As the director of the federal government's Equal Opportunity in the Workplace Agency, I am particularly interested in the impact maternity leave has on the employment outcomes and career prospects for women.

Paid maternity leave may be a broader social and economic issue, but I intend to confine my remarks pretty much to its role in creating fairer workplaces.

In this context, paid maternity leave is important, because it can help to minimise the impact a long-term separation from the workforce, after childbirth, has on employment prospects and career opportunities.

At the outset I should say that I am also a strong supporter of paid parental leave. Unfortunately, it is even less common than paid maternity leave.

But I think a lot of the controversy and confusion would go out of this issue if we thought about it in terms of parents and their family responsibilities, rather than just something that helps mothers stay in the paid workforce.

Unfortunately, about three-quarters of the employers who report to EOWA still see paid maternity leave in terms of cost and 'special treatment for women'.

They don't see the business benefits, though the evidence is incontrovertible.

The continuing reluctance of most employers to implement a positive measure to help overcome a workplace disadvantage is a matter of considerable concern to EOWA in its efforts to realise the objects of the Act we administer.

The current debate
Before I talk in more detail about the workplace issues, let me venture a few comments on the broader debate.

As you know the recent debate on paid maternity leave began with a report undertaken by the Federal Sex Discrimination Commissioner, which initiated a major public debate.

During a media interview in early April, the Prime Minister said the Government was continuing to look at work and family balance issues, including maternity leave. He acknowledged that this was an area where more can always be done provided the financial capacity is there to do it¹.

I think the debate and the Government's positive interest in the matter has been good because it has focused considerable attention on an important issue for women in the workplace.

Based on our direct experience with Australia's top 2000 or so employers, my agency made a submission to Pru Goward's inquiry last year.

In that document, which is available on our website, we supported government action on paid maternity leave because we see it as a necessary part of achieving equality of opportunity in Australian workplaces.

I don't know whether more women will have children, or have more children, if the government introduces a general maternity leave scheme.

Though I think it is extremely likely that continued gender segregation, and the weak commitment of Australian employers to overcoming it, is forcing many women to choose between careers and parenthood².

I do know that paid maternity leave helps overcome one of the remaining impediments to equal opportunity - the design of our workplaces which continues to be based around the antiquated notion that mothers don't work.

Change is slow
On the whole, Australian employers have been extremely slow to introduce EEO strategies generally, including parental leave.

I think this hesitancy is creating some long-term problems for our society, problems that need to be addressed urgently.

For instance, each year women account for over half of our university graduates.

Young enthusiastic, talented and skilled Australians.

They have been taught by family, educators and supporters to believe that these days women can achieve anything.
Sadly, for most of them, this will prove to be simply untrue. Research indicates quite a bit of disillusionment occurs after a few years in the workplace.

There are a few women at the top of most fields of endeavour.

But they are very few, and as the census EOWA released last year showed, progress towards equality at senior levels is glacial and in many cases imperceptible or going backwards.

At present rates of progress, according to some estimates, employment equity for women will not be achieved for another 177 years³.

From my perspective as EOWA director, the case for a national scheme turns on whether employers will make paid maternity leave generally available over the next few years or whether, as with superannuation, government action will be required.

If maternity leave does not become generally available it will continue to be available, for the most part, to women in the public sector, in some of our larger corporates and in innovative but isolated businesses throughout the economy.

Women in smaller companies, and in lower-paid jobs, will continue to be denied access to the opportunity to have children and to keep contact with the workforce.

Its not just about maternity leave.
One danger with the current focus on maternity leave is the possibility that it will be seen as a panacea.

I see paid maternity leave as necessary, but not sufficient.

Our experience at EOWA indicates that every leading edge workplace offers maternity leave provisions that are generous by comparison with what's generally available.

But its also true that they take other measures to maximise the benefits of maternity leave for their employees and for their businesses.

It is interesting to note that all the companies EOWA named “Employer of Choice for Women” in 2001 offered some form of paid maternity leave as part of a suite of benefits – typically, paid maternity leave was seen as a very basic entitlement.

Unfortunately, many businesses that offer paid maternity leave are not seeing the benefits in terms of staff retention and commitment because they have yet to address the broader issues of workplace design.

