Women, particularly feminists, have spent the last four decades seeking equality with men, but have failed to change inequitable male-driven values. We started well in the 1970s and into the 1980s but as neoliberalism took over our progress stopped. We had gained laws for equality in some areas but without the necessary value and attitude changes, so outcomes were very limited.
Cuts to government social funding and the privatisation of much of the public and communal services undermined the ideals of social democracies. These were devised after the Second World War to help avoid the problematic conditions that had led up to it. The three decades following WWII saw the growth of welfare states and the establishment of international order via the UN, WHO, UNESCO, IMF plus to help maintain peace, prosperity, rights and equity internationally.
These also created the fertile ground from which the student and people’s movements of the 1960s grew e.g. nuclear bans, anti-racial discrimination and gender equity. The Second Wave women’s movement grew rapidly in Australia and in western countries at the same time, aiming to break down gender-based legal and social barriers and stop the exclusion of women’s views from male dominions. The successes here of the 1970s and 80s were evident in relation to domestic violence, equal pay legislation, and the establishment of community childcare and fertility services.
However, more work was needed to change values and shift attitudes. This did not happen, as the anti-social macho values of neoliberalism took hold. Privatisation took over both public and community services funding and cut funding. This paradigm shift from the social to market competition changed the priority to one of individualised monetary measures and concurrently devalued most social needs. Feminist equity changes were replaced by macho self-interest criteria.
It took us a while to realise this, as many of us were lulled into the belief that the changes we had started would have the power to continue to meet needs. We were wrong. Another related set of serious problems was becoming clearer, too; the need to solve the dangerous damage to our environment. The Neoliberals’ greedy single-minded focus on growing GDP and financial wealth was, and still is, at the cost of many social and environmental needs.
Self-interested neolibs in the 1980s didn’t care then, and still won’t recognise that offloading power to business and reducing government scope and spending exacerbate societal and economic problems. They also fail to see that people need to trust governments to maintain a stable democracy. The current power holders exemplify all these problems and should be replaced by those who care about fairness, trust, people and communities, as well as the physical environment.
Anger from feminists and women more generally is because, despite equality claims, women still face gendered power relationships in too many institutions. The March 4 Justice turnout and level of interest indicate widespread disappointment at the obvious lack of change in power relationships in workplaces, homes and public spaces. The lack of recognition of unpaid feminised skills, roles and contributions add to the anger and also continue to add to the creation of poverty.
Backward slippage
The following data were collected from the burst of media and organisational interest in women each year around March 8, International Women’s Day (apparently the other 364 are still for men). They illustrate many of the continuing inequities that need to be addressed. Most come from organisations and journals that are relatively sympathetic.
Anna Patty smh
‘The “shadow pandemics” of mental illness, domestic violence and substance abuse have exposed a crisis in community services, a national group of academics from 17 universities has warned. In the Australian Work and Family Policy Roundtable research in a report released on Wednesday, the academics say: “The crisis in care is acute”. “Many formal care services for the aged, children, and for people with disability that were already strained, collapsed under the pressure of the pandemic,” the report says. The crisis in care and employment has had an immediate and negative impact on gender equality and wellbeing in Australia, raising widespread concern about the shadow pandemics of domestic violence, mental illness and substance abuse. The researchers say the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed an under-resourced, precarious and low-paid workforce.’
The ACTU listed the following :
- 4% pay gap
- Women still bear primary responsibility for caring. When the reduced number of hours women work due to caring responsibilities is included, the gender pay gap is much higher – over 30%.
- Australia ranks 44th in the world on gender pay gap
- One of the key reasons for the gender pay gap is that the Australian workforce is highly gender-segregated. Although the principle of equal pay for equal work was embedded in federal law over 50 years ago, it has not moved in the last 30 years
The Grattan report stated:
- Data shows there were 40,000 fewer women with bachelor degrees employed in November 2020 than at the start of last year, while the trend for men went in the opposite direction. The researchers speculate that could reflect professional women exiting work to care for children during the lockdown.
Other odd bits of data I copied but didn’t source included
- Male bias affects clinical studies. Historically,, medical research has often excluded women
- No change at the top for university leaders as men outnumber women 3 to 1 ( NB more women attend universities than men now)
- Australian university leaders are nearly three times more likely to be a man than a woman. Of 37 public university chancellors, just 10 are women (27%) and 27 (73%) are men. It’s exactly the same for vice-chancellors: 10 are women and 27 are men. Together, this means men hold 54 of the 74 top jobs in Australian higher education.
