A SHIFT TOWARDS CARE FEMINISM

This year’s International Women’s Day was marked by a growing sentiment expressed, heard and echoed by many that there is too often only tokenism attached to the way International Women’s Day is recognised and celebrated. 

Against a“cupcake backlash” - a rejection of the lack of meaningful conversations surrounding corporate International Women’s Day events - the voices calling for a sharper focus on actions to end gender inequality grew stronger and stronger. 

It was time for real talk. 

And who better to deliver a message with meaning to Women in Super's members and guests at this year’s Mavis Robertson International Women’s Day lunches than Kristine Ziwica - feminist journalist, activist and author of “Leaning Out: A Fairer Future for Women at Work in Australia”.

Kristine took aim at so-called empowerment feminism and its failure to deliver on gender equality and a better deal for women at work - and she did not miss. 

Arguing that lean-in feminism - with its focus on self-empowerment and failure to address systemic inequality - has made very little difference to the vast majority of women at work, Kristine pointed to the declining global ranking of gender equality in Australia. 

“Lean-in and the kind of empowered feminism it spawned ignored the structural issues that hold women back, and it had little to say about how it could be tackled. 

“A few statistics tell the story of how a decade of lean-in feminism failed to deliver in Australia.

“Australia continued its uninterrupted backward slide in the World Economic Forum Global Gender gap ranking, slipping from 15th out of 153 countries in 2006 to 50th.

“And the biggest drop was in the women’s economic participation category - the category that measures women’s capacity to work and earn.”

The arrival of the pandemic and its strongly gendered impacts had a seismic impact on the discourse of workplace gender inequality, according to Kristine. Women experienced the bulk of employment losses in the first year of the pandemic, and the pandemic exposed the undervalued, low paid nature of care work in Australia - work predominantly carried out by women. 

“The pandemic exposed the fragile foundations of women’s lives, (which) led to a breakthrough on several fronts, what I call an inflection point. From the value we place on care to the need to ensure women are safe at work and more.”

The pandemic gave us an opportunity to shift from “career feminism” to “care feminism”, Kristine argued, highlighting the monetary value of unpaid care work in Australia: a staggering $650.1 billion.

“(This is) the equivalent of 50.6% of GDP, making it Australia’s largest industry, larger than any in the formal economy and the equivalent of three mining industries. 

“The lessons we learned from this pandemic era and how we apply them to the ongoing project of gender equality and women's economic security have profound implications for the future. 

“We are at a crossroads, an inflection point. The pandemic has dramatically changed our ideas of what is possible, upending nearly a decade of stasis when we looked at these issues through a very, very narrow lens. From crisis comes change.”

Lifting women’s issues off the lifestyle pages

Beginning her career as a journalist for the feminist Ms Magazine in New York City in 1997, Kristine embodies the importance of journalism that “lifts so-called women’s issues off the lifestyle pages and reports on them as central to economic and social justice.”

In London, Kristine worked for the UK’s Equality and HR Commission, promoting research on the value of unpaid work. In Australia, working for the Our Watch National Foundation to prevent violence against women, Kristine established the national media engagement program to improve media reporting of violence against women. 

As a journalist in Australia, she reported on women’s safety and economic security, with her reporting on the gendered impact of the pandemic leading her to write “Lean Out”.

Active hope

While calling out the consolation prize nature of IWD, she still sees IWD as a "safe space" to have the “dare I say, angry” conversations about the progress of so-called empowerment feminism and how the pandemic has “hastened women’s disillusionment with lean-in empowerment feminism and their belief that it had their answers.”

While the pandemic shifted the dial on the value of care work, a similar sized shift is taking place on women’s safety at work. The ground-breaking Respect at Work report was followed by a national movement of women who rose up to declare enough was enough when it came to workplace harassment - proof that collective, not individual feminism leads to change.

“This wave of activism… is the blueprint for good old-fashioned, full-throated collective activism and solutions drawn from the hard draft that consultation and consensus building can deliver on many fronts for the women of Australia.

“After almost 3 years of pandemic everything women have experienced on the work front and the home front and in regard to their safety at work and home has helped expedite this shift, and it’s been huge.”

Kristine’s actively hopeful message for change is rooted in the belief that we can and are seizing the current inflection point, collectively, to improve women’s safety and economic security at work.

“There's now a powerful collective political force demanding change. This force and the individuals who make the whole greater than the sum of any individual part, are literally the definition of active hope. 

“We are ready to shed the veneer of lean-in faux feminism and recommit to the collective task at hand.”