Mem’s a Boomer. Why her generation drove social change and isn’t just about house prices | SBS Insight

Younger generations often vocalise their resentment towards Baby Boomers and their inaction on climate policy, their hold on property and economic prosperity, but the work that Boomers have done to create positive changes in society is often overlooked.

By rejecting the conservative attitudes of their parents’ generation, Boomers transformed society by pushing back against social attitudes and norms and breaking taboos.

How Boomers fought against the stigma of single motherhood

When Tricia Harper returned to Australia from London in 1969 as a single mother with her baby daughter, she opened Melbourne’s The Age newspaper and read an article that stated the bottom groups on the social ladder, which included derelict men and unmarried mothers.
Harper had been living independently and working as a teacher when she decided to resist the intense societal pressure at the time to give her baby up for adoption. She kept her daughter Ruth despite family and friends voicing their disapproval.

This disapproval motivated Harper to group together with other unmarried mothers to form a group, The Council for Single Mothers and her Child, that would advocate for change.

“We wanted to abolish the illegitimacy … we wanted to change the Family Law Act, and get better child support payments. They were some of our key goals, as well as moving to eliminate stigma, get rid of labels,” Tricia said.

Source: Mem’s a Boomer. Why her generation drove social change and isn’t just about house prices | SBS Insight

When can we really raise a glass on International Women’s Day? | Madonna King | New Daily

We are currently ranked 32nd in the world for female parliamentary representation, below New Zealand, Rwanda and Iceland.

It’s on the rise. For example, in federal Parliament the number of female politicians has jumped 15 per cent since 2002, to sit at 40 per cent in 2023.

For those young women who feel excluded from politics and disinterested in the ‘he said-he said’ that is yelled across the political chamber, Zoe McKenzie’s message was a warm embrace that showed politics can be done in another way.

But it’s time we stopped celebrating little strides forward in equality with purple cupcakes and long celebratory lunches and looked at how we could genuinely drive real gender equality in our communities.

How can we raise our glasses this International Women’s Day when the fastest growing homeless group is women over the age of 55?

Or when some girls’ schools in Australia still do not allow shorts as part of the uniform.

Or when the media refer to a felon or an accused person as ‘a mother of three’ and the narrative is dominated by her role as a woman. Rarely do we know the marital status of a male in similar circumstances.

But it’s probably the heartbreak of domestic violence that drives home the absolute inequality now faced by many women in Australia (and indeed around the world).

Advertising campaigns, targeted school talks and new laws to address coercive control have all failed to reduce the nation’s shameful domestic violence figures, with police DV callouts now increasing 20 per cent each year. In the large proportion of those, the victim is female.

Imagine if domestic violence figures became the barometer of equality, and we – men and women – worked together to curtail the heartache that largely remains hidden.

Source: When can we really raise a glass on International Women’s Day?

Superannuation will be added to Paid Parental Leave scheme | The Australian

Mums and dads will receive superannuation on top of government-funded paid parental leave payments, in a major spending commitment ahead of the May budget aimed at bolstering Labor’s gender equity credentials.

Women’s Minister Katy Gallagher will on Thursday unveil a plan to increase the nearly $900 a week payment by 12 per cent, which will go into superannuation accounts for the 180,000 parents who access the scheme every year.

Senator Gallagher said the measure would “close the super gap”, with men generally retiring with about 25 per cent more superannuation than women.

The announcement comes almost a year after the government’s Women’s Economic Equality Taskforce recommended it take “urgent” action to add super to PPL, which Senator Gallagher said she was actively considering ahead of the May 2023 budget.

Source: Superannuation will be added to Paid Parental Leave scheme | The Australian

Pay gap stats aren’t about naming and shaming? Um, they kind of are | SMH | Jacqueline Maley

We’ve all got to get our kicks somehow. I’ve been getting mine by playing a game of compare-and-contrast: looking at the data released on Tuesday showing which companies have the biggest gender pay gaps, and lining it up with what those companies say on their corporate websites, under the “diversity and inclusion” tabs.

Here is CommBank (gender pay gap of 29.8 per cent on base salary, twice the national median of 14.5 per cent) telling us its policy on equality. “Everyone has fair and equitable access to career and development opportunities resulting in diverse representation at leadership levels,” it asserts.