- Men also dominate the upper levels of Australian academia. The latest available figures(from 2019) show: 86% more men than women at associate professor and professor levels D and E
Bernard King of Crikey for IWD:
- Politicians are also maldistributed: In politics, that “ascension” remains, to be charitable, a work in progress. Less than 20% of Coalition House of Reps MPs are female, compared to 42% of Labor MPs. It’s better in the Senate: 42% for the Coalition and over 60% for Labor, including its two Senate leaders, and two-thirds for the Greens. Nationally, just one quarter of Liberal MPs in lower houses at all levels of government are female, and 17.5% of Nats, compared to 44% of Labor MPs. It’s one-third of Liberal upper house members, compared to 50% for Labor and 47% for the Nats.
Stock exchange data
- We have made some gains: First the good news: there are now more women than men on some of the boards of Australia’s largest companies. In the 12 months to the end of February. Now for the not-so-good news: for the top 300 listed companies, there are 2057 directors, of whom only 31% are women. There are 1709 non-executive directors, of whom 36% are female.
In sum, the above maldistribution of power between dual gender definitions creates bad power and damage. We needed to contribute other fairer ideas that mend anger and distrust of those in power!
Solutions?
The above data offer serious examples of the ongoing gender inequities and some of its effects. Gender discrimination can be reduced by restoring and reframing the social contract between us, as citizens, and those we elect to govern. We need to restore trustworthiness to the system as a priority. We must establish new goals for social changes, restore community services and reduce our role as customers only to commercial areas where we can make voluntary choices about how we spend our money or time. Australia’s democracy, despite some serious omissions, used to be based on the fair-go social contract between citizens and those we elected to represent. Back then we believed those in power deserved to be there and deserved our trust.
The last ANU Australian Election Survey (AES) indicated the deepening distrust of democracy and those in power, signaling possible further damage to social cohesion and wellbeing. Although the more recent Edelman Trust study showed rising trust under Covid government controls, this is not really valued by this government so t’s likely to dissipate as market ‘normality’ returns. Trust is a basic indicator of legitimacy of democracy and high distrust creates the populisms, paranoia and divides that threaten order and good citizenship.
We can see how this has played out around the world, particularly in the US where it led to the election of Trump, who then went on to make it worse. The return to high discontent and pessimism here is likely if we return to the so-called economic normal, which is highly likely given how the current government is wedded to their mistakes of the last decades.
I remember a 1970’s badge that stated that ‘Women who want equality with men lack ambition’! Back then this was a warning that we needed to radically shift values and culture and not just fight for our share of male privilege in an inherently inequitable system. Money and markets should serve society, not run it. All of us need to work to create fairness, hope and optimism. It’s time to re-engage and reframe feminism so we can lead and contribute to our better futures.
Too much? We can do it!
Eva Maria Cox AO is an Austrian-born Australian writer, feminist, sociologist, social commentator and activist. She has been an active advocate for creating a “more civil” society.
Comments
9 responses to “Feminism needs to oppose neoliberal economics to move forward”
If “neo-liberalism” implies that we can simply rely on certain basic institutions (e.g., property rights, free trade, free flow of capital, etc) to make the world a better place, then I agree we have reason to oppose neo-liberalism. Or at least, we ought to go beyond a “blind faith” that a given set of institutions will guarantee just outcomes.
We have to look at the outcomes themselves, and take responsibility for ensuring that we in fact do achieve just outcomes. This is not to say that we don’t care about property rights, free trade, etc. They may also be part of the “just outcomes” that we have reason to value. But we don’t only care about property rights, free trade, etc. We also care about ending gender disadvantage, ending poverty, not just within our own community, but the world at large.
Similarly, we can’t just assume that because Australia has “free and fair elections”, our democracy is in good health. We have to look at whether everyone have a say on how we are governed. Free elections don’t guarantee good governance. Democracy is not just about elections. Democracy is about giving each of us a broadly equal say on how we are governed, whether we are rich or poor, white or black, resident or migrant, …
Perhaps the sororities should be formed in the same way as the Freemasons and Knights of Malta etc? Just social organizations …. no political aims. Just local charities. Every Friday night? Freya, aka Venus day? Or Moonday?
