Where are the women?

This week, I had a corker of an insight. The AFR's Tess Bennett wrote an article entited "Half of men in corporate Australia are fatigued by gender equality". Oh, how we laughed.

Men think they're tired. All the women I know are exhausted by gender equality, or more accurately the lack of it.

Which is why it was so comforting to hear Sam Mostyn give it to the government during her National Press Club address on Wednesday. Mostyn is the president of lobby group Chief Exectuive Women. Because she's not a street brawler, she didn't directly tell the government its approach was utterly, excruciatingly useless. She took the mature road - fix the country this way, not in hard hats and hi-vis as the Prime Minister always does, but by centring the caring economy.

That economy, said Mostyn, "is powered by women who are often underpaid, if they're paid at all".

"This care economy has accomplished extraordinary things, and we need to start valuing, maintaining and investing in it with the same energy and focus as we would any arterial road," she said.

God yes. You'd love to see it. Sadly for us, men wield the hi-vis just as they do condoms, only used when they think it's useful for them.

Mostyn pointed out 55 per cent of jobs lost during April 2020 were women's, and this year, 60 per cent of the job losses across Australia between June and September were women's. Young women were hit hard. And 90,000 Australian parents stayed out of the workforce last year because the cost of childcare was too high. I'll tell you who was doing most of the staying out.

Childcare could be free in this country. It could. Women's work could be valued in this country. Yes, it could.

Retail workers - mostly women, mostly young, on whom we discovered our lives depended during lockdown - felt the impacts hard. Nearly half said their job security had decreased during the pandemic. As for working hours, 55 per cent of women said their hours had decreased, either to a great extent or somewhat, compared to 45 per cent of men. This new research from the ANU's Ariadne Vromen and colleagues also reveals the huge stress our retail workers were under. I remember interrupting a rant from a large, loud bloke directed at the young woman half his size who was monitoring the self-checkout section at my local supermarket. It wasn't the only time bystanders intervened to protect the staff there.

Not all of us experience gendered violence, yet so many do - but it's only just in the past five minutes, as a battalion of angry women voters come storming to the barricades known as the federal election, that the government now says it will fund a federal Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence Commission, to the tune of a paltry $22.4 million (want to know what family violence costs business every single year? About $2 billion).

Yet, we have a federal government which wants to enshrine masculinity and masculine values in everything we say and do. The best possible example of the Coalition's response to women is to explicate the relationship between the Respect@Work report and sexual harassment at work. Sex Discimination Commissioner Kate Jenkins' report was a clear roadmap out of the workplace hellhole women find themselves in. The most important part of that report was ensuring employers had a positive duty to those who work for them, a positive duty to develop an environment where sexual harassment at work won't flourish. This government refuses to act on this one thing which would make a difference.

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Then we have the blinding obviousness of the gender pay gap. This has the imprimatur of the Commonwealth Bank, which sacked a staffer for discussing his pay while at the same time saying such a thing would never occur. As Julia Angrisano, national secretary of the Finance Sector Union, says in slightly less colourful language: if you let the sunlight in, the gender pay gap will shrivel up and cark it.

What else? The embedded gendered nature of work, the lack of affordable childcare (oh, I mentioned that earlier. Sorry), the resistance men have to playing their part in making the world more equal. Men, please feel free to write to me about how you do the washing up and drive the kids to footy. And I'll send you a laundry list of all the things you don't do (see what I did there).

And I don't blame you. You've grown up in an economy, in a country, in a society, which says this is OK, and have spent the past eight years under a government which covers men to do all manner of unconscionable things. You are in a country which does not care for women.

Again, I'd love to see this government recognise Australia's care economy. But right now we have a government whose practice is more likely to show it doesn't care. And that's why we women must gather at the barricades.