Tag Archives: Women

The midlife crisis? It’s a bloke thing

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THE male midlife crisis is indeed male, according to research that has found women turning 40 are more confident and fulfilled than men the same age. The only area of life in which men and women feel equally dissatisfied is sex, with widespread unhappiness in the bedroom due to men’s increasing anxiety about their ability to perform sexually as they age.

The author of the report, social researcher and Age columnist Hugh Mackay, says many men interviewed for the study, Turning 40, complained their wives were not interested in sex.

“Then you’d hear about it from the other side of the fence; women were saying that around 40 their men seemed suddenly quite anxious about performance and were demanding sex more frequently … to affirm their sexual potency. It was quite a poignant aspect of the study. The women said everything would be fine if he would just relax and stop trying to be an adolescent.”

Mackay says women discussed the issue “with a lot of hilarity, but I think there was also an underlying sadness and difficulty about it”.

Women were suffering from the loss of the intimacy they craved; they were turned off by encounters based on an effort to shore up their men’s faltering sense of masculinity rather than a desire to connect.

“That’s the opposite of romance or intimacy,” Mackay says. “So the classic male behavior is then to wander, even if it’s just for a fling to find a younger woman with whom you can prove you are still a stud.”

Mackay and three other researchers interviewed eight groups of men and eight groups of women from lower-middle to upper-middle Australia. The interviews were conducted in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Canberra, Wagga Wagga, the Blue Mountains and Bathurst.

The “spontaneous discussions” that resulted suggest that turning 40 means different things to different people; those content with their lives see it as an interesting milestone, while the unhappy experience it as a wake-up call to change. Typically, however, turning 40 signals a round of fresh doubts for men and a surge of relief for women.

While both sexes worry about physical decline, women are able to minimise their concerns as mere vanity, while for men it has darker implications about their potency generally, Mackay says.

“Women are superficially more concerned about the cosmetics, in that `drooping body parts’ sense. But leaving aside the beauty question, they have a really obvious sense of being ready to take off. It’s like a second wave of liberation.

“It’s a much more assertive point for women; they square their shoulders and say, `I know who I am. If people don’t like it, tough. I won’t be intimidated by anyone who thinks differently.”‘

Men also reflect and reassess at 40 but they are much more likely to go on as they are, “perhaps with an air of resignation”, Mackay says. He attributes this partly to the continuing strong cultural expectations of men to be the breadwinners.

“They doggedly press on because they have got families that are depending on them, so they can’t do anything dramatic. Some of the women in this study were disarmingly frank, saying, `This is great for us because it means we have the flexibility to make dramatic changes in our lives.’ They’ve got the freedom to do all this because he hasn’t.”

Mackay says 40-something women admit they talk about equality but are frightened by the idea of being the main breadwinner.

“They’re quite happy if they have a male partner who’s prepared to shoulder most of the responsibility for income.”

Men were also extremely conscious of the workplace scrapheap and the fact that making a change might leave them unemployable.

Said one: “Last year, I lost my job after 11 years with the one firm. I found it very, very difficult to get another one. That’s when you realise that 40 is no longer good for employment. I used to think it was 50.”

Mackay says experiences of the recession and unemployment have left these younger boomers questioning materialism and determined to teach their children there is more to life than possessions. Their twin terrors are that their children might be lured into drugs or develop depression and suicide.

“Even the mildest recreational drug use, which they themselves have engaged in, is somehow to be feared far above alcohol, although they are also concerned about alcohol.”

This commitment to family and concern about social problems has translated into a new understanding of what constitutes heroism, says Mackay.

“It’s more internal; it’s to do with psychological states and the quality of our relationships.

“It’s seen as people who are able to hold together a family under the very difficult conditions that would tend to fragment a family today, or people who are prepared to devote themselves to community needs at a time when we are ashamed of the extent of poverty and drug abuse and homelessness.”

ON TURNING 40

Women

‘I might have more wrinkles on my face, and parts of my body are heading south, but I don’t give a rat’s arse what anyone else thinks of me. For the first time in my life, I really fell sure of myself.’

‘Now I’m a bit more determined to make things happen. things have just been happening to me, and I think I’ll go out and do it now.’

‘Gravity is pulling down on everything. And don’t you find the mirrors at shopping centres cruel?’

