THE AGING population presents significant problems for female workers, Sex Discrimination Commissioner, Pru Goward, has warned.
THE AGING population presents significant problems for female workers, Sex Discrimination Commissioner, Pru Goward, has warned.
At the Focus on Carers Conference: Family Carers ‘The Next Generation’, held in Adelaide recently, Goward said women faced ‘triple shift’ workloads in balancing work and family responsibilities.
“With women having children later in life (the median age of mothers in Australia is 30.5) there is an increased likelihood of an overlap between caring for children and caring for ageing parents,” she said.
“We are already hearing reports of the ‘sandwich problem’, whereby women are being squeezed between the demands of caring for children and elders. And the fact that people are having fewer children will alter the gender aspects of caring.”
The problem is compounded by the role of men in family life and women’s continuing greater responsibility for caring and household work needing considerable attention. Australian Bureau of Statistics figures, for example, show that overall, women’s housework accounts for 70 per cent of all household work. In addition women make up 71 per cent of primary carers of older people and people with disabilities. Ninety-one per cent of parents receiving primary care are cared for by their daughters.
“Future demands for care are coupled with economic pressure to work longer to provide for our own retirement,” Goward said. “This is a major issue for women, who are two-and-a-half times more likely than men to live in poverty during retirement because of the gender pay gap.”
ABS statistics suggest that time is gendered: single men and women, for instance, do around the same amount of housework, but once they partner women begin doing more – a woman with a male partner does 71 minutes a day more housework than her partner. Aging as a gender issue is open to debate. “I think it will be difficult to gender age because if you are one of only two children instead of four and you have a sister and she’s overseas or not available it’s not going to be so easy for men to assume their sisters will look after the parents or that their wives will.”
