Capitalism can’t end women’s oppression: we need a revolution
Fifty years ago, the UN designated 1975 as the International Year of Women. The Melbourne Age responded with the headline “$2 million for the Sheilas: Surprisingly it’s Not a Joke”. Sydney’s Sunday Telegraph described it as the “Year of the Bird” and ran an article about a women’s conference titled “Mum’s the Word as the Big Yak-Yak Begins”. With this the public line, you can only imagine what was being said behind closed doors in editorial offices, board rooms and parliamentary corridors.
Fast forward half a century and the official attitude towards women is somewhat different. “Creating opportunity for women is a matter of national interest”, declared Prime Minister Anthony Albanese at a parliamentary breakfast co-hosted by the UN to launch International Women’s Day in early February. “It grows our workforce, lifts our living standards, boosts productivity, liberates the talent and capacity we need to build Australia’s future.”
This contrast reflects the dramatic change in the position of women in Australia over the last 50 years, and the dramatic change in the attitude towards them of government and business. Women today earn more and have achieved formal equality in most spheres of life. They have much greater choice about what to do with their lives. But they are still a long way from being equal to men, and even further from liberation.
This contradiction befuddles many liberal commentators. Their solutions—whether it’s agonising about whether the right voices have been “elevated”, the desirability of quotas or different strategies to eliminate individual prejudice—feel wholly inadequate in the face of the juggernaut that is gender inequality. But there is no great mystery to it: what matters most has not changed. Human life still comes second to profit making, and women’s second-class status is inseparable from that.
Women’s involvement in paid work is a good example. Women have always worked in the formal economy, but prior to the 1960s and ’70s their involvement was less permanent and more marginal. In 1979, for example, only 40 percent of partnered women with children were employed at all (today it is more than 75 percent), and only a very small minority of households included two parents working full time. Paid work was not central to women’s lives like it is today, reflected in the fact that in 1971, a whopping 78 percent of married women agreed with the statement that “motherhood was their most important role in life”.
The participation rate of women in paid work is today at a historic high of 67.3 percent. But this is still below the OECD average, especially considering Australian women are better educated than most others in the OECD. There has been a campaign by the government and capitalist class to increase this through measures like higher subsidies for childcare services, better pay for childcare workers and increases to government supported paid parental leave entitlements. Increasingly, they see women spending long periods out of the formal economy as unproductive and a missed opportunity for increased economic growth. Hence Albanese’s comments about women working being in the “national interest”.
Drawing more women into longer hours of paid work increases productivity not just because they perform work that they otherwise wouldn’t, but because it helps offset demands for higher wages, which in turn adds to productivity. It does this by further normalising, and in so doing making increasingly necessary, double full-time income households rather than single income. Adding an income helps households maintain a decent standard of living in the context of long-term wage stagnation, which has been the reality for Australian workers for decades.
Consider the impact of rising housing costs, usually the single largest item of household spending. House prices in Sydney today are 12.2 times the average pre-tax income. In 1970, they were 4.5 times. So, relative to income, prices have almost tripled, as have the prices of most other necessities. Combined with weakened union power, this has underpinned a dramatic transfer of wealth away from workers, reflected in the proportion of national income that goes to wages rather than profits declining from 57 percent in 1974 to 29 percent in 2022.
To head off any potential pressure to raise wages, the managers of capitalism have adopted the policy of encouraging households to send more members out to earn a wage or work longer hours, all in the name of gender equality. Meanwhile, real wages remain stagnant and the profit share of national income stays high.
Australian Institute of Family Studies figures show that in the ten years to 2022, the rate of women working full time grew by 50 percent—faster than that working part time, a reversal of the previous 40-year trend. For women, this development has meant more paid work, while continuing to perform large amounts of domestic work, and the surrendering of a significant proportion of their income paying for some of the domestic work they can no longer do, such as child care, cleaning and meal preparation. This in turn has become another growth opportunity for the economy, with the explosion of private childcare centres (and their profits) as well as processed or takeaway food outlets and cleaning services. This is a triple windfall for business owners and the capitalists.
But for working women, it presents as many difficulties as advantages. On the one hand, they earn more money and have a greater degree of financial independence than in the past. They also get the prestige and connections with others that come from more time spent working outside the home, and they are more easily able to be involved in political and union activity. All of this has important impact on their view of themselves and the general view of women.
But on the other hand, it means continued dependence on partners, as it is increasingly difficult to exist on a single income, especially with kids. This makes the nuclear family just as hard as ever to escape for women who might want to. And for large numbers of working-class women, the overall impact of longer work hours combined with still significant domestic obligations means more work, more stress and worse health, with minimal improvements in standard of living.
