Neither party supports the traditional family

There's an election campaign on in Australia. It's difficult to get too excited about it as both parties have similar policies.

The leader of the more right-wing of the two parties, the Liberal Party, is Tony Abbott. His family policy is to tax 3000 large companies to raise $6.5 billion in order to fund an exceptionally generous paid maternity scheme. A woman on $150,000 per annum will get 6 months on full pay (i.e. $75,000) plus 2 per cent superannuation.

It's another step along the way to undermining the male provider role. Once upon a time the role of the husband was important in supporting his wife financially during her pregnancy and whilst she stayed at home to look after her children.

In the new system a woman will provide for herself through her career and then be supported by the state during the period of time she is allotted to stay with her infant child.

Abbott has given up on the model of the male provider family:

'It proves that the Coalition gets it when it comes to the reality of the contemporary woman and contemporary families.

'The fact is very few families these days can survive on a single income ... So if we are serious about allowing women to have kids and a career we've got to have a fair dinkum paid parental leave scheme.'

The political elite, whether of the left or right, have accepted the idea that what matters in life is a professional career. Therefore it is a matter of justice for them that a woman's life centre on her career and be structured around her career rather than on and around family. Similarly equality means for them the idea that women be as little obstructed in career and earnings as men. The desired outcome is that sex distinctions between men and women in these public roles be made not to matter.

For traditionalists there is a different logic at play. For us it is important that we be able to fulfil our distinct natures as men and women. For most men, career is not in itself the fulfilling thing in life - it is mundane work that often leaves you tired and stressed by the end of the week. If there is a higher meaning to it, it is that it opens up a protected space for our wives to raise our children and to create a home. It is this higher meaning to male work that current social trends, supported by both parties, are undermining.

I do understand that high property prices have made it difficult for many people to survive on a single wage. I understand too that there are women who have a strong wish to pursue a career. And I certainly understand that families are not going to turn down such a financial windfall as the one being offered by Tony Abbott.

But if we are aiming to establish a trad community in the future, we have to make an effort to defend the male provider role. That doesn't by any means exclude women from paid work. There are a lot of ways to be flexible when it comes to this. But the minimum standard ought to be that in the average home the husband is the main breadwinner over the course of the marriage and that his efforts are significant in allowing his wife to have the opportunity to have children and to create a home for her family.

By the way, I don't mean for posts like this to demoralise younger men from seeking work. My advice is to stay the course. Most women with kids only want to work part-time at most, so you are still likely to end up as the main breadwinner. And if the government ever attempts to equalise the part-time earnings of women with the full-time earnings of men then it's time for all hell to break loose.

Read More

What was that about equal pay?

There are some companies in Australia which are now paying female employees more than their male counterparts on the basis that it's necessary to give women bonuses to keep them at work after having children.

Here's one example:

Caltex has introduced a new ‘return to work’ 12% bonus to lure its female employees back to work after maternity leave.

The quarterly bonuses of 3% of salary will be paid up to the child’s second birthday.

For a worker on a $75,000 salary, the 12% annual bonus would amount to $9000 a year before tax.

Caltex already gives maternity leave of 12 weeks at full pay or 24 weeks at half-pay.

Of Caltex’s 3500 employees, 30% are women. The company is actively pushing to attract and retain a diverse group of employees, including more women, and is keen to reduce its staff turnover as a result of primary carers of children not returning to work.

Caltex chairman Elizabeth Bryan said the package was designed to retain skilled employees...
 

Here's another:

One of Australia's largest companies is set to unveil a new paid parental leave scheme that offers women a "welcome back to work" payment.

Insurance Australia Group already provides 14 weeks' paid leave, but will now double the salaries of women for their first six weeks back at work...

The payment comes on top of the Federal Government's parental leave payment of up to 18 weeks at minimum wage.

IAG chief executive Mike Wilkins says the offer is designed to help women overcome the challenges of returning to work.
 

There was once a time when men were paid more on the understanding that this would enable them to support a family and allow a mother to spend time at home with her children.

But this was shouted down on the basis that equal pay was a sacrosanct principle that could not be violated.

But the equal pay principle is not so sacrosanct when it comes to paying speical bonuses to women.

I wonder what would happen if a company paid its male workers an extra $9000 a year for a couple of years after having a child, on the basis that such men would be facing extra costs in supporting a family? If Caltex and IAG can run with this kind of logic for women, then why shouldn't a company do it for men?

Read More

Pay gap is now running the other way?

The latest news on the "pay gap" is this:

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, single women between 22 and 30 years old earn an average of $27,000 a year.

That's 8% more than comparable men.

What was the media response to the existence of this pay gap? Was it condemned? Was there a gnashing of the teeth at the inequity and social injustice of it all?

No, it was presented as being an inevitable result of young women's efforts and ambitions:

Genesis Hernandez is studying English and culinary arts at Miami-Dade College.

She isn't surprised to hear single women in their 20s are earning more than young men.