‘He’s said a few times that he mightn’t be able to do it much more. And I say, “Some men go through to 70 or 80 having babies. What are you worried about?’

‘My grandmother was right. She used to say men are just big babies.’

Men

‘Your body sends you message you can’t ignore, even though you’re still 18 in your head.’

‘Sex after marriage? There isn’t any.’

‘You don’t know what’s expected of you these days by your wife and your children. You have to be everything, the hard-working man, the hard-working housewife, the hard-working father.’

‘I suppose the days of coming home and sitting down and opening up the newspaper are gone.’

‘I know if I see a job application coming across my desk and the age is 43 or 44 I start to question if they’re too old.’

‘Feminism has made blokes softer. When I was 18, a bloke was a bloke, but now you have to hold back a bit.’

First published in The Age.

Some highly educated working mothers do have ’em

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IN A finding that will reignite the debate about working mothers, Australian researchers have discovered that some children’s education suffers as a result of their mothers’ careers. But the disadvantage applies only to one group: children whose mothers have a university education.

Among such women, the children of those who work average four months less education than the children of housewives. Another way to understand it, the researchers say, is that “one out of three of the children of (educated) working mothers will complete a year less education than they would have done had their mother not worked”. This is enough to reduce the children’s chances of completing secondary school.

The researchers say that, statistically, the loss is not huge and could easily be compensated by other positive influences, such as sending the children to a private school, “but it is not negligible either. It implies an educational risk or challenge equivalent to the difference between a two-child family and a five-child family”.

The findings are reported by Dr Mariah Evans and Dr Jonathan Kelley in the latest issue of Australian Social Monitor, a publication of the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research. Their research is based on pooled data from 24,350 respondents to national surveys by International Social Science Surveys Australia between 1984 and 1995. Respondents were asked about their mothers’ working patterns during their childhood and about their own educational attainments.

Only a minor negative effect was shown for the children of working mothers who had completed secondary school and no negative effect was found for the children of the least-educated mothers.

Evans says long working hours could not be blamed for the problem because few of the tertiary-educated mothers in the survey had had continuous full-time jobs. Most had “mommy-tracked”, working part-time or converting to full-time only when their children were older.

The researchers believe the disadvantage is due to the fact that highly educated mothers talk to, read to and stimulate their children much more than other mothers, behaviors that are linked to higher academic development in children. But when cared for outside the family, these children receive less input from the less-educated adults around them.

“If you come from a modest home where people don’t use the language very much and don’t read very much, then going to a day-care centre will be no great loss to your ability to gain language skills,” Kelley says. “It may even mean a gain. But if you come from a home where both parents are PhDs, where what you get is incessant chatter between parents and children on quite complex topics, and go to a centre where you spend your time with other three and four-year-olds and adults who are
not as articulate, that’s a great loss.”

Evans says the level of training for people who work in preschool child care is low.

“They’re not university graduates. If you’re looking at the relative benefits of children spending time with these women versus their university-educated mothers – who’s going to have the vocabulary? Who’s going to have the cognitive resources to give children the best start?”

These were not findings Evans expected or is pleased by, but she is convinced they are accurate, in part because they confirm a similar discovery she and Kelley made with a different set of Australian data several years ago.

She warns: “The finding is not a policy prescription. There are many possibilities regarding how you might deal with it as an issue.”

She says one answer would be for tertiary-educated women to spend more time at home, but an alternative would be to invest more in child care so that better-qualified staff looked after children.

The evidence relates to the childhoods of people who are now adults but Evans believes child-care standards have not improved since. “There’s probably been a small decline. More capable women now go off to law school or medical school instead of doing education in early childhood work, so you find entry scores declining in many child-related fields.”

But there was no evidence in the results that working mothers damage children’s emotional development. “Because the finding is just for educated women and not for other mothers, it is not evidence that everybody needs their mother at home, or that this is about an emotional bonding sort of issue.”

Consequently, the report suggests it would be possible to reduce public support for single mothers and encourage them to work a limited amount without noticeable harm to their children.

“One strategy that would meet this goal would be to: (1) provide enough income to allow for full-time homemaking while the children are preschoolers and during the transition to school; then (2) from the time when the youngest child is in year one, to make part-time maternal employment a condition of continued income support,” the report says.

But it warns that the costs and benefits to children in terms of delinquency and teenage pregnancy should first be carefully assessed.