This is particularly the case as the burden of unpaid work still falls more heavily on women. According to a 2017 report by PWC, women perform three-quarters of all the unpaid work in the Australian economy. And it is a lot of work—unpaid child care alone, if counted in dollar terms, would constitute the largest single industry in Australia, bigger than any in the formal economy. In the home, women on average perform 22.3 hours per week compared to 15.3 for men, according to the Melbourne Institute and Roy Morgan’s Taking the Pulse of the Nation survey. The gap is smaller between women and men who both work full time—15.8 compared to 14.3—but still significant. And women overwhelmingly report feeling more responsible for ensuring the necessary work around the house is done, in a way men don’t.
This work is indispensable to capitalism. It ensures the working class is healthy, reliable and motivated to work, and that a new generation is raised healthy, well socialised and compliant with authority. It also takes the pressure off the state to provide proper services for the sick, elderly and children. While home and family life for many people (certainly not all) also provides emotional fulfilment and makes them feel valued in a way they don’t at work, this obscures the symbiotic relationship the domestic sphere has with the workplace and formal economy.
The continuing central role of women in maintaining the household and family life, even as their involvement in work outside the home increases, is therefore of enormous advantage to the state and capitalist class. It also helps explain why stereotypes about women’s natural propensity to care for children and nurture others persists, even though this is less their sole focus than it has been in the past.
Involvement in paid work likewise intensifies gender inequality at the same time as it mitigates aspects of it. The potential independence women can gain from work is undercut by their entrenched second-class status in the workplace.
A 2023 study by Eliza Littlejohn and Greg Jericho from the Centre for Future Work at the Australia Institute uses a variety of measures to highlight the real economic disparity between working women and men. They argue that the official headline pay gap obscures a much more unequal reality, one in which men as a group are paid in excess of $3 billion more than women are per week, despite women making up 48 percent of the workforce. And women earning the median wage can expect to earn $1 million less than their male counterparts over their lifetime.
The Centre for Future Work report shows that there is significant variance in the gender pay gap when you take into account particular factors, like the stage of life workers are at, the real take-home pay per week, differentials in hourly rates and the gendered composition of the industry. When looking at the real earnings of women and men, they conclude, “The gender pay gap across all employment and pay types was 29 percent in November 2022, with women earning $476.3 less than men per week. This means that women earn 71 percent of a male weekly wage”.
The gendered nature of different industries is an important factor underpinning this. They explain:
“Men have higher average salaries than women in 95 percent of all occupations, including those where women dominate the workforce. For example, women account for 99 percent of all midwives, and yet are paid on average 19 percent less. We identify 80 occupations in which men make up 80 percent or more of the workforce; these occupations have an average salary above $100,000. In contrast, no occupation where women make up that share of the workforce has such a high average salary. This highlights how segregation has reinforced massive differences in pay.”
Age is also an important factor. From age 34, the pay gap increases dramatically, reaching as high as 34 percent and remaining there until people reach their mid-50s, when it starts to come down again. This reflects the huge economic impact child rearing has on women as compared to men.
Research published in 2022 that used tax office records and the Household, Income and Labor Dynamics in Australia survey confirms this, finding that on average, women’s income drops to 55 percent of its pre-birth levels following the birth of a child, and remains at that level for a full five years. It doesn’t get back to the pre-birth level until ten years after the birth. And if women have more than one child, this is compounded. Working women with young children are also more likely to be part time, forgo or be passed over for promotions and generally struggle with the competing demands of paid work and child care.
Women who don’t have children are better off, but not completely—a wage penalty is felt by all women of reproductive age, presumably because bosses expect them to have children and discriminate accordingly.
Women’s low pay, combined with the increasing need for households to have two full-time incomes, means that, despite women’s increased financial independence and the absence of legal barriers to living outside the nuclear family, the nuclear family model persists. The proportion of households with dependent children that are headed by just one parent, for example, has remained relatively stable since 2001, at about 21-22 percent, according to the Australian Institute of Family Studies.
There continues to be a huge economic penalty for women with children leaving their partners or having children without a partner. Divorce reduces the lifetime income of women with children by 40 percent, according to the University of Melbourne’s Breaking Down Barriers report. The situation is even worse in terms of assets: an AMP study found that newly divorced women have just 10 percent of the assets a married woman has, and debt levels 2.3 times higher than married women and three times higher than divorced men.
Single women with children disproportionately live in poverty, and that poverty is worse in Australia than in most equivalent countries (defined as living on less than half the median household income). Only seven OECD countries, for example, have worse poverty rates for single parent households than Australia. This increases with age, with 25-30 percent of single mothers under 55 living in poverty to close to 40 percent of those over 55.
Whichever way you look at it, women are not equal today. Things haven’t changed because, although women do more work outside the home, they are second-class citizens in the workplace, and the industries they are concentrated in are undervalued. They continue to be channelled into the nuclear family structure because living outside it brings huge economic and social costs, and that reality perpetuates all the traditional stereotyped attitudes about women that the activists of the 1970s hoped would be relegated to history.
This is the context needed to understand the deterioration of attitudes towards women. Despite all the much vaunted advances, women are still belittled, objectified, ignored and trivialised every day of their lives. Too often, they are abused, assaulted and killed.
