It’s time to track parental leave participation alongside gender pay gap data

This week for the first time we saw the Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA) publish the gender pay gap of 5,000 Australian private sector employers.

Sunlight is always the best disinfectant so the report is obviously welcome but there are things we should be tracking other than just pay.

Many feminist women I know are disheartened and losing patience with how long it’s taking to achieve gender equality, but not all of that anger is channeled at employers, it’s at societal norms more broadly.

With a cost of living crisis and exorbitant childcare costs, many women don’t feel like they have any autonomy. Even if they wanted to stay home with young children, they can’t afford to, and yet putting their children into childcare is often no cheaper.

The gender pay gap is an easy thing to latch on to, and rightfully so, but there’s a lot of fury directed more specifically at ‘the juggle’. The expectation to carry the mental load, be the stay-at-home parent, and then get back into the workforce as soon as possible only to often earn less than males who aren’t juggling quite as much.

The simple solution is to apply the same transparency just given to the gender pay gap, to the company’s parental leave policies and fathers’ uptake rates.

We know, statistically, that the best way to close the gender pay gap is by getting men to take parental leave, so that having a child doesn’t unfairly and solely disrupt the mother’s career.

It’s important to celebrate that government and many company policies now aren’t gender-related, and purely speak to a ‘primary caregiver’. An imperative shift for modern families who want choice on how they divide their roles.

And yet while policies might be more adequate and encouraging of fathers taking parental leave, we must track the uptake. The framework might exist, but the culture might not be as open to fathers taking it as opposed to mothers.

Fathers shouldn’t be forced to take leave and similarly, mothers shouldn’t be forced back into the workforce. But if there are anomalies in companies that consistently perform better on this metric, it would be sensible to assume there’s something more systemic at play than simple freedom of choice.

With a mounting disdain and eye-rolling for virtue-signaling International Women’s Day events, this report gives us a metric with grit that we can actually track every year.

Releasing the report on International Women’s Day, instead of nine days before, and expanding the report to include parental leave are the best ways to revive the day and turn it into something more meaningful.

This article was first published by Women’s Agenda.