First published in The Age.

Inside the male `no go’ zone

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IN MY early 20s, I moved to an area of work where I was the only woman among a group of senior men: a desk of subeditors. I was uncertain of my welcome in such a male enclave. I was not uncertain for long. A big, stony-faced man I had never met came over and threw a story on my desk, saying in a voice audible to all, “Sub this, moll.”

In genuine disbelief, I asked, “What did you say?” He repeated himself. I stood up and kicked him hard, once, on the shin. “Don’t call me a moll,” I said. And I sat down and took up my pen with trembling fingers.

Luckily for me, he took it like a man. He held no grudge and we later developed a straightforward, easygoing relationship. A boundary had been set and was respected. It seems like an advertisement for Helen Garner’s advice in ‘the first stone’ to girls being harassed: try a stiletto heel on his instep.

But I would never try such a tactic now. Now I know it’s not always that simple. Unfortunately, the fact that it’s not always that simple has been almost obliterated from view by a decade of media hysteria over “the Ormond College affair”.

The case’s notoriety has made “sexual harassment” a household phrase, but for all the wrong reasons. It has created a social atmosphere so fraught that it has in some ways become harder to deal with the problem.

This is because the public debate was conducted mostly around the terms Garner set. Why did the young women go to the police over minor allegations of touching? Why did they let it get to the point where a man’s career was destroyed? What lay behind their “ghastly punitiveness”?

The point Garner failed to get her head around is the same one that remains obscured today, and the one I had no sense of the day I administered that kick. It is the question of institutional power.

The direct-rejection approach is fine with your average drunk at a party. But it could backfire disastrously with a man who controls your work life or university career.

What if he takes it not like a man but like a weasel? He could go on to play “How do I loathe thee? Let me count the ways”. In an office, he could confine the woman to low-status or difficult work, block her pay rises or promotions, or post her to the workplace equivalent of Siberia. On a university campus, he might compromise her marks, her scholarship or bursary prospects, or her references.

If a man grabs a woman’s breast at a party, it is indeed, to use Garner’s term, just a “nerdish pass”. But if the man is in a position to punish the woman for her knockback by manipulating her circumstances in a formal organisation to which they both belong, that is sexual harassment. This is particularly so if he goes the grope in the first place partly because he knows he has one over her.

The serial sleazebag with delusions of modern-day droit du seigneur poses the biggest moral dilemma for a young woman. If she stays silent, she knows her passivity will leave him free to harass other women. If he holds a position of trust – doctor, priest, the person overseeing pastoral care at a boarding college – his job offers him a bulk warehouse of potential targets.

But why should she be the sacrificial lamb?
Because that is the main lesson from the Ormond affair: that everyone will be scalded and nothing resolved, with the man’s career destroyed and the woman demonised as vindictive, unnatural and unwomanly.

Mass media that had been largely uninterested in sexual harassment issues gave splatter coverage to the first book on the subject that affirmed male anxieties. Commentators seized upon the story in ‘the first stone’ to call the Ormond women bitches, monsters, femi-nazis and man-hating harpies. Garnerism became a magnet for misogyny the way Hansonism became a magnet for racism.

Yes, everyone is more conscious of sexual harassment now. Observation of the gender niceties in many workplaces is the best it has ever been, although this is probably due as much to women’s increasing numbers as to raised awareness. But serious abuse is still not uncommon, according to the Equal Opportunity Commission, and harassment complaints have been steadily rising in the decade since Ormond.

Complaints that reach the commission are complaints that have not been resolved by employers. They are management failures.

I suspect the most profound lesson taken from Ormond has been “Cover thine arse”. A lawyer I spoke to last week told me that while many companies have terrific written policies, their complaints procedures often collapse quickly because managers’ first instinct is still to quash an allegation rather than investigate and resolve it.

The number of women reporting that they were victimised in the workplace because they dared to lodge a formal complaint has skyrocketed in the past couple of years, from 209 in 1997-98 to 346 in 1998-99.

Analyses of the Ormond affair trawled the women’s psyches and motives. But where was the analysis of the male-dominated group dynamic that dictates an organisation’s response to harassment complaints? This was, after all, the reason the Ormond affair was taken to so many arenas: the women believed they did not get a fair hearing.