"A woman has more motivation to study, to get a degree, to be somebody," Hernandez said. "For me it's really important to get a degree."

Education is key. Both Time Magazine and USA Today say more women go to college than men. Once there, women are more likely to graduate or earn advanced degrees.

"I do believe that," 28-year-old Jorge Oquendo said. "I have two sisters. Both of them are going to college. A lot of girls actually go to college and stay in college."

Model Amber Lawson wasn't expecting to hear women are starting to make more.

"That's good to hear women are getting their head on their shoulders," Lawson said. "I would think it would be about the same, but I guess men kind of go with the flow."

But what happens when men don't just "go with the flow" but get more motivated? What happens when men start to take on family responsibilities and settle into a stronger work ethic? At that point in time, men start to earn more than women, many of whom are downscaling their work commitments.

But when men in their 30s and 40s start to earn more, do we get the media cheering them on for their strong work ethic? No, it gets presented as a great social injustice that has to be rectified by state intervention.

Once again, it's that problem that men are targeted as an oppressor group in liberal society and so their achievements are always pinned down to some kind of unfair advantage, to "sexism" or to "discrimination", whereas the achievements of women are always their own.

We shouldn't accept it or get defensive about it. If men end up working harder for longer, and therefore earning more money, we should present it as a positive aspect of what men do. If men end up earning a dollar for every 80 cents earned by women, then that should be thought of as a credit to the male work ethic.

Finally, it's a little sad that Genesis Hernandez believes that you have to get a degree "to be somebody". The human person is a lot more than a career.

Read More

The Julia attitude

Barack Obama ran a "Life of Julia" campaign recently which attracted a lot of criticism. Julia is a (fictional) white American woman who goes through life being supported by government welfare policies rather than through a family. She does have one child at age 31, but apart from that Julia lives her life as an individual supported by the state.

It's not surprising that left-liberals would feel comfortable promoting such a life, given that their ideal is an autonomous individual whose life conditions are to be made equal by a state bureaucracy. But there was less support for such a vision of life on the right. Andrew Bolt wrote:

Beyond parody. Barack Obama’s latest ad boasts how a single woman can be married to the government for life.

And from James Taranto:

The most shocking bit of the Obama story is that Julia apparently never marries. She simply “decides” to have a baby, and Obama uses other people’s money to help her take care of it.

...In 1999 Lionel Tiger coined the word “bureaugamy" to refer to the relationship between officially impoverished mothers of illegitimate children and the government. “The Life of Julia” is an insidious attack on the institution of the family, an endorsement of bureaugamy even for middle-class women.

It's interesting that the American left should be ramping up the idea of replacing family support with state welfare at exactly the moment such a model is failing in Europe. There are European countries now facing a serious debt crisis because of excessive government spending (even in Australia the average worker is now paying $5000 a year in taxes to support welfare spending).

It's interesting too that left-liberalism has continued moving left to the point that Barack Obama's advert is now more radical than the views expressed by feminist Germaine Greer back in 1991. Greer wrote back then that "Most societies have arranged matters so that a family surrounds and protects mother and child" and she complained of "our families having withered away" with relationships becoming "less durable every year".

There is no such sense of lament about a woman being supported by the state rather than by a family in the Obama adverts.

I should point out that you can find the "Julia" attitude in various places. For instance, yesterday I was reading an article in the Melbourne Herald Sun about superannuation. The gist of the article was that women are facing a bleak financial future because when they opt out of the workforce to have children they lose a few years of superannuation contributions.

The assumption is that women are not part of a family and have to support themselves. The thought never even occurs to the writer of the article that the husband's super fund will help support the family - instead, the assumption is that men's super is used for men and women's for women, therefore if women have less they are missing out:

"Countless Australian mothers are paying the ultimate sacrifice for their commitment to family, with many neglecting their financial futures in favour of other responsibilities around the home," Suncorp Life head of superannuation Vicki Doyle says...."

What do those with the Julia attitude then propose? They believe that women should get free superannuation payments:

We have argued for some time that paid parental leave should include a superannuation component and that a super 'baby bonus' or a return to work super bonus after a career break could go some way to addressing the issue.

And here we come to a serious flaw in this whole attitudinal shift. On the one hand, a society needs to keep its men motivated to work. But the Julia approach undermines this motivation, by seeking to make women financially independent of their husbands.

Let me put this another way to try to clarify it. A society needs its men to believe firmly that they are necessary to a family as providers. If that belief breaks down then that society will inevitably decline. But Western society is taking the attitude that women should be autonomous of men and rely instead on government welfare for support.

So the West is relying on individuals to hold two contradictory beliefs or values. We are supposed to believe of women that they exist as individuals without family support, but of men that they should continue to work to support women.

There are already some in the men's movement who believe that the situation should be equalised by no longer expecting men to be providers, i.e. by matching a "Julia" attitude with a corresponding "Julian" attitude.

Traditionalists would remove the contradiction the other way - by not thinking of women as autonomous Julias reliant on state welfare, but rather as wives and mothers supported within a family.

