Better off?
Are Australian women better off than their United States sisters? They are, argues the prime minister's special adviser on women's affairs, Dr Anne Summers.
In a public forum in Sydney last month, she pointed to a few things that have given women here a better deal; these included a decade of Labor governments willing to introduce reforms, and Australian femocrats' willingness to compromise on key issues.
Summers contrasted the passage of the 1984 Sex Discrimination Act and the 1986 Affirmative Action (Equal Employment Opportunity for Women) Act with the failure of the US women's movement to secure an equal rights amendment to the constitution. The Australian women succeeded where their US sisters failed, she argued, partly because they were more willing to compromise.
The compromises made by the Australian women who drafted the sex discrimination legislation included exemptions for the insurance industry, private schools, industrial awards and the military. Affirmative action provisions, originally intended to form part of the same legislative package, were taken out to be dealt with separately.
Summers argued that the drafters' view at the time — that it was better to have "60% of something than 100% of nothing" — has been vindicated. Legislation, while inadequate, is in place, and can be amended and improved. The US women, refusing to compromise, "ended up with nothing".
But in at least one crucial area, US women would appear to be in a better
position than Australian women. While US women, along with blacks, have reaped the benefits of affirmative action for years, this has not been the case for Australian women.
Don't we have a piece of legislation by that name? Yes, the legislation exists, but after six years, it still has no teeth.
An opportunity to strengthen the legislation has just gone by. According to an Affirmative Action Agency spokesperson, there are no plans to amend the legislation to make punishment for non-compliance something a little more terrifying than being named in parliament.
The agency is recommending ways to improve the quality of employers' compliance with the act (the minimum requirement at the moment is simply that a company or institution submit a yearly report on progress; if there has not been much progress, that's okay, as long as you submit a report on it). But quotas are not on the cards now, says the agency, and there is no talk of their ever being introduced.
When the US government specifies affirmative action policies for corporations receiving government contracts, that means the corporations must actively attempt to employ women and blacks in the proportion in which they exist in the local population; and that means quotas.
Quotas have long been a vexed issue in US politics; but at least there appears to be a recognition that overcoming centuries of structural, accumulated discrimination will take more than the creation of a "level playing field".
Of course, the whole range of social, economic and political experiences of women in each country have to be taken into account when making a broad judgment about whether one lot is better off
than the other.
Perhaps Australian women, on the whole, are better off than their US sisters. But Labor's record on affirmative action, and the women's movement's inability to strengthen this weak legislation after six years, gives a rather different picture to Summers' sanguine view.
By Tracy Sorensen