The real question is not: Why can’t women just let it go? The real question is: Why can’t bosses deal with this without either party being shamed or losing their jobs?
Until that changes, there will continue to be women who limit discussion of dirty deeds to urgent undertones in the ladies’ room; who cop it sweet or handle it one on one, despite the risks of retaliation; who resign from workplaces where they were otherwise happy because they couldn’t bear to make a fuss. There will be women who shield male misbehavior from view and bear its consequences themselves, as women have done for centuries.

This means public spaces such as work and university are still dotted with “no-go” signs for women. Because that’s what harassment does; it tells women that this is a male place where they are interlopers. The unwanted touch and the sexual epithet amount to the same message: You’ll be judged here not on what’s inside your head, but on what’s inside your undies.

Is that what we want for our daughters?

First published in The Age.

The last stone – what the judge said this week

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LIKE DRACULA, the Ormond affair has resisted a natural death. One lawyer who has followed the case couldn’t believe it was back in court again this week: “I thought `Oh God, the hand out of the grave! Kill it! Kill it!”‘

This is probably the one point on which all the parties concerned could reach heartfelt agreement. But this week’s Supreme Court defamation case has not only reignited the story; it has resulted in the legal “outing” of the two young women.

This defamation case resulted from an attempt by the academic who had advised and supported the young women, Dr Jenna Mead, to respond to author Helen Garner’s 1995 book, the first stone. Mead’s 1997 book of essays, ‘bodyjamming’, included a chapter entitled “Sticks and Stones”. It was written anonymously by one of the young women, now known to be Olivia Mayer, and is the only public comment either has ever made.

In it Mayer described what it was like to be at the centre of such a maelstrom: “I could be driving my car, switch on the radio and tune into an argument between several strangers on the topic of my breasts.”
She did not write about the alleged incident with Gregory but did attack the way the complaint had been handled by the then vice-chancellor of Melbourne University, David Penington, and Suzy Nixon, the university psychologist he called in to conciliate between Gregory and the young women.

Nixon sued Jenna Mead and bodyjamming’s publisher, Random House, for defamation. In her statement of claim to the court, she argued that the chapter wrongly suggested she had breached professional confidentiality and used her position as conciliator to try to shut down the complaints.

Nixon’s statement says the chapter suggested that her recommendation that Gregory remain in his position was wrong and dishonest because “she was merely following the instructions of the Vice-Chancellor, to whom she directly reported”.

This week Nixon won a resounding capitulation: an out-of-court settlement that included a retraction, an apology, costs and an undisclosed amount of damages. “Random House and Jenna Mead now accept that this chapter contains serious errors of fact concerning the role of and behavior of Ms Nixon as conciliator and that the chapter was damaging to her,” the publisher’s lawyers told the court.

“Random House and Dr Mead unreservedly withdraw the false allegations contained in the chapter and apologise for the hurt and distress caused to Ms Nixon.”

The settlement came soon after the judge, Justice John Hedigan, had ruled that the two young women would have to give evidence under their own names, which had been suppressed for nearly a decade.

He said they could not expect to remain anonymous forever and it would be “curious and unjust” if they could write about the past anonymously while those they wrote about were denied such a “luxury”. By writing “Sticks and Stones”, Mayer had ignited “the fires of the past” and could not now expect to stay shielded. By the next day Mayer and the other original complainant, Kirsten Campbell, had been named in the press.

Mayer and Campbell are maintaining what is left of the barrier around their privacy. They still refuse media requests for interviews and their supporters will not reveal anything of the women’s circumstances.

Nor will anyone else associated with case talk about it, including Alan Gregory, who still lives in Melbourne.

Jenna Mead and her husband, poet and academic Philip Mead, have left Melbourne to lecture in English at the University of Tasmania. Author Helen Garner has returned to Melbourne after more than five years in Sydney. Suzy Nixon left Melbourne University in 1996 to set up her own practice as a therapist and organisational consultant.

All of them want to put this saga behind them. Only with hindsight will we know whether this week’s events give them their wish; whether this case is the final stake through the heart of “the Ormond affair”.

First published in The Age.

Staying home with children: a costly option

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Women who stay home to care for children are still not getting their full property entitlement at divorce because neither they – nor their husbands – value the homemaker’s contribution enough, according to new research.