Read More

So much for equal pay - Australian company to pay women double

An Australian insurance company has decided to pay women double the money paid to its male employees in the first six weeks after they return from paid maternity leave.

That is a flagrant breach of the equal pay principles that have been pushed in the media for several decades:

NEW mums will be paid double for their first six weeks back at work under a major insurer's 20-week maternity leave scheme.

Insurance Australia Group, which owns CGU and NRMA Insurance, is offering the generous scheme to its 10,000 employees from today.

IAG is offering mothers 14 weeks' standard paid leave, plus six weeks at double pay when they return to work.

Combined with the Federal Government's 18 weeks' paid parental leave, women working at the insurance companies will get almost a year's wages while off work caring for children.

Could that be any clearer? If a woman has two children over a four year period she will end up being paid nearly four years' wages for two years' work; her male peers will work almost twice as many hours for the same income.

Will the unions stand up to protect equal pay for men? Not on your life:

The ACTU has welcomed the announcement, saying it should put pressure on other big banks and insurers to review their paid parental schemes.

"I think companies are not going to have any choice,'' ACTU president Ged Kearney told ABC Radio on Monday.

"We really need women to participate in our work place. It is important for the economy."

What about the media? Will it protest on behalf of male workers? Not likely. The Herald Sun ran this editorial:

The Insurance Australia Group workers will be paid double their wages in the first six weeks of their return to work...The move should be roundly applauded by the community...IAG has now thrown down the gauntlet to Australia's leading corporations to follow it down the path of progressive and sensible workplace relations.

The Herald Sun editor wants the double pay to become standard practice as a "progressive and sensible" measure.

Why? It's likely that several things are at play here. First, liberals don't think much of the motherhood role. They believe that power and autonomy come through careers and that it's therefore better for women to get back quickly into the workforce after having children. As part of this, equality is measured in terms of female workforce participation rates and lifetime earnings. And this tendency to look upon women in economic terms suits the interests of business just fine - it opens up a labour resource.

Traditionalists don't measure the good in terms of individual power and autonomy. We therefore place a higher value on the non-economic role of women as mothers within a family and we are more protective of the masculine provider/protector role that is exercised by fathers.

Paying women extra money is another step in undermining a masculine provider role. And whatever makes the male role within the family less necessary is likely to increase the instability of family life.

We ought to oppose what the IAG is doing; as a starting point, if I had a policy with either CGU or NRMA I would not be renewing it.

Read More

The unhappiest award goes to...

Who is unhappiest at work? According to one survey, the unhappiest workers are female, unmarried, age 42 and a doctor or lawyer.

That's an interesting result. According to liberal theory, such women should be the happiest. Such women are "unimpeded" in their autonomy by any commitment to family and they have successfully pursued a glamorous, high status career outcome.

But they are unhappier than anyone else.

Mightn't this suggest that an unimpeded, maximised autonomy is not the sole, overriding good in life? And that marriage is more significant to women than the liberal theory allows for?

And who are the happiest workers? They are married men with children, a good income and a managerial position.

That fits perfectly with what traditionalists would expect. Such men are fulfilling their masculine natures to be fathers and husbands and good providers. They are the happiest despite the fact that they have sacrificed a considerable measure of their autonomy to make a strong commitment to family and career.

Some more interesting data comes from a recent Herald Sun article about longer working hours. Which sex starts paid work earlier and finishes later? Not difficult to guess:

The report quoted Australian Bureau of Statistics figures showing about 30 per cent of men and 11 per cent of women are at work at 7am, and one in six men and one in seven women at 7pm.

Maybe that should be considered when feminists complain about the pay gap. The working day is longer for men which must account for some of the gap.

Read More

EU proposal could see women being paid double for the same work

Feminists have often raised the slogan of "equal pay for equal work". That is not a principle they truly believe in. What they want is equal or more pay for women regardless of the hours of work put in.

The latest evidence comes from the European Union. The EU is proposing not only that new mothers get 20 weeks leave on full pay after the birth of a baby but that they also get 2 hours a day to breastfeed the child when they return to work.

So let's say that there are two workers in a firm. Tony is a hardworking dad supporting a family. He gets paid $70,000 for putting in 8 hours a day for 48 weeks in the year. So he is working 1920 hours to get his $70,000. His female counterpart Julia had a baby at the start of the year. So she ends up only working for 30 weeks. Then she breastfeeds for at least one hour a day on her return. So she earns $70,000 for working 1050 hours. She gets the same wage for working 55% as much as Tony. If she takes the full 2 hours breastfeeding time then she will end up being paid the same as Tony for less than half the hours.

Is that equal pay for equal work? Surely not.

Now it might be argued that there are reasons for paying the woman so much more than the man - that it has to do with her family responsibilities. But the same could also have been said for the older system that the feminists complained about so much. Men used to be paid more because it was assumed that men had to support not only themselves but also a wife and children.

So if the older principle was so terribly unjust in feminist eyes, then how can they justify the new system?

Read More