Energy company AGL (gender pay gap of 30 per cent, again, twice the national median for base pay) says it “strives to empower women to achieve their career goals and provide them with opportunities to connect and grow”.

AGL assures sceptics that “our Values [sic] are not just words on paper, they represent the very essence of who we are as an organisation and what we stand for. They shape our culture, guide our decisions, and drive our actions”.

Investment bank Morgan Stanley (gender pay gap of 25 per cent on base salary, and a whopping 48.2 per cent when you factor in bonuses), boasts of its commitment to “Diversity & Inclusion” as one of its “core values”.

So – is the pay gap entirely structural? And is it fair to expect companies to fix gender stereotyping in society at large?

We can blame corporate Australia for some things, but not for the fact that women, for their own reasons, “choose” to do more flexible, family-friendly jobs that happen to be less paid.

Right?

Well, it requires a truly heroic suspension of reason to conclude sexism and discrimination do not contribute to the pay gap. Salary begins to diverge along gender lines at the graduate level, before most women have had babies.

Source: 12ft

Global awareness of women’s health being ‘hijacked by vested interests’

The global drive to increase awareness of women’s health is being hijacked by major corporations promoting flawed or ineffective tests, treatments and technology, doctors and public health experts have warned.

[F]eminist health narratives are increasingly being co-opted by commercial interests to market products or interventions that are not backed by evidence, said researchers writing in the BMJ.

The surge in marketing risks harming women through inappropriate medicalisation, overdiagnosis and overtreatment, said Dr Tessa Copp, a public health researcher at the University of Sydney, Dr Minna Johansson, a GP in Gothenburg, and colleagues.

Companies have historically exploited health agendas by co-opting messaging about female autonomy to encourage women’s consumption of unhealthy commodities like tobacco and alcohol, they wrote. But this phenomenon has now expanded across women’s health.

They cited two examples of how feminist discourse was being hijacked to push non-evidence-based healthcare to healthy women.

The first was the anti-müllerian hormone (AMH) test, which measures levels of AMH in the blood, linked to the number of eggs in a woman’s ovaries.

The test does not reliably predict the chance of conceiving but fertility clinics and online companies globally are marketing it to the general public suggesting as much, the experts warned.

The second example cited was the view that all women having screening should be notified about their breast density, one of several independent risk factors for breast cancer.

Breast density notification can also increase women’s anxiety, confusion and intention to seek additional screening, while the unreliability of breast density measurement is another concern, they added.

In conclusion, they say: “We need to ensure the goals of feminist health advocacy are not undermined through commercially driven use of feminist discourse pushing non-evidence based care.”

Source: Global awareness of women’s health being ‘hijacked by vested interests’

If the ABS guts Australia’s time use survey, women’s work will count for little

Childcare is probably Australia’s largest industry, most of it unpaid.

We know this because of Australian Bureau of Statistics time use surveys. Since 1992 these surveys have recorded what thousands of Australians say they do with their time in diaries kept for 48 hours.

But if the Bureau of Statistics proceeds with its current plans for scaling down the survey we soon won’t be able to tell.

Australia has not only led the world in recording time use, but also in recording simultaneous activities – what Australians do when they multitask.

In 1997 the survey found that whereas the average time spent on childcare as a main activity was about two hours per day, the average when simultaneous activities were taken into account was closer to seven hours per day. Among the simultaneous activities were preparing meals and washing clothes.

Now the bureau wants. . . .to exclude simultaneous activities.

This means we will no longer get a good read on the total amount of childcare and other domestic activities we are doing. Our surveys will also no longer be directly comparable to those of other countries.

Time-use expert Lyn Craig of the University of Melbourne says that without the contextual data the bureau proposes to leave out we won’t be able to capture the full dimensions of care work, including whether the breakdown by gender is changing.

Those who specialise in time-use research say the bureau’s current plan is destined to fail. There’s a good deal of women’s unpaid work it won’t capture.

In 1988 New Zealand economist Marilyn Waring wrote a famous book called Counting for Nothing about how women and the environment were invisible in policymaking.

If the bureau proceeds as planned, it will take us back toward those days.

