An equal society isn’t a loss for men but a gain for everyone

In the 1920s, when my grandmother was working in a Manchester office, some of her married girlfriends used to wear their wedding rings on chains around their neck. They did so because if their employers realised they were married, they would lose their job and their income – which then, as much as now, was often vital to the financial security of young couples. When my grandmother married my grandfather in 1927, she automatically lost her job.

Until 1966, under what was called the “marriage bar”, Australian women who worked for the public service lost their jobs when they got married. No doubt many of them employed the same sort of subterfuge as my grandmother’s friends a few decades before.

Thankfully, those days are long gone. In fact, the status of women has changed so much, it’s hard to imagine such constraints ever being accepted as normal or reasonable. But before we get too self-congratulatory in the week of International Women’s Day, maybe it’s worth thinking about what we might be accepting now as cool and normal that will shock future generations.

Australian women are still not as free to succeed or fail on their own merits in the same way as their male peers. According to the “Breaking the Norm” report from Deloitte Access Economics, our progress on gender equity has stalled. Women are still earning only 86 cents for every dollar earned by a man, still do more of the domestic load and hold down just 6 per cent of the CEO positions on ASX 200 companies.

The report blames “rigid gender norms” for the slow progress. We used to call them gender stereotypes, the ingrained prejudices most of us still hold about the things women can and should do and the things men can and should do. These prejudices are stubborn and self-defeating.

“Australian women are still not as free to succeed or fail on their own merits in the same way as their male peers.”

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Australian women are among the best-educated in the world according to the World Economic Forum, but we have fallen from 13th to 70th for women’s workplace participation and achievement. Surely such a criminal waste of talent ought to be cause for radical action (hello quotas), but frankly, little has been done. Rigid gender norms and then some, I’d say.

And those gender norms may be getting worse. According to Queensland University of Technology Associate Professor Michael Flood, a Victorian Health Promotion Foundation survey reveals that while younger males (aged 16-17) may have more progressive ideas about traditional gender roles and their negative effect on men’s health, they have more rigid beliefs when it comes to violence and the right of men to dominate and control relationships. Given that an average of one woman is killed by an intimate partner in Australia each week, this is terrifying.