Cover Story
The mother myth
by Joanne Black
Within two generations, a phenomenal social change has swept New Zealand. More women are in paid work than ever before. But opportunities that early feminists fought for still come at a price. From the kitchen to the Cabinet, women’s choices are causing plenty of angst.
Prime Minister Helen Clark kick-started 2005 with almost Soviet-style exhortations for women, and mothers in particular, to join the paid workforce.
Yet her encouragement – or admonishment, depending on your point of view – came as women were already working more than ever. According to the latest figures from Statistics New Zealand, just over 70 percent of all women aged 20-64 are in paid work, compared with 85 percent for men.
A Treasury paper produced last year shows that one of the strongest factors determining whether or not women work is whether they have pre-school children. Women in New Zealand tend to leave the workforce when they have children but return as those children get older. Although this seems hardly surprising, it is not the common pattern in other OECD countries. Clark has often pointed out that the proportion of working women in the 25-34 age group is lower in New Zealand than in similar countries and this observation seems to drive much of the government’s concern with women’s work. But if women are out of the workforce because they are raising young children, and if they will eventually return to work, is this really such a pressing issue? Indeed, policies like paid parental leave actively encourage mothers to take time off work at that period in their lives.
Yet social researcher Paul Callister cautions against a presumption that the pattern of mothers returning to work month by month as their children get older, will continue: “There is evidence now that kids can be just as problematic as they get older, and women are wanting to be home when the kids are teenagers, so they know what they are doing after school.
“When childcare surveys are done, people will say the reason they haven’t put their kids in childcare is because of income and the cost of transport, etc. But there must also be some strong ideology influencing them to do what they think is best for their kids.”
The architect of New Zealand’s paid parental leave policy, Laila Harre, who is now national secretary of the National Distribution Union, says it is hypocritical to suggest that government policies give parents genuine choices about whether to work or not.
“We dutifully say, ‘This is all about giving people choice’, but we don’t develop our workplace or social policy to do that.
“What we really mean is we want to reduce the cost to the state of supporting single parents, and we want to boost productivity by putting more women in the workforce.
“At the same time, we’ve got this whole sort of confounding thing which is philo-sophies and values saying we really don’t think mothers should be working at all.”
Harre says that she used to deeply resent Clark saying she could have not have achieved what she had if she had also had children, “but she is probably right, given that men are generally not prepared to be wives – they make okay mothers, yes, but not wives also”.
Last year Clark cited labour shortages, and a desire to improve New Zealand’s GDP per capita, as reasons why more women should be encouraged back to work.
The government has brought in a raft of policies in this area, including the introduction and extension of paid parental leave, a considerable boost in subsidies for childcare, and the Working for Families package designed to ensure families will always be better off working than on a benefit.
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et Working for Families, the centrepiece of last two Budgets, has contradictory messages. The increase in Family Support, which makes up the bulk of the package, gives money to families based on their total income and number of children. So when a second earner in a family, likely to be a woman, considers whether or not to go back to work, she needs to take into account what the family would lose in financial assistance by moving to a higher income bracket. Effectively, this puts a relatively high tax on her earnings – this may discourage many women from re-entering the workforce.
Fulbright scholar Nick Johnson is back in Washington DC after spending six months last year in New Zealand studying Working for Families. He says, “It did strike me there was a bit of a missed opportunity in Working for Families in thinking about differential tax treatment for the second earner, and what their marginal tax rate is, ie, what the additional tax rate is if they go into the workforce.
“There was a fairly clean solution that could have been embraced. Why not do a little more for families with two working parents, than the equivalent family with one working parent? It wouldn’t have been that hard.”
Johnson says the problem in Working for Families will be for “the workers on the bubble – those who are scratching their head saying, ‘Should I participate in the paid workforce more or not?’”
But mixed messages are not unfamiliar in government policy, and Johnson laughs when asked if US policy on such matters is more coherent. Take it as read, it is not.
“None of these matters are unique to New Zealand. Every country grapples with balancing how to support two-earner families and how to support one-earner families.”
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