Page 738 - Week 03 - Tuesday, 8 March 2016
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that they too can go right to the top. We are so proud of what has been done here in the ACT for women. It is a special place to be a woman in some ways.
I also want to focus on women who are not struggling with domestic violence and women who are not at the top of the boardroom table. I raised this in my maiden speech in this place. There are a lot of women whose progress is about confidence and about us knocking out the little things that still get in the way of women making the same choices as men at the same stages of their careers or after having had time out of the workplace.
We need to smooth the processes for mums. I focus particularly on women who have left work for a period of time, whether it is for a short period to have a baby and do some breastfeeding and get to know their child, or whether it is a longer gap because they choose to be a mum for 100 per cent of their time because that is really important to them. There are still so many small changes that need to be made. We learnt here in the Assembly, when we had a function run by PANDSI only a few months ago, that the ACT Assembly public area does not have a baby change facility and does not have a breastfeeding facility. We as women have sat in this building and have not really noticed that. It goes to show how difficult it can be to identify and resolve all of these matters. We probably need to have a systemic approach.
Many of our systems and offices were designed for an era when men went to work from nine to five and women stayed at home, or the majority of them did. We need to make significant inroads into changing this dynamic. The practicalities of women’s multifaceted lives need to be welcomed in the workplace. For example, our laws state that it is legal for a woman to breastfeed her baby wherever she chooses, as long as it is safe. However, how many workplaces welcome babies? Women are often caring for ageing relatives. Where are the workplace policies to support those additional roles? It is probably something that most employees do not know a great deal about, not to mention probably some management.
We talk a lot about women’s outcomes, but there still needs to be a great deal of work done to change all of those little things that make it harder for us to achieve the same level of choice about our lives as men have. We still do more tasks around the home on average and we are still not reaching the same career heights on average as men.
I am in a particularly fortunate position, and I do not take this for granted at all. In my home there is a great deal more work done by my husband than me, and I do not think that should be remarkable in any way. Women, when there are children involved, have already spent nine months on each child just bringing them to birth. That is a huge physical task and our bodies are often never the same again. The conversations that women need to be empowered to have in their homes are about the fact that, at the moment of the birth of a child, there is already a nine-month deficit in the amount of work that has been done on the raising of that child. We need to be encouraging women to have those conversations around the dinner table and on the lounge.
I have been more than happy to make that case. My fantastic husband has always come to the party because he wants me to succeed, and not every woman is in that situation. We need to give women the words to say and the statements to make that make them feel stronger about having those conversations.
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