In our experience, companies with comprehensive strategies achieve nearly 100 percent retention rates following maternity leave, while companies that simply comply with basic award conditions achieve rates of around 45-50 percent.

A continuing problem
In EOWA's estimation, fewer than 200 Australian employers have made significant achievements in re-shaping their workplaces to make them more inclusive of the needs of women.

That's less than 10 percent of the organisations that are required to report to us annually - after 17 years.

Its pretty clear that the vast majority of employers who report to EOWA are still committed to doing the minimum required to comply with the Act.

There are some marvellous examples in Australia of how re-designing jobs can promote equality and deliver business benefits.
But these are still too few.

That lack of interest in providing equal opportunity clearly shows up in the pay statistics.

Women earn on average 67 percent of male earnings. That's 271 dollars less per week.

Even in industries dominated by women, the gap is as wide as 54 per cent.

In fact, women earn less across every single occupational group.

Similar patterns are evident when we look at the incidence and spread of maternity leave.

Across the board, 34 per cent of workplaces and 36 per cent of employees have access to some form of paid maternity leave⁴.

Public sector employees (57 per cent) are more than twice as likely as private sector employees (24 per cent) to have access to paid maternity leave⁵.

An EOWA survey of organisations that report to it found that large organisations are much more likely to offer paid maternity leave than smaller organisations.

While the lack of a widespread commitment to equality shows up in pay statistics and the availability of family-friendly conditions, it is perhaps most stark at the senior levels.

The EOWA census of women on boards and in senior management showed that Australian women hold just 8.4 percent of senior executive positions.

Even more disappointingly, Australian women hold only 5 percent of executive positions in the core business areas, which are the main feeder group for CEO and Board positions.

This failure of Australian business to select women for executive positions in core business areas means that women will continue to be a novelty in Australian boardrooms for many years to come.

The CEO is critically important
I don't want to sound too pessimistic, that's not my natural disposition.

As I said, there are some excellent employers out there developing and implementing some exciting and very successful equal opportunity programs.

In fact, 2002 was a good year in the life of the Agency.

We identified 93 employers who could be described as leading edge.

Another 119 employers, met our waiving requirements, next tier down, and demonstrated that they had done everything reasonably practical to address the employment issues involved but they had not yet gone that extra step.

Moreover, a growing number of Australian employers want to be seen as Employers of Choice for Women.

For instance, 46 CEOs and 230 other senior executives participated in this year's EOWA Business Achievement awards.

I mention this interest from CEOs because my experience, working in this area in business since 1988 and more recently at EOWA, tells me that CEO commitment and involvement is absolutely critical for achieving successful change.

It is also true that the presence of women in senior positions makes it more likely that progress towards equal opportunity will be sustained.

Reluctance to implement EEO
Why male CEOs and senior managers should remain so resistant to the idea of equal opportunity in the workplace is frankly beyond me.
It defies any rational explanation.

After all, there is clear evidence that providing equal opportunity directly benefits the bottom-line.

There is, moreover, a strong and well-accepted economic case for employers to invest in equal opportunity programs.

Equal opportunity reduces the costs of recruitment and retention, it increases the returns on investment in skill acquisition, it fosters a more committed and productive workforce and so on.

In these post-Enron days there are also good reasons for investors to welcome the greater diversity of perspective and openness that women can bring to the traditional ‘clubbiness’ of our corporate boardrooms and senior management teams.

Call me biased, but I don't think its any co-incidence that it was a woman who finally blew the whistle on Kenneth Lay and his colleagues.

Nevertheless, equal opportunity is not a rational commercial consideration but an emotional issue with most men.

Often men only change their views when they hear from their daughters about the problems they confront in their own careers.

So what do you do about fathers who only have sons?

Recognising this reality led EOWA to describe its mission in terms of inspiring employers, without that inspiration equal opportunity is just not a goer.

Although, I should add in passing that many younger men are becoming supportive of equal opportunity programs because they can help them with their own desires to be more involved as parents.

Self-interest is always a great motivator.

Re-designing the workplace
Inspiring CEOs is one thing, but there is also the underlying reality that the design of our workplaces has simply not kept up with social change.

We live in a two-income family society. Most women do paid work at some time in their lives and about three-quarters do some paid work during their child-rearing years.