The Australian Institute of Family Studies has also found that women in wealthy partnerships receive a smaller relative share of the matrimonial assets than women from couples who are less well off. This is because men and women tend to view a share of the marital home as the woman’s right but see other assets, such as shares or real estate, differently.

“The non-financial contribution made to these assets, particularly the domestic activities performed by one spouse that frees the other spouse to work directly for financial reward, are disregarded when property is divided,” write researchers Grania Sheehan and Jody Hughes in the latest issue of the institute’s magazine, Family Matters.

“The wife’s share of assets is reduced where non-domestic assets, such as investments, businesses and superannuation, comprise a high proportion of the couple’s asset wealth.”

The big exception was marriages in which both partners had shared work and domestic tasks.

“Women who report having taken a traditional role in household management – that is, primary responsibility for the day-to-day care of children and cleaning, while the husband had primary responsibility for household maintenance and paying the bills
– received a share of property well below the mean share for women overall.

“Conversely, women who reported sharing responsibility for all household tasks equally with their former spouse (including paying the bills) received a share of property above the mean share for women overall.”

The report, The Division of Matrimonial Property in Australia, is based on data from the Australian Divorce Transitions Project, a random national telephone survey of 650 divorced people held in late 1997.

The researchers said the future needs of dependent children appeared to have been the most important consideration at the time of settlement “and the financial needs of the former spouse may have been overlooked”. But men and women regarded such settlements as fair.

The assumption that the domestic sphere is where women’s entitlements lie produced this paradox: “The greater the percentage of asset wealth accounted for by domestic assets such as the family home and furnishings, the fairer men reported the settlement to be, even though the more domestic assets were in the pool, the more the wife received.”

Researchers found criticisms by men’s groups that women were unduly favored in settlements were not supported. The share received shifted in favor of the resident parent regardless of whether that parent was the mother or the father.

For men and women, being happy with the property settlement was strongly linked to being happy with the children’s arrangements. Men who reported the child support arrangements and property settlements as fair also tended to be men who had frequent contact with their children.

Arrangements with the other spouse were governed by the view that there should be a “clean break”, with no ongoing responsibility for each other’s welfare. Spousal maintenance was rare, minimal and brief, usually paid as bridging finance until property matters were finalised.

Women who had spent more than a third of the marriage out of paid work – those most in need of spousal maintenance – were the group least likely to support the idea. “This suggests that women, particularly those from more traditional marriages, may underestimate their entitlement to matrimonial property based on their own financial need (independently of the needs of the children),” the report said.

Another study based on the same telephone survey, Financial Living Standards after Divorce, found that women are still more likely than men to experience economic hardship but that single fathers are emerging as the most disadvantaged group of divorced men.

Researchers Ruth Weston and Bruce Smyth found that up to 65 per cent of older divorced women had low incomes, as did 44 per cent of younger sole mothers. “Like the patterns for women, the most disadvantaged men were those living alone (both older and younger groups) or as sole fathers (all of whom were in the younger group).

“The most advantaged group appeared to be those living with a partner and no children, all of whom were male respondents from the younger sample. Two thirds had incomes at the highest level, and only 11 per cent had low incomes.”

But overall, the rate of disadvantage for men was higher than observed in previous studies, with 16 per cent of young men relying on social security payments, compared to 2 per cent in a similar survey in 1993.

This report found that repartnering remains the main way out of financial difficulties for women, and hence their children, following divorce. But women are generally less likely than men to repartner, and the poorest among both sexes have the dimmest repartnering prospects.

Researcher Jody Hughes reports in Marginal Mates and Unwedded Women, a third Family Matters article, that repartnering is most common among men and women with an average economic profile.

It is unlikely for those with few resources: “In particular, women with inconsistent work histories and lower asset wealth were less likely to repartner, and men on the fringes of the labor market were clearly also on the fringes of the `mating market’. This suggests that unemployment, work insecurity and income inequality are influencing patterns of relationship formation and dissolution in Australia.

“Men and women who are unemployed, or in precarious or insecure employment, may be socially as well as economically marginalised, with fewer opportunities to meet people and establish relationships.”

Women with greater economic resources are less likely to remarry than other women, says Hughes.

First published in The Age.

Daughters’ lives better, poll says

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Most Australian women believe their lives are more fulfilled than their mothers’ and that they have a good balance between work and family – but few thank employers for it, seeing them as unsympathetic to working women’s needs.