I would also recommend that sisters form closer friendships with those near to them, for safety and security.
Gossip, especially when documented and secured within the sorority, may be a great source of consolation and delight. Recipes for dishes that would remove constipation from the body politic, perhaps?
Expect lots of nose
y enquiries from women who know that other women cannot be trusted …
A media organization, aimed at the fairer sex, perhaps called Amazona? Lots of designs for needlepoint and recipes but also the odd hard nugget: all news is local. No need to worry about male world leaders, just build up trust and cultivate sources within the hierarchies?
The banks will soon be failing. Instead of amalgamating them into viables, lets trawl through the records for the last 20 years…. A new state owned banking system can make loans for building and developing?
I think the last four decades have not been a failure for feminism, it has been the resolve of some men to push back against women to make things worse. There has even been a rise in some all male extreme groups that promulgate misogyny, and in some cases rape. But if you look at someone historically like Emmeline Pankhurst, had she not persisted for around the same amount of time and more, then she and her supporters would not have won the prize of the vote in the UK. For that she and her followers got buckets of resistance from even men that earlier fought to get the vote themselves.
Not wanting to weaken your specific case for women, its also been part of wider response to the 1970s changes in culture with the introduction of many equality-based challenges to social issues. Some in our society actually hate the notion of equality, because they they lose their power and dominance over people – many of them are men. Some believe in hierarchies of power and wealth, and they push for it, while others think we should be more focused on sharing wealth and treating each other as equals. Traditionally this cleaved into the French description of the left and right sides of politics.
It certainly does not mean that nothing has changed for women, and many men do support women on such issues, but there is certainly a long way to go before women are fully equal on all levels. Equality for all is the major issue in today’s world, whether that be males and females, people of different ethnicities, old verses young, abled verse disabled, differences in economies between rich and poor countries, black verses white, rich verse poor, it is everywhere and no one likes to be the person that is less equal.
Neoliberalism has been of benefit to about 1% of the world’s richest, and any graph since the beginning of the 1980s of the continued increase of wealth to that demographic is demonstrative of the fact. Trickle down economics was a massive failure, and generally the bulk of the population has not kept up with pay increases like the wealthiest in our community have had even during the Covid-19 pandemic. The response from our government was to give men more chances for stimulus packages such as for tradies, a male dominated field, and not give a toss about women who in any case earn less, often held jobs that were lost due to lockdown, have less superannuation, were not remunerated as casuals if they had not worked for a year in (the position for many women), yet they were the majority of frontline workers facing the pandemic. There are still far less women in key management positions as well. But then this is a government that promotes Neoliberalism, trickle down economics, and also shows the greatest problem with accepting women as equals.
Thanks Eva I agree with you and do not enjoy the very sad fact that one of the people who did the most damage to the improvements achieved in the 1970s was one who herself benefitted from them, and then systematically denied others the same opportunities: Margaret Thatcher of course – she of the ‘no society just an economy’. Well COVID is proving her wrong I think – but then I never believed her. And just a thought- a possible typo: did you mean Bernard Keane from Crikey and not King – memories of tv chefs of Old??
A source for bias in clinical studies, Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez; more general but with lots of stuff on the clinical bias.
Thanks Eva for the stats.
I note that it will be hard to address these issues while accepting the Neo liberal framing language. This is designed to prioritise anti social greed and tie proponents of social unity in verbal knots.
GDP relies on environmental destruction in much the same way that football scores rely on brain concussions. As with football scores, the scale and distribution of GDP reflects the rules of the market, which reflect the priorities of ruling authorities. In Australia, the federal government issues and administers the currency and therefore has first and loudest say in what counts as ’GDP’. If improving citizen welfare harms ‘GDP’, this is because market settings are way off mark, ‘corrupt’ so to speak. We all need to stop using the language they have adopted to hide this simple fact.
One of the biggest enablers of the neoliberal corruption has been the use of divide and conquer. Not many white middle aged men are benefiting from neoliberal policy settings in absolute terms, it is unfortunate when they are encouraged to think they are.
We should all oppose neoliberalism, Eva. Most of us did but our opinions were not sought by either side of politics. Elizabeth Humphrys has written a book on the subject — “How Labour built Neoliberalism: Australia’s Accord, the Labour Movement and the Neoliberal Project.” It is reviewed in the current edition of the Journal of Australian Political Economy.