Yet we often talk as if female work is optional.

I think this mismatch between work design and social reality is fuelling the extraordinary recent interest in debates around work and family issues.

Maternity leave is the current policy flashpoint but there will be many others before the heat goes out of this particular debate.
Statistics about workers with family responsibilities indicate that one-third of all employed men and one-third of all employed women have dependent children under 15 years of age (ABS, 1998a).

Nearly one third of employed caregivers have claimed that care-giving commitments caused repeated interruptions at work, resulted in their having to work fewer hours, or both.

Almost one-quarter has taken periods of unpaid leave; 16 percent have taken less responsible jobs, and 13 percent have refused promotion.

The ACTU recently described this phenomenon as downshifting.

Another study involving interviews with employees in several leading Australian corporations found that nearly three-quarters of people with dependent children said they would refuse a job or promotion if it decreased time available for family.

This appears to be a global trend, as a recent Harvard Business Review article testifies. In one case reported in the review, six out of 8 ‘rising stars’ at an international consulting firm emphatically turned down the possibility of partnership in the firm because of what they perceived as a lack of Work/Life balance!

studies is that our continued failure to match work design with social reality is preventing many businesses from fully using the skills of their employees.

EOWA's interest in job design

EOWA's interest in the way workplaces are designed flows logically from the nature of the Act we administer.

The Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace Act 1999 is built on the idea that equity will only result from the adoption of positive measures to overcome the historical disadvantages encountered by women.

This is an outcomes-based approach to equity.

Accordingly, the Act requires employers to develop workplace programs which identify issues faced by women in their workplaces and to propose, implement and evaluate actions to address those issues.

Since I have been Director, I have interpreted this approach to mean that we should celebrate the achievers and share the lessons through practical and accessible advice.

Our goal is to be recognised as a Centre of Excellence on Women in the Workplace. We provide information and advisory services, through engagement with our reporting organisations and through communication channels including our website.

Flexibility is at the core of redesign
Through our consultations with employers, we know that flexibility is the core issue in job redesign and therefore the core problem facing those organisations which recognise that equal opportunity is the way to go.

Designing a job to meet the needs of women means finding ways to give employees more control over how, when and where they do their work.

Unfortunately, most Australian organisations have been very narrow, and very conservative in their approach to workplace flexibility.

Many flexible work options do not result in improved employment outcomes for women. In fact, they can be quite the reverse.

For instance, restricting the offering of part-time work to particular areas of a business (eg. customer service) has severely limited career opportunities for women in many organisations.

Part of the problem is that employers are often fearful that flexibility measures that work for employees will cost them money and cause insoluble management problems.

Some good examples
What’s very interesting and instructive is that companies which are serious about ensuring that women have an equal chance to get ahead are also often companies with more comprehensive approaches to flexibility.

Its generally true in our experience that great HR managers are great for everyone, including women.

They recognise that the world has changed and that employers have to change as well. Too often, we only hear about how employees have to make changes.

Let me briefly outline a few examples.
Melbourne-based Autoliv, manufactures seatbelts and airbags.

In this traditionally male-dominated, often industrially-troubled sector of automotive parts manufacture, Autoliv has a female dominated workforce, a phenomenally low turnover and impressive annual growth.

And it has not had an industrial dispute in 10 years.

The company’s CEO, Robert Franklin, was named Leading CEO for the Advancement of Women in EOWA’s last annual Business Achievement Awards, and the company itself was named Leading Organisation for the Advancement of Women in the “more than 500 employees” category.

He's certainly a committed CEO.

But what else does it take? Identifying the scope of the problem is a crucial starting point.

In Autoliv’s case this involved measuring female participation in various aspects of the business and where women were under-represented, setting specific targets.

For instance, currently 25 percent of managers are women, almost double the national average.

Not satisfied with that achievement, the company is working towards a target of 50 percent female managers in five years time.

Similarly, currently only 14 percent of the company’s engineers are women. The five-year plan sets the target number at 30 percent.

To achieve these targets, Autoliv requires managers to build them into their unit’s business plan. They hold quarterly reviews of performance against these targets.

They also build it into personal performance reviews. Executives are judged, in part, on their leadership performance, and equal opportunity and equal participation are seen as very strong components of leadership performance.

