinds of official events to celebrate our nationhood. It is also the day when large numbers of people are honoured by the government for their service to the community, and it is the day after we have learned who has been selected as 'Australian of the Year'. On Australia Day we show our face to the world, and to ourselves, and reveal what kind of country we really are. And that face, it turns out, is mostly male.

On 26 January 2013 Order of Australia honours were awarded to 571 people, 425 of them men and only 146 women. Just 25.5 per cent of these awards went to women. Not a single woman received the AC (the Companion of the Order of Australia), the highest of the honours, and the percentage of women honoured overall was one of the lowest on record. The night before, the magazine editor and publisher Ita Buttrose was named 'Australian of the Year'. She was the first woman for eight years and just the fourth woman in 20 years to have received this honour. In its first 31 years, until 1993 when the timing of the award was changed and no appointment made that year, it was somewhat fairer: between 1961 and 1992 seven women had been 'Australian of the Year', eight if you included Judith Durham, a band member of The Seekers, who were collectively named 'Australian of the Year' in 1967. This is just one of many examples in Australia today of women's representation in the organisations and institutions that define our country being not just low but lower than it used to be back when we seemed to take women's equality a bit more seriously.

How can this be? It is, after all, well over a hundred years after Australian women got the right to vote, and more than forty years since Gough Whitlam put equality of the sexes on the national agenda by promising in his campaign election speech, delivered on 13 November 1972, that his government would introduce anti-discrimination legislation and equal pay for women.

It seemed a simple goal. It was easy to outline what needed to happen: legal and other barriers to equality needed to be removed, measures to promote equality needed to be put in place, and women's particular needs recognised. Anti-discrimination laws would be a key tool to remove impediments to equality. Women would be given equal access to education, jobs and remuneration. They would be able to exercise reproductive control by having access to contraception and abortion. And, of course, childcare and other essential supports would be provided to enable them to combine participating in the paid workforce with having children. Equality would be all about ending the traditional view that women's only place was in the home, and promoting the alternative notion that women should participate fully in all areas of society. How hard would that be?

Extremely hard, as it turned out.

Forty years on we are not even close to achieving equality. It really is quite absurd when you think about it. Why is it that in forty years we have not been able to bring about a series of changes that are logical, rational, just and, as well as being personally beneficial to women themselves, would be of tremendous economic advantage to the nation?

Certainly it was an ambitious goal. In order for it to happen there needed to be a radical restructure of virtually all of our institutions in order to reform the old, unequal basis on which most of them were conceived and operated. It meant taking on and challenging, as a prelude to reform, entrenched attitudes and practices that were predicated on the idea that women had no legitimate role outside the domestic sphere. It meant confronting these attitudes – these prejudices – in major institutions of society such as business, the media, the military, and the church. It also meant trying to end decades, if not centuries, of privilege that were founded on the inequality of the sexes and which would be threatened by the large-scale entry of women into these organisations and institutions. There were clear national economic benefits, as well as individual ones, to be gained.

In the past, we have embraced huge, ambitious projects for national betterment. How ambitious, for instance, was it to reroute several rivers, flood a few towns and create a massive hydro project that would generate electricity and provide irrigation waters to parched farmland across half our continent? The Snowy Mountains Scheme was just that: logical, rational, just and of tremendous economic advantage to the nation. We managed to complete that in just 25 years.

But while we are good at engineering such huge national construction projects – think also of the Overland Telegraph and, currently, the National Broadband Network – perhaps we are not so adept when it comes to engineering social projects. In fact, we don't even like to think of equality between the sexes in such terms. We – or many of us – would prefer to talk about rights and fairness and entitlements. I want to argue here that such talk has not achieved what we want and maybe it is time to take another approach.

The question I explore in this book is: Why have we Australians denied ourselves the benefits of equality? We know that increasing women's workforce participation adds substantially to national economic growth, as well as providing financial benefits and personal fulfilment to women themselves. So why have we been so irrational as to forego the economic and other advantages that would stem from having a truly equal society? And why, when it comes to equality of the sexes, have we seemingly laid aside our longstanding concerns for social justice? Australia has a long and proud tradition of pioneering reforms that have granted or improved upon political, social and economic rights for her citizens. Australia created the secret ballot to prevent corruption in elections. Australia led the world with many reforms designed to end the exploitation of workers and to improve society for everyone: it was the first to introduce the eight-hour day, recognising that workers were entitled to leisure as well as rest after their labour; Australia introduced conciliation and arbitration processes for fairly determining wages and settling disputes between workers and employers. Australia was one of the first places in the world to grant women the right to vote (the states of South Australia and Western Australia enfranchised women in 1894 and 1899, respectively, before national suffrage was introduced in 1901). We were the first to introduce such reforms as child endowment, the widow's pension, and policewomen. Why, with such an innovative history, have we fallen so short with women's equality?

Why is it that despite at least forty years of legislative and other measures designed to achieve equality, women are still paid considerably less than men, women are still seen as having the primary responsibility for raising children, women's workforce...