In a national Saulwick Age Poll of 800 women taken last weekend, only 14 per cent said they believed most employers were sympathetic to working women’s need to juggle family and other responsibilities.

Forty-five per cent conceded that some employers were sympathetic but almost a third (32 per cent) thought few or none were sympathetic. Younger women were more inclined to see employers as understanding.

The results suggest that while workplace reform remains a priority in the struggle for equal opportunity the changing role of women has improved their lives dramatically.

A total of 73 per cent of women believed that their lives were better than their mothers’, with 40 per cent seeing them as much better. Twenty-one per cent said their lives were about the same, with less than 5 per cent reporting their lives to be worse.

The older a woman was the bigger the difference she reported between her happiness and that of her mother. This could be because the mothers of older women came from a pre-pill generation with fewer opportunities.

Most of the women polled worked outside the home (57 per cent, rising to 70 per cent of those aged under 54). Eighty-seven per cent felt they had a liveable balance between work, family and leisure; 65 per cent rated it as good or very good and 22 per cent as fair.

Labor-voting women were less likely to be satisfied with this aspect of their lot than coalition voters.

Among those who felt their balance was fair, poor or very poor, the main cause of their stress was work expectations (34 per cent), followed by lack of personal fulfilment (20 per cent) and lack of support from their partners (15 per cent).

For 9 per cent, child care was the main problem. Surprisingly, women with no children were only slightly more likely to report having a better balance.

Asked to choose the issue of greatest importance to them from a list of seven, 30 per cent nominated health and 23 per cent the effect on households of the goods and services tax. Education came next (14 per cent), followed by equal opportunity in the workforce (13 per cent).

Similar numbers nominated the environment (7.4 per cent) and child-care issues (6.6 per cent). Only 5 per cent nominated unemployment.

Surveys of this kind are subject to normal sampling variance, which in a sample of 800 could be up to plus or minus 3.5 per cent.

First published in The Age.

Country women hit under Kennett

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The lives of rural women have been hit hard over the past five years, particularly in access to justice, due to the polices of the Kennett Government, according to the latest report of the People Together Project.

The report, to be launched today, says cuts to legal aid funding and other services such as transport had hurt rural women and heightened their geographic, economic and social isolation.

The People Together Project, a non-party political organisation set up to assess the impact of government policy, found that country women often found it hard to get legal advice because they had to travel to regional centres to find it, and many then could not afford to pay.

This often led to women facing pressure to forgo claims on assets, such as farms, in order to secure custody of their children during marital separations. The problems were further complicated when working out their property entitlements in family law because farm ownership arrangements were often secret, the report said.

The report is based on information from a two-day public inquiry that included submissions from 53 organisations and a series of women’s audits involving interviews and focus groups in three communities.

Submissions said rural women had been disadvantaged by the Kennett Government’s abolition of crimes compensation for pain and suffering: “If a girl or woman is sexually assaulted in a country town and then has the guts to report the assault it is reasonably likely that no action will be taken against the perpetrator.

“The previous crimes compensation system provided many rural women with often the only form of acknowledgment of the harm done to them or the opportunity for justice in their terms.”

The report found cuts to domestic violence programs in rural areas had led to large waiting lists for women wanting help or safe accommodation, and country people were struggling to fill the gaps left by cuts to other services.

A woman from the Central Goldfields told the project: “The community needed to raise money to match Government funds: $359,000 for the hospital and $250,000 for the community bank. No other money is now available in the community for any other services.”

The Association of Neighborhoods Houses and Learning Centres told the inquiry: “We now have voluntary drivers in mini buses and/or their own vehicle taking elderly people to doctors’ appointments 30 kilometres away because the public transport has been withdrawn.”

The Opposition spokeswoman on women’s affairs, Ms Leonie Burke, said the report failed to give the former Liberal Government credit for the positive steps it had taken for women, including $100 million to support carers, and broad consultations with rural women resulting in the Women on the Move report.

First published in The Age.

Women forced to fill `care’ gaps

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Victorian women’s lives had become harder because Kennett Government policies had transferred the responsibility of caring from the public to the private domain, according to the latest report of the People Together Project.

The report, Women: Balancing Social Justice with Economic Efficiency, said women are forced to fill the gaps left by early discharge from hospital, the closure of childcare centres and the tightening of criteria for respite services.