Source: If the ABS guts Australia’s time use survey, women’s work will count for little

Hopeful anthology about the gender war

Gender-based statistics are removed in several countries. Women are renamed womb carriers or pregnant people. Yvonne Hirdman, who launched the word “gender” in Sweden, reads a new anthology and reflects on what has happened to gender research.

The book I promised to review is called, Women’s Rights Gender Wrongs. The global impact of gender-identity ideology , and is an entry in this war.

It is an anthology (ed. Kath Aiken & Sally Wainwright) which is divided into two parts. The first consists of essays/reports from women around the world about the impact “gender-identity ideology” has had in each country – for example in terms of legal systems, social policy, education and health systems.

The second part contains short reports from 35 countries around the world on how the country in question lives up to the Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights, a declaration that requires CEDAW, the Women’s Convention, to be confirmed. 1

So what is the book about? The title trumpets its thesis: that women’s rights – as women – are threatened or have already been curtailed or sidelined by an ideology that does not recognize biological sex as a basis for rights, but replaces this with an experience, a sense of identity.

[S]o the core of this movement that leads away from woman/sex to gender according to the book’s author: to de-biologize motherhood, to be able to become a “generic” mother or father.

“Exploitation of reproduction is at the core of the post-queer agenda and appropriation of women’s reproductive capacity is at the core of patriarchy”.

Neither Beauvoir nor we (at least I) ever denied the existence of sex: the vagina, the breast, the X-chromosome. What we denied was that these biological characteristics created collective female characteristics. This attribution of stereotypical gender characteristics emanates directly from biological functions: if you have a vagina, you are predestined to scrub toilets – the kind of idiocy that has kept women under the tyranny of the cutting blankets. So simple.

Source: Parabol | Hoppfull antologi om genuskriget

Women’s Legal Services Australia calls for Federal government funding in gender equality push | Australasian Lawyer

Women’s Legal Services Australia has called for increased funding from the Federal government in a push for commitment to fighting back against gender inequality in the country.

Women’s Legal Services Australia chair Elena Rosenman explained that the availability of specialist legal services for Australian women has not increased significantly across most jurisdictions in spite of funding commitments made in prior budget cycles.

The organisation analysed 2023 data collected by all 13 Women’s Legal Services and found that over a five-day period, Women’s Legal Services had to deny 1,018 women who needed legal assistance – equating over 52,000 Australian women per year.

Rosenman added that the 2024/25 budget provided an opportunity to “break this devastating cycle of unmet demand for women in crisis”.

Source: Women’s Legal Services Australia calls for Federal government funding in gender equality push | Australasian Lawyer

Inquiry into Women’s Pain

Key messages

  • The Inquiry into Women’s Pain will provide recommendations to inform improved models of care and service delivery for Victorian girls and women experiencing pain in the future.
  • Submissions for the Inquiry into Women’s Pain open 30 January 2024.

Chronic pain affects a higher proportion of girls and women than men around the world; however, women are less likely to receive treatment. Research has also shown that women generally experience more recurrent pain, more severe pain, and longer-lasting pain than men.

Medical gender bias routinely leads to a denial of pain and therefore, lack of pain relief and associated treatment for women. This occurs for various health conditions, including cardiovascular, neurological, reproductive, and autoimmune conditions.

We will consult broadly through:

  1. Written submissions from consumers, clinicians, and health service organisations from 30 January to 12 March.
  2. Engage Victoria survey in late March 2024 to hear from those with lived experience of pain, and healthcare workers who provide pain services, care and treatment.
  3. Focus groups in mid-2024 with healthcare workers, people with lived and living experience of pain, and key stakeholders.

Source: Inquiry into Women’s Pain

Flemish film awards under fire after men win most prestigious gender-neutral categories

The Flemish film and television awards are facing calls to temporarily do away with gender-neutral categories amid concerns that the switch has left women routinely shut out of the top awards.

At the Ensors awards on Saturday male actors cleaned up the categories for best lead and supporting actors. It was an echo of 2022 – the first year that the awards ceremony axed gendered categories – when men also walked away with each of the four awards recognising the best actors.

The results prompted calls to temporarily revert back to the traditional format.

Source: Flemish film awards under fire after men win most prestigious gender-neutral categories