A little more than 50 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 being 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 last year. “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 in the attitudes 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 before the 1960s and 1970s, their involvement was 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 tiny minority of households included two parents working full time.
Today, the participation rate of women in paid work is at a historic high of 67 percent. Yet working women face as many difficulties as advantages. On the one hand, they earn more money and have greater financial independence than in the past. They also gain the prestige and connections that come from spending more time working outside the home, and they are more easily able to be involved in political and union activities. All of this has an important impact on their self-image and on the general view of women.
But on the other hand, there is a continued dependence on partners, as it is increasingly difficult to survive on a single income, especially with kids. Consider the impact of rising housing costs, which are usually the single largest item of household spending. House prices in Australia today are 16.4 times the average pre-tax income. In 1970, they were 4.5 times. This makes the nuclear family—a couple with children—just as hard as ever to escape for women who might want to. And for many working-class women, the overall impact of longer work hours, combined with still-significant domestic obligations, means more work and more stress.
This is particularly the case as the burden of unpaid work falls more heavily on women. According to a 2017 report by PwC, a consultancy firm, 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 between women and men who both work full time is smaller—15.8 compared to 14.3—but still significant.
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. It also takes the pressure off the government to provide proper services to the sick, the elderly and children. While home and family life for many people (certainly not all) also offer emotional fulfilment and make them feel valued in ways they don’t at work, it obscures the symbiotic relationship between the domestic sphere and the workplace and formal economy.
The continuing central role of women in maintaining the household and family life is therefore of enormous advantage to the capitalist class. It also helps explain why stereotypes about women’s natural propensity to care for children and nurture others persist.
Involvement in paid work likewise intensifies gender inequality, while also mitigating certain 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 highlights the economic disparity between working women and men. They estimate that men as a group are paid at least $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. 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”.
Women’s low pay, combined with the increasing need for households to have two full-time incomes, means that the nuclear family model persists. 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.
Whichever way you look at it, women are not equal today. 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 experiences 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 an 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 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 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?
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 young men. 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”. Support was even higher among young men.
This is a dire situation. To change it, we need to challenge and organise against the reactionary politics of the right. They aim 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 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 often makes them feel they cannot do anything satisfactorily. This sort of change is incompatible with capitalism and the profit-making that is its sole objective.
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.