“Ancillary services such as the Royal District Nurses and many community health care services now incur fees, which many women are unable to afford,” the report says.

The report is based on information from a two-day public inquiry to which 53 organisations made submissions, and three “women’s audits” involving interviews and focus groups in city, regional and rural communities.

It is to be launched today by Ms Felicity Hampel, QC, president of Liberty Victoria.

The report challenged the former Kennett Government’s claim that its economic and social reforms brought a better quality of life for Victorian women through its “social dividend”.

“In fact, many women now carry heavier burdens than ever because of widespread cuts to services,” the report said.

The report criticised lower standards of care in public hospitals, closures of family planning centres and long waits for help from mother-and-baby units.

It said a lack of public housing had left an increasing number of women living in sub-standard accommodation, and many mothers were struggling to pay higher fees for kindergartens and cope with “voluntary” levies and fundraising activities for schools.

It said restructuring of school councils had discouraged women from standing, while the amount of time and responsibility required of women on kindergarten committees of management was frequently equivalent to a part-time job.

The report said caps on legal aid funding in Family Court matters forced some women to remain in violent or unhappy relationships or to represent themselves in court when trying to protect their own or their children’s entitle-ments.

“In one instance, a client instructed his barrister to keep a woman in the witness box for as long as possible so that her legal aid would run dry,” the report said.

It said the contracting out of health, education and community services – traditional employers of large numbers of women – had reduced women’s jobs, job security, and pay and conditions.

Ms Hampel said the report’s findings were “a shameful indictment on a society which prides itself on fairness, equality of opportunity and access”.

The shadow minister for women’s affairs, Ms Leonie Burke, said yesterday that the former Liberal Government had recognised carers of the aged and disabled needed support and had pioneered a four-year, $100million program to help them.

She said the Government had also consulted women over their needs, culminating in the Women on the Move report.

The People Together Project describes itself as a non-party political organisation that assesses the impact of government policies on social justice.

* CASE STUDY 1

“The intern was doing an epidural whilst the supervising doctor was not present. Twice her (sciatic nerve) was touched. On the third attempt her respiratory system was knocked out and plasma was required to resuscitate herThe supervising doctor arrived and (asked) why they were using a glass syringe. The intern replied that they thought because of the need to save resources, they’d use the cheaper reusable type of syringe, despite it being more difficult to use.”

* CASE STUDY 2

“Jennifer, a mother of two secondary-school aged children, approached (a charity) distressed that she was unable to afford her children’s school fees (voluntary levies). She was embarrassed when she attempted to negotiate payment arrangements with school staff. Jennifer said, `I was abused by the secretary and told that schools were not banks.’ It was then suggested that she apply for credit elsewhere.”

* CASE STUDY 3

“One woman was on the waiting list for public housing for 8 years. Then her daughter turned 16 and she was removed from the list altogether because she was no longer classified as a supporting parent.”

First published in The Age.

If abortion is a religious issue, why is the state involved?

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I ONCE met a woman who taught sex education in a Catholic school. She was warm and enthusiastic and transparently sincere. She told me Catholic schools had changed, and that she was able to teach girls they had choices about their sexuality.

“They can choose to be chaste until marriage, or they can choose to be the town bike,” she said, beaming. “Uh, huh,” was the most neutral response I could muster.

She was as entitled to her belief in the two absolutes – chastity or promiscuity – as I was to my belief that there is a responsible middle course involving neither. And her attitude was no skin off my nose because she was never going to impose it on me or mine; she moulded children whose parents sought out an educational system imbued with those values. Each to their own.

If only there were such a clear division between church and state in the abortion debate. This is an arena where those driven by religious belief often wield power out of all proportion to their support in the community.

Last week a visiting American doctor was detained and told he would be deported or imprisoned if he advocated “activities” in relation to abortion. This followed lobbying of the Immigration Minister, Philip Ruddock, by anti-abortion groups.

In America, President Bill Clinton has agreed to limit aid for international family planning initiatives that support abortion. Republican congressional leaders have for years refused to pass Budget legislation allowing the US to pay its back dues to the United Nations unless Clinton agreed to the restrictions.

Although pro-choice himself – heaven help any man married to Hillary who wasn’t – Clinton capitulated this time because the US faced losing its seat in the UN General Assembly if the debts remained unpaid. Now organisations funded by US money will be forbidden to lobby for liberalised abortion laws.

