I found the title suspiciously misleading as well. A little trolling by the editors perhaps.

As for working towards family friendly work places, both men and women gain equally. Why should men always be the ones to carry the financial burden and women have their careers castrated simply because of raising and caring for the next generation?

Excellent article. Crap title.

SJF, Fractelle,

It would be debatable that the title came from editors.

Eva Cox was the aware and loving feminist who once said “as least they (men) are doing something right”.

This remark was made in response to a question about male suicide.

Only a feminist would trust Eva Cox

The elephant in this particular room is, of course The Economy.

In detailing the progress of work patterns over the years, and blindly extrapolating these into the future as if there is some form of warm cocoon around the workplace, the author pays absolutely no attention to the realities of world trade, of comparative advantage, and of the hunger for self-improvement that is shown by China, India, and many other people-rich, ambitious lands.

The response is always to propose that these countries, too, join in the race to the bottom, where people are somehow paid just to "be", rather than actually struggle for daily existence.

Workers in those countries are not going to stop working their ten-hour shifts, six days a week, simply to conform to the wishlist of a bunch of earnest do-gooders, pontificating from their pampered - and declining - economies.

It's cause and effect. You pay yourself too much, and you become competitively disadvantaged to a people who have more to achieve. You continue along this path for too long, and the condition becomes permanent.

This myopia will, quite literally, be the driving force behind the collapse of any number of European economies, in a scenario not unlike the demise of any number of previous empires that believed themselves reality-proof.

I'm re-visiting Gibbon right now. And it makes for scary reading

What a stupid title. Great bait for the femo-phobes.

Robert, SFJ and Fractelle all made excellent points. What working means and what full time or part time work means needs to be revistited.

I've been in the workforce over 30years and have seen the growth and development of technology explode. It is crazy that with all this technological assistance inefficiency has also had an explosive growth.

Administrative duties, part of probably most jobs, are taking up more and more time.

It is rather last century to view work as being 8hrs per day-40hrs per week all done at some office with limited car parking facilities.

It is also becoming monumentally boring to have people constantly harping on how family committment/duties are not to have any bearing on working arrangements.

The fact is that there is a huge workforce, made up of men and women, who run themselves ragged trying to juggle family and work. It is quite irrelevant what 1950's fantasy some may want to hold on to. Those years were boom times of a different nature, this is the 21st century, there is no going back.

Now there is a huge cost to employers: all the sick leave taken by employees because it is nigh impossible to share parenting duties between parents.

The work that I do is in a lab open 24hrs. Do you think that the employers are interested in discussing doing 10 hrs a day, or even 12 hr days? No. The rostering is too difficult. Much of the administrative duties, certainly data entry could be done from home, even logging in over the internet. It just is not necessary to be at a work place for that. Can you just imagine how much easier that would make it for a parent and how sick leave would plummet?

We are clever in many things, but really slow in thinking outside the box and coming up with some innovative ideas on how 'work' can be delivered and measured.

In the 1970s we all expected that hours of work would go down to 35 hours a week, instead many Australian white collar workers routinely work more than 50 hours a week without overtime.

I have worked in work places where 70 hours a week was the norm and expected, in one the overseas parent had their Australian subsidiary up for sale, if we worked in head office then our working hours would have been restricted to 38 hours.

Up until 1974 my mother got paid 2/3 the male wage for doing the same job, which really annoyed her because the only man in the department was lazy, incompetent and suspected of stealing money out of his co-workers purses.

It is disappointing that female wages are still 80% of male wages - it would be fine if women were allowed to produce at 4/5 the output of their male counterparts but women generally have to work much harder than men to be considered equal to men.

Many jobs now entail masses of procedural paperwork that is used to demonstrate that the job has been performed in a responsible manner. The paperwork is not considered part of the job, there is no allowance given for filling in this massive increase in paperwork and all it does is add another hurdle in the performance of work.

I got to the stage where I would say "Management's failure to anticipate and plan for this eventuality is not my emergency" and similiarly management's inability to organise a roster, admittedly not a skill everyone can pick up, shouldn't preclude workers from working reasonable hours.

<It is disappointing that female wages are still 80% of male wages ->

Billie

Well Billie if this was true. Then how come employers are not sacking men in droves and hiring only women? Who in theory are much cheaper labour than hiring men.

As Eva pointed out, the main reasons women in general earn less than men is because they either take lower paying jobs perhaps because of work flexibility, or work part-time.

For a bloke it would be much cheaper and more cost effective to hire a housekeeper/cook, visit the occasional brothel, than it is to get married, after all, all that unpaid work comes with a hefty price tag.

A single bloke only needs a single room flat and a small car, add a missus and rugrats and costs skyrocket.