Mistreatment starts very young—the 2019 Growing up in Australia report found that one in two girls under the age of 17 had experienced unwanted sexual behaviour. Over their lifetimes, one in five women experience sexual violence and one in five will be stalked.
Women also continue to be objectified and judged according to their looks. If anything, the pressure on women to look a certain way has gotten worse since the 1970s and affects women for a greater proportion of their lives, starting younger and extending further into old age. This is despite overall better and more accurate representation of women in public life and in some aspects of pop culture.
More women than ever today are taking drastic measures to conform to this punishing standard—according to the Australasian College of Cosmetic Surgery and Medicine, Australia has a higher number of cosmetic surgery procedures per head than the US, and one of the highest in the world. The vast, vast majority of people undergoing these procedures are women—in the US, 92 percent are women and around 86 percent worldwide. In research released in 2023, the ACCSM cites “low self-esteem” as the single most important reason patients seek out cosmetic surgery. Why wouldn’t women have low self-esteem in a society that deems them less worthy than men?
Another indicator of the pressure women are under to look a certain way, and the negative body image associated with it, is the increase in eating disorders. Women are twice as likely as men to experience eating disorders, and the number of people suffering these disorders in Australia has increased six-fold since the 1990s, according to the National Eating Disorders Collaboration. Self-harm is also higher among women than men, with government figures suggesting 10.4 percent of women will self-harm over their lifetime compared to 6.8 percent of men.
Meanwhile, the ever-expanding consumption of porn and the normalisation of the sex industry are helping to drive grossly sexist attitudes among men, especially young ones. The Growing up in Australia report found that boys are six times more likely to engage in unwanted sexual behaviour if they have been exposed to porn than if they haven’t. The 2019 National Community Attitudes Towards Violence Against Women Survey likewise found more than a third of young men believed women preferred men to be in charge in relationships, and one in seven young people felt men were justified in raping women if they changed their mind during sex.
And this is all getting worse as the political right repopularises and re-legitimises reactionary ideas, particularly sexist ones. Figures like pro-rape influencer Andrew Tate are normalising extreme sexism and finding a willing audience among disaffected young men who likewise embrace the callous and bullying style of the far right and Trumpism. A 2024 study published by Melbourne University found that just under 20 percent of Australian men agreed with the statement “Feminism is damaging to our society and should be resisted by force if necessary”, and support was even higher among young men. Young men were also more likely to agree with statements supporting the restriction of women’s sexual autonomy than older men were. A full third of male and female respondents indicated agreement with hostile sexist attitudes, compared to just 7 percent with hostile racist attitudes.
This is a dire situation. To change it, we need to challenge and organise against the reactionary politics of the right. Their aim is to roll back all the gains of the 1960s and 1970s, limited though they were, and without serious resistance they will likely succeed. But to resist effectively, we need to know what we are up against and what needs to change to bring real equality for all the oppressed and exploited. We need to be committed to challenging all the structures that sustain these ideas and that maintain gross inequality, not just tweaking some policy settings or rallying behind politicians who want to put a more friendly face on the same unfriendly system.
The experience of women over the last 50 years demonstrates that formal rights, increased involvement in paid work and greater representation in the halls of power do not lead to equality. So long as the structures that subordinate the lives of the majority to profit making—to turning up to work each day, making goods and services that bosses can sell for far more than they pay workers and bringing up children to do the same when they’re adults—genuine equality is impossible. For women, who play a vital role through the work they do in the home and at work—both of which are indispensable to capitalism—this is particularly the case.
So to make any meaningful progress, we need radical change. First, we need to transform work. Work under capitalism is controlled by those who control the machines, tools, infrastructure and land that make our work productive. And it is directed towards profit, so people are under constant pressure to work harder, longer and for less. The capitalist class needs to be overthrown and work organised democratically by those who do it and who need the goods produced by workers to best serve their needs. That means work can and should be organised around and integrated with caring for people: children, the elderly, the sick and disabled.
Second, we need to break down the stark separation between work and home life. This is an efficient model for profit-driven capitalist production. But it is not conducive to human beings reaching their full potential, being happy and connecting meaningfully with others. This means integrating the production of what people need with the necessary work of caring for others. This is the only way to eliminate the compartmentalisation of women’s lives, which frequently makes them feel they are unable to do anything satisfactorily. This sort of change is incompatible with capitalism and the profit making that is the sole objective of production.
Therefore, to liberate women, we need to get rid of capitalism. We need a revolution, in which the mass of workers take control of the world around them and decide, based on what is in their collective interests rather than those of a wealthy elite, how to organise production and distribution.
Such a revolution could call into question every aspect of life and social organisation, and unleash the creativity and potential of the mass of people to solve problems that capitalism simply can’t, of which just one is eliminating gender inequality. Things that seem impossible to change, or that we’re told are the inevitable result of human nature, can be challenged when workers and the oppressed start acting together, discovering their power and thinking of new ways to work and live. This is what socialist revolution is all about and is the starting point in the fight for a world without sexism and oppression of any sort.