There will be little joy about that among desperate women in countries such as Nepal, where six women a day die from botched illegal abortions and two-thirds of women in prison are there for abortion or infanticide.

Like the sex ed teacher, these Republicans deal in moral absolutes: abortion is always wrong, never mind poverty or illness, rape or incest or despair. But, unlike the sex ed teacher, they are in a position to impose their views on others who differ.

The power of the American anti-choice movement is understandable. Opposition to abortion is strongly linked to church attendance, and a third of Americans regularly front up in their Sunday best, compared with only one-fifth of Australians.

The US is also a country in which the separation of church and state has favored religion. Its founding fathers, having fled persecution in the old world, focused more on protecting freedom of worship from state intervention than protecting the sovereignty of the state from religion.

But why is it that Australian anti-abortion campaigners – most of whom have strong links to churches – have so much political influence?

It’s certainly not because they speak for the community. Research findings released this week suggest only three in a hundred Australians oppose abortion under all circumstances.

Among the 2151 people surveyed, 97per cent said abortion should be allowed in cases of danger to the mother’s health, 92 per cent after rape, and 88 per cent where there was a strong likelihood of a serious birth defect. Most said abortion should be allowed for reasons such as poverty, unwed motherhood, or couples wanting no more children.

These views do not fit with abortion’s continued position in the Victorian criminal code. They do not fit with restrictions on the morning-after pill RU486, or the inability of many rural women to gain access to abortion services.

The report said the abortion debate remains very much a religious matter, with churchgoing the single most important factor differentiating opponents from supporters.

It concluded that “the separation of church and state” is actually a polite fiction that can be maintained only in the face of consensus about central values. Where the two do separate over values, there is friction, with abortion providing the clearest example.

The results of a previous survey tell us how Australians think such conflicts should be handled: only one-third believes it is appropriate for religious leaders to try to influence government decisions.

There is a case for churches to speak out on social justice issues because they are such big providers of services to those in need. Their dictates on reproductive morality are another matter.

Extremism in relation to abortion has declined in the past decade. Most Australians have come to understand that this painful, tragic, private business is a bad thing in itself, but justifiable if it avoids something even worse. They have abandoned the false certainty of black-and-white positions to grapple with the complexities of greys.

Some will see the shift away from the absolutism of “never” as godlessness. Most of us, though, will recognise it as a moral coming-of-age.

First published in The Age.

Abortion extremism in decline, study finds

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Fifteen per cent of Australians surveyed believe a woman should be allowed to abort a foetus if it is the “wrong” sex, a survey has found.

Asked if abortion should be permitted if parents wanted a child of the other sex, 6per cent said it should be allowed and 9per cent said it should probably be allowed. And 2per cent said parents should be allowed an abortion in order to choose a child who would be a great athlete or intellectually brilliant.

The figures are based on an analysis of the 1996-97 International Social Science Surveys Australia by researchers from the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research.

The national sample of 2151 people was compared with a sample of 3012 people taken in 1984-85.

Researchers found only 1per cent “definitely” thought abortion should never be available, and a further 2per cent “probably” opposed abortions under all circumstances.

Extremism of both kinds has declined over the past decade, with fewer people holding absolute views for or against abortion.

“Instead of an intractable conflict between entrenched positions pro and con, we see a full spectrum of opinion with the majority near the centre,” said a report on the findings in the Australian Social Monitor.

A big majority said abortion should definitely or probably be allowed in dire circumstances such as danger to the mother’s health (97per cent), pregnancy following rape (92per cent) or strong likelihood of a serious birth defect (88per cent).

Most also supported the availability of abortion in difficult social circumstances such as poverty (69per cent), unwed motherhood (68per cent) or couples wanting no more children (65per cent).

The report said: “Very few Australians think abortions should be prohibited (although many theologians would disagree) but, equally, very few believe that a woman has an absolute right to an abortion (although many feminists and some moral philosophers would disagree).

“Rather, most Australians view abortion as somewhat of a bad thing in itself but justifiable if it avoids something even worse.”

Older people were less opposed to abortion than younger people.

A co-author of the report, Dr Mariah Evans, a senior research fellow with the Melbourne Institute, speculates that people’s views might change as they age and become exposed to more life experiences.

First published in The Age.