Autoliv has also been great at coming up with creative solutions.

Having identified that they were not attracting female engineering candidates in the numbers they wanted, Autoliv has funded a female engineering scholarship program at Swinburne University.

A lot of work has also been put into ensuring that the benefits and conditions of employment are appealing to the women the company wants to attract, and this is given strong focus in the EBA process.

Autoliv has implemented paid maternity leave, carers’ leave, flexible starting times and an early knock-off on Fridays plus one RDO a month.

As you can imagine, some of these took quite a bit of work to make happen. Staggered start and finish times in particular is a real challenge for a manufacturing organization. But a lot of effort was put into making it work.

Autoliv's efforts show that the traditional manager's fears about flexibility can be overcome - although it takes time, persistence and creativity.

Autoliv also has various other uncommon benefits for employees such as 100 percent income protection insurance, a funeral benefit for employees or their family members, and a crisis fund for people who have family emergencies and need to travel overseas.
These are innovations that come from effective staff consultation—from asking employees what exactly they would like and then examining the business case for each.

The result of all of this is very high morale and impressive performance statistics: annual staff turnover of less than half a percent, absenteeism of less than 3 percent, business growth of 20 percent annually and no IR disputes for decade.

For the CEO the overriding philosophy couldn’t be simpler. What he says is, “We’re really trying to make ourselves an employer of choice in order to attract the best people.”

Another company leading the way on equal opportunity for women in Australia is Sara Lee Household & Body Care.

This is headed by Stephen Goodey, who is both devoted to bringing about real change in this area and who sees diversity and equal opportunity as providing a business advantage.

He explains it is by saying, “The size of our business means we need to keep good people - particularly women, who after all are the majority of business graduates - that we otherwise might have lost.

We simply couldn't afford to recruit and retrain replacements. It’s also a competitive scenario - if we can position ourselves as an employer of choice by embracing diversity, that will give us an edge in the marketplace.”

In order to achieve that Employer of Choice status, Sara Lee Household and Body Care has introduced many of the same innovations as Autoliv: flexible working hours, paid maternity leave and targets for female recruitment that must be met.

Again, we also see the importance of accountability in meeting these targets. In Sara Lee’s case the target for women in senior management is 50 per cent, and both the CEO and HR manager’s performance bonuses are linked to meeting this goal.

The company’s excellent performance in terms of equal opportunity saw it named Leading Organization for the Advancement of Women in the “less than 500 employees” category in our Business Achievement Awards.

Conclusion
Over many years, EOWA's experience has been that there is a strong correlation between employer attitudes to paid maternity leave and their commitment to broader EEO and diversity strategies.

In fact, it is not stretching the matter to say that good employers provide paid parental leave and they do so because its good for business.

There has been a steady, if slow, uptake of leading edge EEO strategies and programs among Australian employers - though these leading practice organisations are still very much in the minority.

The changes we need to make our workplaces women-friendly won't happen by accident nor will they occur automatically and in the fullness of time.
They require the commitment and involvement of truly inspirational CEOs backed by creative HR people and strategies.

The examples they provide are truly remarkable, yet they continue to be few and far between.

If more employers recognised the very real benefits that flow from more flexible workplaces we would not be having intense national debates on issues like maternity leave.

Nevertheless, if we did have a national paid maternity leave scheme there would still be a lot of work required to overcome the systematic discrimination against women in the workplace.

Maternity leave is a start, not a panacea.

It is an essential part of the overdue re-design of our workplaces.

The broader re-design is the agenda we are continuing to pursue at EOWA.

Thank you.

1.  With Glen Milne and Chris Bath on the Sunday Sunrise program, 6 April.
2.  Fertility rates appear to be inversely related to labour force attachment, ABS 3301.0, Births Australia
3.  A. Hede and E. O'Brien, 'Empirical analysis of women's managerial representation in the private sector', Paper presented at ANZAM '96: Australian and New Zealand Academy of Management Annual Conference, Wollongong, December 1996.
4.  These statistics are from a speech by Sharan Burrows, ACTU President
5. Alison Morehead et al Changes at Work: The 1995 Australian Workplace Industrial Relations Survey, Longman Melbourne 1997, 451.

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