Gender relations in Contemporary Australia

1
Gender relations in Contemporary Australia

• Is the war over?

2
Defining the gender wars

• Is Australia a particularly sexist society?
• How should we characterise the nature of the
  relationship between men and women?
• Do significant disparities exist along gender
  lines?
• The crisis for feminism vs the crisis of
  masculinity.

3
Defining gender

• Masculinity and femininity refer to the
  idealisations of particular qualities,
  characteristics, appearances, behaviours that are
  attached the male and female sex.
• Hegemonic or dominant form of gender identity.

4
Defining gender

• Binary oppositions
• Men as strong, objective, rational, independent,
  logical.
• Women as weak, subjective, emotional, dependent,
  hysterical.

5
Sites of gender socialisation

• The family
• Education
• Work
• Leisure
• Language
• Advertising

6
Advertisements

• Tend to depict women in a limited range of
  situations
• wife and homemaker
• mother
• sexual object
• Men often depicted as stupid and incompetent
• particularly in the home and afraid of
• commitment.

7
The nation as a gendered entity

• National types constructed around male figures
  and a particular kind of masculinity.
• Hyper-masculinity

8
A sexist nation?

• Gender imbalance in the 19th century
• The nature of the Australian frontier
• The basic wage
• The role of war in Australian society

9
Gender disparities today?

• Has Australia reached a post-feminist stage of
  the debate? Is feminism now redundant?
• The end of equality? Issues of gender imbalance
  off the national agenda.
• The need for a national conversation?

10
Women and politics

• The vote and the right to stand for parliament
  both achieved early in Australia.
• 1902 Commonwealth Franchise Act
• First woman to gain a seat in parliament in 1943
  and then not again until 1966.

11
Women in parliament

• 1994 ALP adopted a policy of affirmative action
  to ensure 35 of seats needed to form government
  would be filled by women.
• The number of women in parliament has climbed in
  the 1990s.
• One-quarter of Federal parliamentarians are
  women.
• Women under-represented at the executive level.

12
Women paid work

• Access to paid work a key demand in the struggle
  for womens liberation.
• 1947 women comprised 22 of the workforce
• 1987 women comprised 37 of the workforce with
  the increase of married women from 3 to 22.
• 1992 women comprised 42 of the workforce

13
Legislative changes

• 1969 granting of equal pay to women doing work of
  the same nature to men.
• 1972 equal pay for work of equal value.
• 1975 anti-discrimination legislation
• 1984 Sex Discrimination Act
• 1996 Affirmative Action (Equal Opportunity Act)

14
Women in work in contemporary Australia

• Feminisation of the workforce.
• In August 2002 women comprised 44.5 of the
  workforce.
• Overall participation of women in the workforce
  is 66 - lower than comparable nations like the
  US

15
Gender segregation

• Describes the concentration of women and men in
  different occupations
• Horizontal segregation women and men working in
  different occupations
• Vertical segregation occupational hierarchies
  are also gender hierarchies.
• Lower wages for womens work.
• Women continue to earn less than men.
• In 2002 the ratio of the female to the male wage
• was 84.4

16
The national conversation

• Housework
• Childcare
• Maternity leave

17
A crisis for feminism?

• Has feminism achieved its goals? Is it redundant?
• Is feminism relevant for young women?
• Does liberal feminism establish a men as the norm?

18
A masculinity crisis?

• Marginalised and confused by their social roles.
• Linked to changing nature of the workforce and
  increased participation of women.
• Representations in popular culture of men as
  stupid or incompetent